I am just starting the recomended weight loss supervised, during this six months I want to do as much core exercising (abs) as I can to hopefully help in the extra skin in the end, my question I guess is when they do the surgery do they have to cut through the stomach muscle, and will recovery be worse if I build some muscle mass in this area before surgery? am having the LAP-BAND® guess I am a little scared to ask the doctor fearing it may sway my decission any help would be great:cursing:

I don't have an answer to your question. I can tell you my doctor knows that I do an hour of fairly rigorous swimming every day. Which does/can involve a lot of core muscles depending on the stroke you do. He has never said it would make the surgery harder. In fact at my first consult after feeling my belly area said that he could do the surgery as I was and I had only lost half the weight that nurse had required. I am too much of a wimp but you could go on Youtube and watch a surgery and see how much muscle they have to cut.

You're extremely unlikely to build enough muscle mass on your stomach, no matter what you do, that you would make surgery harder. A fit body is always going to recover much better than an unfit one and surgery will be safer to boot.

Not to mention, if you get yourself fit before you're banded, you will be able to hit the ground running, so to speak, which will be a big advantage.