The simple fact of the matter is that you can’t spot reduce! Sorry to burst the bubble so quickly but if you look at the science you will soon realise that it is in fact impossible.

The fat that is burned by the body needs to go through a transformation before being able to be used by the muscles. The fat stored is known as a triglyceride and it must be broken down in to glycerol and free fatty acid before entering the blood stream and used as fuel. This means that the fat broken down to provide the energy to train those “lower abs” may not in fact have come from that lower abdominal area. It could have come from your big toe for all we know.

Then we move on to the exercises being performed. Have a look at the spot reduction exercises that are often portrayed as being effective by magazines and the TV. The movements are quite small and burn very minimal calories when being performed.

If you aren’t burning many calories you aren’t going to lose much body fat from anywhere. It just so happens that you are more likely to melt the love handles away by running on a treadmill than you are doing all the abdominal twisting exercises that you can fit in to your daily routine.

High intensity interval training (or HIIT) is effective not only for the larger movements it often has associated with it, but the excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC) which can cause your body to continue to burn extra calories for recovery from as many as 8 hours to 72 hours post exercise. The key is to combine this HIIT in such a way that it has both cardiovascular exercise and resistance training included.

The resistance training is of most importance, as we can get your heart rate to a high level similar to that of the cardiovascular component, but it is a must to maintain muscle mass. If you are going for a “toned” look, then we must ensure there is muscle when that fat disappears.

Lastly, none of the above will be effective without nutrition being on point. If you were to eat at a calorie deficit (approximately 500 calories lower than your Basal Metabolic Rate multiplied by your activity level – see the Harris-Benedict equation) you will start shedding the unwanted fat at a rate of half a kilogram per week.

Lets go beck to the exercises for just a second. In a seemingly last ditch effort to convince you of the possibility of spot reduction, TV infomercials constantly recycle old equipment and preach the ideals that training the lower, middle, and upper abdominals is the key to spot reduction. Ummm… Pure genius. I need them to teach me how to get these muscles. There are no upper and lower abs! The abdominal region is made up of the Rectus Abdominus, made responsible for flexion of the spine, Internal and External Obliques, which do the entire side bend movement, the Transverse Abdominus, which compresses the abdomen, and lastly the erector Spinae which has the role of extending the spine.

So given that this is the entire abdominal region, I hope we can all see that there is no muscles here that actually move the legs. I bring this movement up because leg lifts are supposedly one of the key movements to spot reduce the “lower abdominals,” that actually don’t exist. The muscles responsible for this movement make up the hip flexors. All this movement is likely to achieve is tight, overactive hips.

We can move on to the word tone. Muscle tone is defined as “a state of contraction of the muscle”. You can’t tone a muscle to make it seem leaner or more muscular. The only way to change a muscles tone is to lose fat, gain fat, lose muscle, and gain muscle to achieve what has become known as a toned look.

The bottom line is this, if we wish to reduce fat from a specific area, we must actually lose body fat and gain muscle mass across the entire body. In order to do this, we must follow 3 simple guidelines:

• Overload – Muscle mass and strength will increase if your workouts are progressively more intense. This will also likely result in a greater amount of fat utilization.
• Body fat Reduction – As mentioned previously, a calorie deficit, exercise induced deficit of course, will decrease your body fat and with resistance training increase your lean muscle mass.
• Training Program Planning and Progression – Each muscle group or your full body workouts must go through what is called periodization. Muscle groups should be trained no more than 2-3 times per week. Ample recovery is needed for performance, and muscle growth. By also increasing the intensity, and allowing for enough recovery, you will be able to keep an upward trend in performance which will ensure that your fat burning, muscle building, “tone creating” workouts help you reach your body fat reduction goals.