Building a Flat Belly: What Really Works
By Shelby Miller, CPT-NASM
Pooch. Beer gut. Spare tire. Muffin-top. Whatever you care to call it, excess belly fat is easy to put on and can be frustratingly difficult to eliminate. A significant cause of belly fat is excessive food and alcohol consumption; another is lack of exercise. Simply put, when we take in more calories than we’re expending, those calories are stored in the body as potential energy, or fat. This is an evolutionary adaptation from the days when humans hunted and gathered their food---stored body fat helped us to survive when food was in short supply. Now, food is cheap and readily available; however, our bodies have not changed.
Unfortunately, it’s not possible to “spot-reduce” abdominal fat, meaning that doing hundreds of crunches daily will not burn fat from your belly. There are also no magic pills. So what will work? There are three steps that, taken together, will help to slim down and flatten your abdomen.
Cut back on booze, sugar, and saturated fat. What you eat is key to maintaining a lean midsection, perhaps more than exercise. This is because certain kinds of calories---namely sugars found in simple carbohydrates and alcohol---are stored as fat in the body if they are not burned off through activity. Avoiding excessive alcohol (especially hard alcohol, which is more calorie-dense than beer or wine), sweets, and white-flour products is the first step toward flattening your stomach.
Instead, aim for a diet rich in complex carbohydrates (think whole grains, vegetables, and legumes), lean protein, and unsaturated fats (the kind found in fish, olive oil, nuts, and avocados). This latter part is especially important: recent studies show that consuming plenty of mono-unsaturated fatty acids (MUFAs) may help prevent fat from accumulating in the abdomen.
Get enough cardio. Cardiovascular exercise is any activity that gets your heart rate up and keeps it up for a sustained period of at least twenty minutes. This calorie-blasting exercise may include walking, jogging, biking, dancing, jumping rope, stair-climbing, or any other continuous form of movement (sports like tennis, soccer/football, and boxing are other examples). In order to burn body fat, this exercise should be performed for 30 or more minutes per day, at least 5 days a week.
You also want to be sure your cardio is intense enough to get results. For fat loss, this means exercising at minimum 65-percent intensity; on a scale of 1 to 10 in difficulty, the work should feel like about a 7. For most adults under 40, this will correspond to a heart rate of at least 130 beats per minute.
Strength-train your entire body. If your goal is a flat, toned abdomen, you may think that sit-ups or crunches are the most important exercises you can do. This is fundamentally untrue, and for several reasons. First, no matter how much work you do to strengthen your rectus abdominus (or “six-pack”) muscle, it will not be visible if it’s covered by a layer of fat. Second, crunches are a resistance exercise, not cardiovascular, and only cardio exercise can burn the calories required to lose body fat. Crunches tone the muscle under the fat, but they won’t remove the fat concealing the muscle. Third, the only kind of resistance exercise that contributes to an overall fat and calorie burn is exercise that utilizes large muscle groups in performing full-body movements. Think lunges, push-ups, or combination moves like squats with military presses.
This is not to say that you shouldn’t do crunches in pursuit of a sexy, flat stomach. But an even better toning strategy would be to do a combination of exercises that hit all the major muscle groups of the core: the rectus abdominus, internal and external obliques, transverse abdominus, and low back. Here are a few key movements to include in your routine:
· Yoga plank: This is a fantastic belly-flattening exercise because it recruits all the muscles that pull you in tight around your midsection and help you stand up straight (much like an internal corset), giving you the appearance of a narrower waist. Lie on your stomach on the floor with your elbows propped directly under your shoulders and your legs straight. Lift your body off the ground so your weight is on your elbows/forearms and your toes, and hold a completely straight line, drawing your belly button in toward your spine. Hold for at least 30 seconds.
· Supermans: Drop back onto your belly and extend your arms over your head. Keeping your abs pulled in (imagine you’re trying to keep your belly button from touching the ground), raise your right arm and left leg a few inches off the floor. Hold a second, then lower and repeat with the opposite arm and leg. Try to avoid rocking side to side. Perform 10 repetitions each side.
· Heel Touch-Downs: Roll over onto your back with your arms at your sides and your legs lifted above your hips, knees bent 90 degrees. Keep your abs drawn in to maintain contact between your low back and the floor at all times. One at a time, lower your leg from the hip joint, keeping your knee bent, until your heel touches the floor, then exhale and lift your leg back up using your abdominal muscles. Repeat on the other leg, alternating for 10 reps each side.
· Reverse Twists: Keep both legs elevated above your hips with knees bent 90 degrees, but place arms straight out to either side. Keeping both shoulder blades in contact with the floor at all times, inhale and slowly rotate hips to one side, allowing knees to drop sideways toward the ground. Exhale and rotate hips back to center, bringing knees back up. Repeat on the other side, alternating for 6—8 reps each side.
Perform 2 sets of each of these exercises 3 times a week following a full-body strength routine, and you’ll be well on your way to achieving the flat belly you’ve always desired.
