For total weight loss — including burning belly fat — diet is just as, if not more, important as exercise. Your diet has a significant effect on your ability to show your abs and shed that last lb of abdominal fat. Since stomach fat is stored in your beltline and belly area, doing a little ab training may be helpful in battling it. Abdominal exercises like crunches or sit-ups will not specifically burn belly fat, but it may help your belly look flatter and more toned.
While there is not one exercise that specifically burns belly fat, any exercise can help lower total body fat if done regularly and combined with a healthy diet. You can lose belly fat without doing abdominal exercises by focusing on your diet and decreasing the percentage of total body fat. To lose fat – including belly fat – quickly, focus on strengthening every region of your body: your upper, lower, back, and abdomen. Strength-training twice per week for one hour can decrease your overall body fat, including extra belly fat, by as much as 4%.
Because muscles burn more calories than fat at rest, having more muscle mass can help you burn off more fat. While exercising muscles can build stamina or strength, it does not burn off the fat in your abdominals. Muscles burn fat, and unless you have plenty in your muscles, you are not going to get that extra push needed to get the job done on belly fat (Prevention). Sure, those types of exercises will help to bulk up the muscles in your abdomen, and they can also tone it, but it is not going to move up the fat layers on top.
While abdominal exercises may build up your abdominal muscles, they will not decrease the amount of fat you have in the area, and you will never see the abdominals until you first drop the fat sitting above. Exercises such as hill climbers and leg raises are fine if you are looking to build up core strength, but if reducing fat around the abdomen is your goal, to reduce body fat percentage, maybe even to achieve a six-pack, ab exercises alone are not going to cut it. The trick to working on your abs is realizing that strength training is essential for keeping your core strong, but ab exercises are not magic. The exercises listed in this article can help to build up your core strength and tone up your abs, giving you better definition.
Core exercises such as the side plank, the hollow-hold, and straight-leg-toe contact can all work towards toned abs. While core exercises are not the most effective ways of burning off subcutaneous and visceral body fat from the abdomen, they are an answer for toned muscles below. If crunches, abdominal circuits, and other intense interval workouts are something you are afraid of, these five tips can help you get that flatter midsection. While it is true that ab-specific exercises are an excellent way to get ripped abs, performing whole-body strength-training movements can help you achieve your goal of burning fat more quickly than if you focused on abdominal exercises alone.
If you are more adept at lifting, I recommend including more compound exercises–exercises that target larger muscle groups, and thereby force you to burn more calories and fat–into your workout routine. Start with the following eight fat-burning exercises, which will hit the dozen muscles that connect your shoulders to your buttocks, while also improving your metabolism.
Keep in mind, according to another study, you may also be able to reduce total body fat by moving around more during your job. Rather than working out for hours at a time or running for miles, doing shorter bursts of vigorous activity is highly beneficial in cutting down on hard-to-reach fat, according to a recent study (2),(4). Too often, people will keep working the abdominals everyday with no breaks, hoping that they will burn off fat by doing more exercises.
It takes weeks, sometimes months, of consistent exercising and controlling your diet to achieve a flatter or more toned abdominal. Many of us have likely done countless ab exercises in an attempt to achieve flat abs, only to see little or no success. To achieve a six-pack, you might need to cut down on your body fat, either at levels that are difficult to maintain or completely unhealthy.
If you are smart about what foods you choose and restrict how much you consume, you should eventually begin losing body fat and drop the size of your pants. If you want to truly show off a toned midsection, you need to follow a balanced diet of all the good fats, not starve yourself. Playing it safe is the reason that sticking to a healthy, balanced diet (with few to no processed carbohydrates) alongside a workout routine is crucial for getting rid of that stubborn belly fat. To lose belly fat, and fat overall, you must keep the total number of calories in you eating lower than the number you expend each day.
Your body fat is like an organ, located all over the body, and you cannot remove it from one location alone, unless you get liposuction. First things first, everyone has fat, whether that is a layer of subcutaneous fat right beneath our skin, which helps to insulate the body, or the deeper visceral fat, which surrounds and protects the organs. Just because we have fat cells in our belly does not mean that when we are doing a core exercise, our body is going to pick these specific fat cells for conversion into energy. The falsehood of localized cutting suggests if you have fat on the top of your belly fat on your stomach, exercising the abdominal muscles will cause this fat to disappear.
Toning up alongside cardiovascular training will accelerate and enhance your cuts, but do not assume that you need to only work on your abs. Doing ab exercises may build up your core, but they are not going to really reduce body fat or make your love handles smaller–and that is why you have to eat healthily. If you want to lose less fat in your hips, you do some lunges; if you want less fat in your arms, you do some bicep curls; and if you want to shed that spare tire, you do some core exercises.
Share
