Ab Exercises Do Not Burn Belly Fat, But This Method Does

I've been a Fitness Professional for over a decade as a personal trainer and a nutrition specialist, and I have to say that the biggest confusion I still see is regarding losing that stubborn belly fat that most people have around their midsection.

Although it's been beaten to death, I still need to convince people that doing crunches, leg lifts, situps, and obliques exercises are NOT going to help them lose their belly fat and love handles. Ok, we all know by now that spot reduction doesn't work, so why is it that whenever someone tells me that they are trying to get rid of their stomach, they start talking about all of the crunches and other abs exercises they've been doing, pumping away for hundreds of reps a day with no results?

I guess it's counterintuitive, but the first thing we need to get straight is that in terms of exercise, we need to STOP focusing on abs exercises to get rid of stomach fat for good. The reason for this is that abs exercises only work a relatively small muscle group of the body, and therefore do not burn much quantities of calories compared to exercises that work larger more complex portions of the body.

In addition, by NOT focusing on abs exercises and working larger portions of the body, we not only burn more calories, but we also stimulate a much greater increase in our metabolism as well as a higher production of fat burning hormones in the body.

The best way to do this strategically is to combine multi-joint full body exercises into high intensity routines. I prefer to design my clients workouts using alternating upper and lower body multi-joint exercises. This allows them to keep working at high intensity, without over-fatiguing each particular muscle group at any given time.

In case you're wondering what examples of multi-joint exercises that work larger portions of your body than abs exercises do, these could be any of the following:

• lower body movements such as squats, deadlifts, lunges, step ups, and all variations
• any upper body presses such as chest presses, pushups, dips, or overhead presses
• any upper body pulling exercises such as lat pulls, pullups, bent over rows, seated rows, 1-arm rows

Those are the MOST important exercises you need to focus on if you want to get a high enough metabolic response to start getting rid of your stubborn stomach fat in the long term.

These types of exercises combined in high intensity fashion in either supersets or circuits should be your priority in all of your workouts if you really want to start burning off that body fat for real. Only once you've focused most of your efforts on these, should you finish up your workouts with abs-specific exercises.

The other vastly important factor for losing stomach fat and getting visible six pack abs is your nutrition. Nutrition is king! We'll get into fat burning nutrition in a future post.

For now, be sure to go to the following page and grab your own free fat loss for six pack abs report

Also, be sure to check out our new innovative 4-Minute Dumbbell & Bodyweight Workouts for Busy Professionals.