By Shelby Miller, CPT-NASM
Pooch. Beer gut. Spare tire. Muffin-top. Whatever you care to call it, excess belly fat is easy to put on and can be frustratingly difficult to eliminate. A significant cause of belly fat is excessive food and alcohol consumption; another is lack of exercise. Simply put, when we take in more calories than we’re expending, those calories are stored in the body as potential energy, or fat. This is an evolutionary adaptation from the days when humans hunted and gathered their food---stored body fat helped us to survive when food was in short supply. Now, food is cheap and readily available; however, our bodies have not changed.
Unfortunately, it’s not possible to “spot-reduce” abdominal fat, meaning that doing hundreds of crunches daily will not burn fat from your belly. There are also no magic pills. So what will work? There are three steps that, taken together, will help to slim down and flatten your abdomen.
Cut back on booze, sugar, and saturated fat. What you eat is key to maintaining a lean midsection, perhaps more than exercise. This is because certain kinds of calories---namely sugars found in simple carbohydrates and alcohol---are stored as fat in the body if they are not burned off through activity. Avoiding excessive alcohol (especially hard alcohol, which is more calorie-dense than beer or wine), sweets, and white-flour products is the first step toward flattening your stomach.
Instead, aim for a diet rich in complex carbohydrates (think whole grains, vegetables, and legumes), lean protein, and unsaturated fats (the kind found in fish, olive oil, nuts, and avocados). This latter part is especially important: recent studies show that consuming plenty of mono-unsaturated fatty acids (MUFAs) may help prevent fat from accumulating in the abdomen.
Get enough cardio. Cardiovascular exercise is any activity that gets your heart rate up and keeps it up for a sustained period of at least twenty minutes. This calorie-blasting exercise may include walking, jogging, biking, dancing, jumping rope, stair-climbing, or any other continuous form of movement (sports like tennis, soccer/football, and boxing are other examples). In order to burn body fat, this exercise should be performed for 30 or more minutes per day, at least 5 days a week.
You also want to be sure your cardio is intense enough to get results. For fat loss, this means exercising at minimum 65-percent intensity; on a scale of 1 to 10 in difficulty, the work should feel like about a 7. For most adults under 40, this will correspond to a heart rate of at least 130 beats per minute.
Strength-train your entire body. If your goal is a flat, toned abdomen, you may think that sit-ups or crunches are the most important exercises you can do. This is fundamentally untrue, and for several reasons. First, no matter how much work you do to strengthen your rectus abdominus (or “six-pack”) muscle, it will not be visible if it’s covered by a layer of fat. Second, crunches are a resistance exercise, not cardiovascular, and only cardio exercise can burn the calories required to lose body fat. Crunches tone the muscle under the fat, but they won’t remove the fat concealing the muscle. Third, the only kind of resistance exercise that contributes to an overall fat and calorie burn is exercise that utilizes large muscle groups in performing full-body movements. Think lunges, push-ups, or combination moves like squats with military presses.
This is not to say that you shouldn’t do crunches in pursuit of a sexy, flat stomach. But an even better toning strategy would be to do a combination of exercises that hit all the major muscle groups of the core: the rectus abdominus, internal and external obliques, transverse abdominus, and low back. Here are a few key movements to include in your routine:
· Yoga plank: This is a fantastic belly-flattening exercise because it recruits all the muscles that pull you in tight around your midsection and help you stand up straight (much like an internal corset), giving you the appearance of a narrower waist. Lie on your stomach on the floor with your elbows propped directly under your shoulders and your legs straight. Lift your body off the ground so your weight is on your elbows/forearms and your toes, and hold a completely straight line, drawing your belly button in toward your spine. Hold for at least 30 seconds.
· Supermans: Drop back onto your belly and extend your arms over your head. Keeping your abs pulled in (imagine you’re trying to keep your belly button from touching the ground), raise your right arm and left leg a few inches off the floor. Hold a second, then lower and repeat with the opposite arm and leg. Try to avoid rocking side to side. Perform 10 repetitions each side.
· Heel Touch-Downs: Roll over onto your back with your arms at your sides and your legs lifted above your hips, knees bent 90 degrees. Keep your abs drawn in to maintain contact between your low back and the floor at all times. One at a time, lower your leg from the hip joint, keeping your knee bent, until your heel touches the floor, then exhale and lift your leg back up using your abdominal muscles. Repeat on the other leg, alternating for 10 reps each side.
· Reverse Twists: Keep both legs elevated above your hips with knees bent 90 degrees, but place arms straight out to either side. Keeping both shoulder blades in contact with the floor at all times, inhale and slowly rotate hips to one side, allowing knees to drop sideways toward the ground. Exhale and rotate hips back to center, bringing knees back up. Repeat on the other side, alternating for 6—8 reps each side.
Perform 2 sets of each of these exercises 3 times a week following a full-body strength routine, and you’ll be well on your way to achieving the flat belly you’ve always desired.