People often ask:

– “I love my body, but I just want to reduce fat from my thighs. What to do?”

– “How can I reduce fat ‘Just’ from my arms?”

– “I am doing lot of sit-ups and crunches. Why am I not reducing belly fat?”

The attempt to spot-reduce body fat should be dead and buried, but it lives on. It’s a pursuit that just doesn’t go away because marketers use this myth to convince people to spend money on their useless machines and gadgets.

Just turn on the TV late at night and you are sure to hear ridiculous claims like “Spot-reduce fat in those trouble zones”. After all, everybody has one or two trouble zones but it’s not a dream worth chasing.

Spot reduction is simply the idea that if you work a specific muscle group you will decrease the amount of fat in that area. The most common example of this is people focus on abdominal exercises in an effort to lose fat in their stomach area.

In reality, there is no such thing as spot reduction. You will never attain a flat stomach just by performing abdominal exercises.

The reason for this is simple: Muscle does not own the fat that surrounds it. Sit-ups, for example, will definitely strengthen your abdominal muscles, but sit-ups alone will not get rid of the layer of fat that is covering the muscles.

How to Reduce Fat from Problem Areas

Even if you want to reduce fat from your problem area, you need to drop over all body fat percentage.

To reshape your body and burn fat from trouble zones, you need to do the following:

Cardio exercise is critical if you want to maximize total fat loss. It helps you drop over all body fat percentage. The best cardio exercises to do are those that we like and will do regularly.

Doing a variety of cardio workouts keep our body challenged mode and burn a maximum amount of fat. You can have fun by doing activities like Frisbee, Tennis, Cycling, Gardening, Jump rope, Sprint intervals, Volleyball, Golf etc.

Weight training is the only natural way to individually shape and sculpt our muscles and it is one of the best ways to alter our appearance and balance our proportions.

You can do targeted exercise along with total body exercises to reshape specific part of your body. For example if you want to tone your thighs, you can do targeted exercises like squats, lunges, leg press, leg extension etc to shape your thighs.

In addition to helping you look your very best; weight lifting boosts your metabolism so you burn more calories even if you are sleeping or sitting on the couch. It increases your body’s fat burning capacity.

It goes without saying that nutrition is the biggest secret to fat loss. Exercising without healthy eating is a waste of time.

 

Written by Sapna Vyas Patel, PhD Nutrition Science and Dietetics. Sourced from StayWow.