So often people come to me wanting to get abs expecting to do a variety of abdominal exercise. Everybody has abs. More often than not, they are just hidden under belly fat. Depending on the individual, this could be more or less of their overall body fat percentage. Genetics dictates where your body fat will sit. Generally speaking women will have more fat on their hips and glutes and men will tend to accumulate more fat on their stomach, giving them the ‘beer belly’ look with a slight lean backwards to compensate for the excessive weight at the front of their body (lordosis). The amount of fat a person will store in areas will always depend on genetics.
This creates problems when trying to tone a specific area. If a person wanted to lose their ‘pot belly’, they would have to begin by just losing overall body fat. We do this by creating a calorie deficit, simple! Our bodies will then dictate where the fat comes from. If you exercise one body part continually you may get minimal muscle growth in that area but it wont be the main reason for muscles to start showing. The loss of overall fat starts to show more muscle definition. Eventually, if a calorie deficit is maintained for long enough, the body will inevitably start to lose fat from where you want it to come off of also.
The best exercises to do are therefore not the small isolation exercises burning far fewer calories offering less of the ‘after-burn effect’ (sit ups) but are the larger, compound exercises that drive huge amounts of muscle mass throughout the entire body, releasing the most amount of hormones most conducive to burning fat and maintaining/gaining muscle mass (squats and deadlifts). The compound exercises generally also tend to also engage the core muscles.
Wont doing the ‘big lifts’ make me more muscly, I hear you say?! NO! You can lift weights and increase your strength without putting on any size at all. In fact, you can increase strength and the efficiency of your muscles while losing body fat quite easily. Losing fat too quickly can hinder progress with the lifting of bigger weights. If you lose weight steadily by maintaining a slight calorie deficit then you can increase your strength, drop body fat (that will eventually come from the places you want) and increase muscle tone. Having a higher percentage of your muscle mass as muscle rather than fat means your body will also be burning more calories while you rest in front of the TV (increases your basal metabolic rate) meaning it’s even easier to create a steady calorie deficit. All this together gives you a far leaner, HEALTHIER body both inside and out rather than just ending up skinny, which in some circumstances can be just as unhealthy as being overweight.
NOTE: you can gain muscle and lose fat at the same time which can mean that sometimes our basic bodyweight may not move much on the scales (misery step) but your body make up may well be changing dramatically. Body impedance scales are incredibly inaccurate at measuring body fat percentage changes. Measure your body with basic circumference measurements of upper arm, upper thigh, hips, waist and chest or measure with body fat callipers, both ways giving a far better understanding of what is actually happening to your body than jumping on the scales every morning. Training can also cause swelling in the muscles so measure before lifting any weights.
