To truly understand why the seated position is such a terrible weight loss tool, and what we can do better, it is important to discuss why stomach fat is so difficult to lose. If your goal is to burn belly fat, doing nothing but sit-ups and crunches is not going to get you there.
Since stomach fat is stored in your beltline and belly area, doing a few ab exercises may help you fight it. With a chin-up or other abdominal exercises, you are toned your abdominal muscles, but not burning any fat from your insides. Two especially notable studies explicitly disprove the notion that using abdominal exercises such as sit-ups is toburn belly fat.
While sit-ups cannot target abdominal fat, what they can do is help you burn calories, build your core strength, and build more muscles. They can be part of an overall exercise and nutrition plan that helps you cut extra fat all over your body, including the stomach. Sitting exercises strengthen and tone the muscles in the rectus abdominus, transverse abdominus, and oblique abdominus, and the muscles in the neck.
Sit-ups target more muscles than crunches and static core exercises because they have a wider range of motion. Sit-ups are excellent at bulking up and definition (the six-pack), but in order to truly lean out or cut fat, you need to work on a balanced workout routine. The amount of sit-ups does indeed matter, but in order to achieve meaningful results, you will have to participate in a quality, well-rounded exercise routine that includes other exercises in addition to the traditional sit-ups (see How to Lose Weight In One Month With Treadmills).
A combination of a good diet and well-rounded exercise routine is the fastest and most reliable way to shed that stubborn belly fat. Increase daily activity, minimise time spent sitting, and follow a well-balanced diet to help lose the pounds. While a moderate calorie cutback will help you slim down, increasing physical activity may help you drop the pounds more quickly, with greater health benefits.
Burning off those extra calories may help you reach and maintain a healthier weight when combined with regular cardiovascular activity and eating a healthy diet. Because muscles are more metabolically active than fat, the more muscles you have, the more calories you will burn at rest. As I covered above, the trick that most people miss is that you need to utilize big, hungry muscle groups in order to burn more body fat.
Having more muscles, in turn, increases the number of calories that your body burns, helping you to burn fat. Since muscles burn more calories than fat at rest, having more muscle mass may help you burn more fat. To lose fat throughout the body, including the abdomen, you need to burn more calories than you consume, or reach a negative caloric balance. To lose fat, you need your body temperature to rise high enough to produce the metabolic effects needed to burn fat.
To burn fat, you must increase your heart rate and body temperature with moderate to heavy weight training, depending on your level of fitness. To burn fat, stay within your caloric deficit, regardless of how much calories you believe you are burning in your sweat sessions. To reduce belly fat, you have to restrict calories that you eat, or only eat as much as you are capable of burning every day. Fat loss is most effective when exercise is combined with nutritious eating and a positive life-style.
With the combination of a healthy, caloric-controlled diet and exercise, you will reduce the body fat around your midsection, strengthen the muscles of your abdomen, and flatter the areas in your midsection. Of course, there are a variety of different exercises you can do to strengthen your muscles in the abdominal region. Static ab exercises also target deeper muscles in the abdomen region, particularly internal obliques – muscles along the sides of the body. While sitting exercises can help build strength in your rectus abdominis, there are other exercises that recruit that muscle, as well as others, from the core.
The V-sit is a challenging ab exercise that works several areas of your core, as well as challenging your balance. The seated chin-up, however, has been shown to work the rectus abdominis, a muscle that runs vertically down the front of the torso, more than other exercises such as the plank and other static core exercises. The plank, in conjunction with other abdominal exercises like bicycle crunches and hill climbers, are better exercises for building stomach muscles. Working the abs through exercises such as crunches, sit-ups, and planks is a good way to build strength in the core and begin developing a six-pack.
According to estimates by Harvard Health Publishing, if you weigh 185 pounds, you will burn around 133 calories during a half-hour of total resistance exercise, which may include crunches and other core exercises. If you weigh less than 68 pounds, you will burn less calories in the specified time, while if you weigh more, you will burn more calories by doing seven sit-ups within one minute. Reducing belly fat requires a disciplined, dedicated regimen of several well-balanced exercises. Maintaining an emphasis more on the quality of your exercises versus quantity, and eating a suitable diet is the way to go for losing belly fat in a healthful and productive way. The one single most important thing that individuals can do to prevent the accumulation of belly fat and to shed existing belly fat is to engage in physical activity, or even better, adopting a physical lifestyle.
If you find something that you enjoy doing for its own sake, it is much easier to integrate it into a long-term lifestyle shift that results in losing excess body fat everywhere, including the abdomen. While you might think that the best exercise to lose belly fat is just sitting, sitting, sitting, sitting, sitting, sitting, sitting, sitting, sitting, sitting, sitting, sitting, might actually not be the best choice to target this critical area of where your stubborn belly fat lives. To get a flatter stomach, you need to decrease the overall percentage of fat on your body–sitting simply cannot do it. You cannot decrease the fat from one particular body part by exercising that body part; our bodies just do not work this way.
Share
