🤔🩲 What The 'FUPA'? Lower Abdominal Fat Loss Explained...
- Fit with Frank
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Twenty-plus years coaching real people, and I still learn a new word every week. This
week's offering: FUPA.
If you've not heard it, don't worry, neither had I, but it is something a lot of you have asked me about without knowing there was a name for it. So on episode 101 of The Voice of Fitness Reason, Katie and I sat down to actually get to the bottom (well pubic area) of it for you.
So What Actually Is a FUPA?
It stands for fatty upper pubic area - aka the soft bit of tissue that sits just above the pubic bone, below your belly button. In plainer terms: it's the low-down pouch some of us carry, especially after weight changes, pregnancy, or just... life.
Turns out it's had a bit of a moment online lately, popping up in health articles and even plastic surgery blogs (apparently it's now a big thing in aesthetic medicine circles too). Katie and I are not surgeons, and we're definitely not going to pretend to be, but we do know training and fat loss, so that's the lane we stayed in.
Can You "Fix" It With Exercise?
Short answer: not entirely, and here's why.
Like bingo wings, thigh gaps, and armpit caves, the FUPA has become the internet's latest body part to obsess over. And like all of those, it comes with the same myth attached: that you can spot-reduce it away with the right ab exercise or hip thrust routine. Truth is, You can't simply 'exercise it away'. Sorry.
Genetics plays a big role in where your body chooses to store fat. Pregnancy, hormonal shifts, and rapid weight changes can also affect skin elasticity in that area, meaning even once the fat's gone, the skin doesn't always spring back the way it used to. That's not a failure on your part. That's just... biology.
What Can You Do?
Here's the bit that actually matters:
Treat it like any other part of your body. Overall fat loss through consistent training and a sensible calorie deficit will generally make the area look better — even if it doesn't disappear completely.
Build strength underneath it. Muscle under that area genuinely changes how it looks and how you feel in your clothes.
Know the limits of exercise. Loose skin and stubborn genetics are real. If that's your situation, that's a conversation for a medical professional, not a fitness coach, and there's no shame in that.
The Bit I Actually Care About
Here's my worry with all these viral body-part names: you might wake up tomorrow not even thinking about your body, see a video, and suddenly your whole day is ruined by a word you didn't know existed 24 hours ago.
That's the real risk with trends like this, not the fat itself, but what it does to how you see yourself.
Katie put it better than me on the pod: self-love isn't a switch you flick, it's something you train, same as your bench press, and that's where you need to focus your energy if you really wanna feel confident everytime you look in that mirror.
The Real Takeaway
Appreciate that your body has done things over the years your teenage self never imagined. It's carried you through decades, maybe even created another human being. It's allowed to change. New "features" show up, and no, we can't always exercise them away.
What we can do is keep showing up for our health, practice being a bit kinder to ourselves in the mirror, and stop handing our mood over to a word we googled five minutes ago.
🎧 Listen to the full episode: Katie and I properly get the giggles on this one:
Two ordinary humans, still practising what we preach, 100+ episodes deep.
We hope it helps,
FRANK
your Personal Trainer / FUPA Fanatic
