This article is going to talk about how to lose belly fat, something that may be within your reach, or maybe not. Let us take a minute to first carefully consider the aim of your question before making suggestions. You wish to lose belly fat, and you think that certain exercises will help with that goal. You are correct in this assumption quite literally, but are likely making several other incorrect assumptions. In this article, I will discuss the toning myth, how fat is gained and lost, several exercises to lose belly fat, and dietary considerations to complement your exercise.
To begin, there is a horrible myth going around popular fitness culture, the myth of toning, also known as spot reduction. The only way to target fat loss in a particular area is through liposuction. Stick a needle with a vacuum hose in the area you want to lose the fat, and start sucking. What happens instead in most of these supposed toning cases is that the person simply builds more muscle in the area. This helps make the fat less noticeable on certain body parts. For example, I recently lost about ten pounds after I was sick for a week. Rather than think that I had lost weight, my coworkers asked if I had gained weight. The reason for this is because I had in fact lost muscle at this time and gained fat. Overall, I weighed less, but my body composition was worse. Take a look at the yearly winners of strongman competitions and you will see that they have very large bellies. On most people, these would look enormous, but since they are so muscular everywhere else, they look much less fat than less muscular people carrying around the same amount of body fat.
If you want to “tone” an area, just work at making the nearby muscles larger because you will not target fat loss in any one specific area. Fat is lost in a special order for each person. Some people like to carry it on their bellies, others on their legs, others on their arms, some on their chest, many on their rear end. However, wherever it last came on, it will first come off. Exercise will help you lose the fat that you most recently put on, and lots of exercise over time will slowly burn away the fat from most recent to most ancient. Therefore, if you have never had a six pack, the last place that you will lose fat on your body is probably your abdominals. I am currently living in Korea and see many “skinny-fat” people with visible abs but no muscle and plenty of body fat in other places. Then there are skinny people with no abs. We are all different and have different genetics. Our bodies store and burn fat in the same order, so even if you do manage to reveal your abs, beware because if this is the last area you burn fat, it will be the first area you put it back on.
Now, I have hopefully made matters a bit more clear on the storage of body fat, the loss of fat, and dispelled the toning or spot reduction myth. Next I would like to deliver on the article title, and tell you how to lose belly fat. In bodybuilding, there is an ancient and ongoing dispute about the best way to train your muscles for optimal growth. Should you do body part splits or whole body workouts? Luckily, this question does not matter for you. What does matter is whatever program you decide to do, you should be using free weights and doing complex movements. The goal is to burn as many calories as possible per workout, and the more volume you lift, the more calories you will burn. It is simply a matter of physiology and neuromuscular activation for our choice of complex movements. It goes without saying that you must try to become as strong (not necessarily as big) as possible. The stronger you are, the more volume you can handle. Doing ten sets of ten for biceps curls will take about the same time as seven sets of squats for triples, but in squatting, you will lift far, far more weight. The best exercises then are the power lifts and Olympic lifts, the squat, the deadlift, the bench press, the overhead press, the clean, the jerk, the clean and jerk. If you can do snatches, those are great as well, but take some time and technical supervision to master. Learn how to do these lifts well and lift lots of weight doing them. If you do nothing but these for several years in the gym, you will serve yourself and your goals well, but remember to try and continually improve your technique along the way. This will lead to bigger lifts, greater safety in the long-run, and more variation.
Finally, no article on how to lose belly fat would be complete without discussing diet. If you only focus on exercise, you are missing a very important factor in the weight loss equation. Losing belly fat ultimately comes down to losing enough fat so that fat loss eventually comes from your belly. Recall how fat goes onto and comes off the body from above; first on, first off, and last on, last off. So belly fat loss is a very simple matter, simply lose enough fat so that your body has to get rid of the extra fat it has on its belly. Exercise will do a lot, but a multifactorial approach is almost always better. Burn as many calories as possible, and only eat enough calories for getting the body you desire. I have several other articles on this site which discuss diet recommendations, so let me highlight something new here that I have not yet mentioned. When you are training hard with weights, it is very difficult to cut calories, and often counter productive. You may actually want to increase your calories and, if done correctly, this will actually help you lose weight. Learn the basics as outlined in other articles, and learn to feel how many calories you need. After a rough workout, I will often feel that I need some carbohydrates the next day for recovery, so I will eat them. Protein and veggies is not always enough (although this is what I usually recommend). There are no absolutes in this business, but the general principles are very powerful. Work on those first; healthy food, no empty calories, and regular protein intake.
Good luck assimilating my article on how to lose belly fat, dietary recommendations, and perhaps most importantly, digesting the spot reduction myth. This article has covered all the basics you need to know to lose the stubborn fat around your belly, it is now up to you to put them into action.
