Can abs exercises burn off fat ?

One of the most common questions found on exercise forums is "can abs exercises burn off fat?"

It's understandable why people ask the question - to get great looking abs, you need to both strengthen the muscles and remove fat. So is it possible to do both things at once?

Technically, the answer is yes - any exercise burns calories, and ultimately you have to burn calories to lose body fat. However, to all intents and purposes, the answer is no. This is because the quantity of abs exercise you would have to do to burn a significant amount of body fat is astronomical.

Additionally, there is no such thing as 'spot reduction'. Exercising the abs does not burn abdominal fat - your body burns fat as and where it chooses. Usually, the most recently added fat is burned first, while the areas where you first gained fat (usually the stomach for men, the butt and thighs for women) will be the last areas to lose fat.


In other words, while the correct abs exercises will strengthen your core muscles, using them to try and burn a significant quantity of fat is an incredibly inefficient way of burning body fat.

Losing body fat comes from two complementary processes:

• An effective exercise program
   
• A healthy diet
   

As you can probably tell, being complementary also means you need to use both processes in your quest to burn excess fat from your body. Many people look to diet pills, powders or other quick fix methods of helping to burn body fats, but in reality the safest and most permanent route is to combine exercise and diet.

The abs are always one of the most difficult areas of the body to get definition / tone - especially if you drink beer and eat lots of takeaways! But persevere and you will get there in the end.

The most effective ways of burning calories are as follows:

• Cardio workouts : This means steady sessions of running, biking, stepping, rowing etc. Two to three sessions of at least twenty minutes per week will improve your health and fitness, and help to burn calories.
   
• Interval training : Interval training is an incredibly effective way of burning calories (and thus fat), for two reasons. Firstly, more intense workouts such as this burn more calories per minute than steady cardio workouts. Secondly, they increase your metabolism - the speed at which your body burns calories.
   
• Weight training : For years, many people, particularly women, have avoided weight training, afraid they would 'bulk up'. Now, however, people are beginning to understand that far from bulking up, weight training will add a small amount of muscle that will not only improve their appearance, but also burn more calories - each extra pound of muscle that you add will burn anywhere from 15 - 35 calories per hour, 24/7!

So now that we've established the link between burning calories and the amoun to fexercise and training you do, we need to look at a healthy diet as being the other half of the equation. A healthy diet based around lean protein (meat, fish, beans), plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables and whole grains could do wonders for your overall body fat content - especially your abs if you're also working out.

At all costs you need to eliminate or avoid junk food at every turn. This includes heavily processed food with high salt content and nutritional horrors such as excess sugar, salt, and trans fats.

Trans fats in particular are something to avoid - they are chemically modified fats and far more harmful to our body as they can for example help to raise your body cholesterol levels. A simple example to remember is : that people who discontinue the use of butter to reduce their saturated fats, replacing it with margarine actually increase trans fat ingestion.

Summary

So if you want those perfect abs and a toned tummy, you need to start working them effectively through your training. But equally important is that you need to get your diet and workout programme right in tandem to see all the benefits and that ripped stomach!