Have you ever stood unclothed in front of a full-length mirror
assessing
your body
shape and thought that while you didn't really look that bad overall,you'd really like to lose the rest of that abdominal fat or that extra weight you're carrying on your hips and upper thighs? Maybe you've even been exercising for a while now with some good results, but these particular body parts seem to
doggedly retain fat. What to do?
Often the seemingly logical response is perhaps to
work these areas extra hard. If a hundred sit-ups every other day is not reducing this abdominal fat, then maybe two hundred a day will work. At this point we need to make a distinction between two separate concepts.
Spot development and spot reduction.
Spot development means
generating strength and muscular endurance in a specific muscle group
through a regular, steady exercise routine. For example, if you
were to do three sets of ten repetitions of the concentration curl for
the biceps (regularly moving up the weight load), three times a week for six months, your biceps would grow stronger and larger, but the
rest of your body would not. This technique works.
Spot reduction
on the other hand, is the concept that an increase
in a muscle's activity facilitates a relatively greater fat mobilization
from this specific storage area. This technique doesn't work.
The reason spot reduction doesn't work is that exercise stimulates the mobilization of fatty acids through hormones (such as adrenaline) delivered through the blood to act on fat deposits throughout the body. The areas of greatest fat concentration supply the greatest amount of this energy. The body cannot be "forced" to use fat in a particular area by exercising the muscles directly under that area.
To test this, the forearms of high-level tennis players were
measured.
As expected, the circumferences of the playing arms were significantly
larger than the non-playing arms. However, when fatfold thickness tests of
the two arms were made, there was no difference between arms in the quantity of
forearm fat.
Therefore, how do we lose fat in those troublesome areas?
Two techniques that work:
Reduce total daily calorie intake(especially fat calories).
Focus
your
diet on fresh vegetables and fruit, fish, skinless chicken breast,
and
whole grains. Avoid snack foods, candy, refined sugar and
flour, and any other "empty calorie" foods.
Increase aerobic activity using exercises which work large muscle
groups such as the legs and back. These muscles burn calories
more efficiently than do small muscles such as the shoulders and
arms. Exercises using the large muscle groups are running,
bicycling, walking, rollerblading, rowing and swimming.
Finally, we'll
have better luck getting rid of that abdominal fat by watching
calories
and
spending forty-five minutes a day on a treadmill than by doing those
innumerable sit-ups.
HEALTHandFITNESS.com 
