Another common exercise mistake that people make is to think that running, or doing only cardio, can help to burn stomach fat. If burning belly fat is your goal, then doing nothing but seated exercises and crunches is not going to get you there. Perhaps one of the most frustrating parts about exercising, particularly for women, is when that stubborn belly fat seems to stay around, even after you make the effort to perform a daily sit-up or crunch.
If you have had more kids, there might be a layer of loose skin remaining on the abdomen, no matter how much fat you have burned. With chin-ups or other abdominal exercises, you are toning the muscles in your abdomen, but you are not burning the fat inside of your abdomen. Twists, crunches, and lateral bends do not make the abdominal muscles visible if the abdominal muscles are covered with a thick layer of fat.
Abs exercises like crunches or sit-ups will not specifically burn fat from the abdomen, but it may help your stomach look flatter and more toned. While sit-ups cannot target belly fat, what they can do is help you burn calories, build 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.
Sit-ups are good for toned, defined muscles (six packs), but in order to truly drop pounds or shed fat, you need to engage in a well-rounded 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).
That is why full-body, high-intensity exercises are much more effective at losing fat than sitting up or crunching. When exercise is combined with a nutritious diet and active living, fat loss is even more effective. For total weight loss — including burning belly fat — diet is just as, if not more, important as exercise.
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 reduce belly fat, you need to restrict calories that you eat or eat only as many calories as you are capable of burning every day. Burning these extra calories may help you reach and maintain a healthier weight, along with regular cardiovascular activity and eating a healthier diet. While a moderate calorie cutback will help you slim down, increasing your physical activity may help you drop the pounds more quickly, with greater benefits to health.
Having more muscle mass, 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. Because muscles are more metabolically active than fat, having more muscle means more calories burned at rest. Any exercise that gets multiple muscle groups working is intense, will raise your body temperature, and get fat burned.
To burn fat, you will want to increase your heart rate and body temperature with exercises that are moderate or high in intensity, depending on your level of fitness. Running produces tremendous amounts of body heat, which as you know by now is necessary to lose fat.
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 seated rows and other core exercises. Based on this extremely rough depiction of how many calories are burned from sitting, you could lose roughly 1 pounds of body fat per 10,000 sit-ups performed at 5 minute intervals.
Each situp you perform uses just a small portion of the fuel that you would use in an exercise using a larger muscle group — say, a squat or a deadlift. As I covered above, the trick that most people miss is that you have to use bigger, more ravenous muscle groups in order to burn more body fat. An effective workout using big muscles on the legs, therefore, may spur fat loss on your core.
While there is not one exercise that will exclusively burn belly fat, any exercise can contribute to reducing total body fat if done regularly and combined with a healthy diet. With the combination of a healthy, caloric-controlled diet and exercise, you can lower fat in the belly region, strengthen the muscles of your abdomen, and flatten out the belly. Of course, there are a variety of different exercises you can do to strengthen your muscles in the abdominal region. Working the muscles of the abdomen through exercises such as crunches, sit-ups, and planks is a great way to increase your core strength and begin developing a six-pack.
While the sit-up helps to build strength in your rectus abdominis, there are other exercises that recruit that muscle, as well as others, in the core. Static ab exercises also target deeper muscles in the abdomen region, particularly internal obliques – muscles along the sides of the trunk. The seated bent-over press, however, has been shown to work more effectively in engaging your rectus abdominis, a muscle that runs vertically down the front of your torso, than other exercises like the bent-over plank and other static core exercises.
Even if you are hesitant about doing an HIE or strength training, studies show that simply taking a brisk daily walk also can be effective in decreasing abdominal fat and overall body fat (31, 32). Moderate to intense exercises may decrease stomach fat mass, as compared with aerobic exercises at a lower intensity or resistance exercises (22, 23 ). Studies have shown that individuals can lose stomach fat with either moderate- to vigorous-intensity aerobic exercise, provided that a caloric deficit is maintained (44, 45 ). The single most important thing that individuals can do to prevent the accumulation of belly fat and get rid of existing belly fat is to engage in physical activity, and even better, adopt a physical lifestyle.
If you weigh less than 68 pounds, you will burn less calories within a prescribed amount of time, while if you weigh more, you will burn more calories by doing seven seated exercises within one minute. Reducing belly fat requires a disciplined, committed regimen of several well-balanced exercises. Reduction shows that instead of burning fat only in areas surrounding working muscles, your body draws fat stores all throughout your frame.
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