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Now I am not the first to declare this and I certainly won’t be the last. It is a basic fact that you cannot just pick certain areas of your body to lose body fat from. For example you can’t focus on your thighs and train only to lose weight from that specific area – it won’t work!
Hormones
It is actually our body’s hormones that often decide where we store fat. So the areas where we store fat depend on which sex we are. For men this area is the stomach and for women it is the hips, buttocks, stomach and backs of the arms (women get the short straw again). The first place the fat is stored is always the last place it leaves. Well I’m sure you don’t need to be a scientist to work that out. You could have told me this from your own experiences and from the amount of workouts available that are designed to improve these weaknesses.
Workouts
How many fitness magazines for men have you read that advertise ‘6 packs in 6 minutes’? Or for women the quantity of fitness videos and advice to give you firmer buttocks, flatter stomachs or specific exercises to firm up the backs of your arms? Are they doing it because they care? I don’t think so! They are doing it because they already know your weaknesses and when they know this they can sell you anything. These sales techniques have been used for years and the fitness industry is full of them now. Of course they will never be stopped because at the end of the day they are not lying, they are just slightly misleading you. They can always fall back on the argument that exercise is proven to reduce body fat and that of course is true.
What to do
Well, you first have to understand how your body works and I can’t do that in one post, but quite simply when you add together the genetics that your family gave you, combined with your daily intake of foods and then minus the energy you burn off in a day you then have your answer: that’s how your body works. If you are left with more energy than you burn then you will store this as body fat. If you burn more than you consume then you lose body fat. But wait! This doesn’t mean don’t eat and exercise lots. That only works to an extent. It is a fine balancing act, but basically eat healthy foods, don’t go hungry and stop eating when you are no longer hungry. I know this is simplifying it all massively but I don’t want to get too heavily involved in the diet subject today.
No Spot Training
So you see in that very simplified summary I have not mentioned once that if you have a large tummy then crunches or sit ups will make it flat. Why? Because it won’t. You must always treat your body as a whole and this means change your diet to a wholefood diet (healthy eating) and exercise your whole body. The last bits of body fat to go will be those annoying places like your stomach or your hips - but no one said or should ever believe that this was going to be easy.
When Spot Training Does Work
Spot training does have its place as long as you realise it won’t reduce body fat in a particular spot, what it will do is increase muscle size. That means if you want to firm an area up it is possible with spot training; but it will all happen to the muscles underneath the body fat you have in that particular spot. But it will never be truly firm until you have reduced your body fat %.
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