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Through my years of personal training, I have found there is one huge misconception among the people I sit down in front of. Many individuals I come in contact with believe they can decrease the fat in their problem areas by simply working those areas during their workouts. For example, if I had a quarter for every time I heard someone say they planned on doing crunches in order to shrink their stomach area, I would be sipping strawberry smoothies on the beaches of the world! 

The term I am referring to is called spot reduction. It has been proven that an individual cannot spot reduce the fat in certain areas of their body. If you have started a fat loss program, expect the fat to come off throughout the entire body, not in just one area. For a lot of people, the stomach area is a big problem (no pun intended). A lot of an individual’s excess fat goes straight to the stomach area, which you can see by getting out and about and observing those around you. Since it is so easy to put fat on in the stomach area, that means it will be very hard to take off because while you may be burning fat off in that area, your body will still be trying to put fat on in that area at the same time. 

Think of it this way. Picture a glove filled with water, one of those latex gloves you see in a doctor’s office. The entire glove is filled with water (all 4 fingers, the thumb, as well as the rest of the glove). The water filling this glove can be considered the excess fat we store in our bodies; you know, that ugly fat we are always trying to get rid of. For this analogy to make sense, pretend the glove is positioned with the thumb facing up. Let’s say you want to spot reduce the water in the pinky of the glove. To do this, you take a pin and pop the pinky, but what happens? The water may drain out of the pinky, but the pinky still stays full of water until the entire glove empties. On top of that, popping the pinky actually leads to the water in the thumb being reduced. The same can be said of the fat in your body.  You may do plenty of crunches (popping the pinky in this example), but until the fat burns off throughout the entire body, your problem areas, such as the stomach, will not get much smaller. Doing crunches can actually lead to fat coming off in other areas of the body, just like popping the pinky can lead to the water in the thumb being reduced. 

The goal of your workouts shouldn’t be to work just your problem areas. You may be burning off a tiny amount of fat in your stomach by doing crunches, but the reality is, those crunches are really just a pinprick attempt to decrease your stomach fat. The fat burnt off in the stomach isn’t because you are simply working the muscles in the stomach area, it is because your abs are burning calories off by doing work, and when it comes to fat loss, it is all about calorie burn. This is why you can’t spot reduce because fat loss isn’t based on what areas of your body are worked. It is based on burning calories and hoping the fat calories that are being burnt off are coming from the problems areas you want them to come from. 

Remember, fat will come off from the easiest areas first. Going back to our glove example, problem areas like the stomach, butt, and thighs (the fingers of the glove) will be the last places the fat comes off because they are the easiest places for the fat to be stored, just as the fingers are the first to fill up with water. With this being true, instead of using a pin to pop the pinky of the glove, why not cut a hole in the glove and let the water rush out of the palm? When exercising, instead of doing small calorie-burning exercises like crunches, why not perform exercises that will burn the most calories, or drain the water out of the glove as fast as possible? “What are these exercises?” you may ask. Next week we will find out.     

Dan Falkenberg is the co-founder and co-owner of Your Live Trainers at YourLiveTrainers.com.

Tags: exercise selection, weight loss