How to target and tone your stomach muscles (but for real!)

23 May, 2018

The fitness industry is full of nonsense and lies!

Want to learn how to really start shifting that stubborn fat? There is no trick, tip or secret. It takes a lot of hard work on your diet and lifestyle. Everyone can see amazing changes in their body and you have the right to look in the mirror and love what you see.

I want to help as many people as possible fall in love with body. Do you have any questions about health, diet or exercise? Send me a message!

Also check out my other video about core training: The best abs exercise ever

Video transcript

Let’s talk about abs and core muscles, and why most people are training them wrong AND for the wrong reasons.

The main reason most people do a lot of sit ups, crunches and planks, is because they want to be able to see visible abs. They want that nice toned look, and who wouldn’t, it looks great!

The problem is there is no such thing as spot reduction. Spot reduction is a myth that’s been going round the fitness industry for years. The idea that we can target an area and cause fat to reduce on that area.

A great example is women that are trying to lose their bingo wings. They do a lot of pressing exercises to work their triceps. It will shape the muscle around that area, but it will not target fat burning in that specific area. That’s just not the way the body works.

The body works as a system. The way we partition fat and store it depends on our hormonal profile. We can’t convince our body to burn fat off a certain area by targeting it.

If you are doing sit ups thinking that you will lose that last bit of stubborn fat, you are wrong. The best way to lose fat there through exercise is to do large compound exercises.

In other words, exercise that uses multiple joints and puts the most stress on the central nervous system and hormonal profile at once. This helps us partition fat better. We are more likely to store lean, toned muscle than horrible, bulging fat.

Most importantly, when it comes to being able to see our core, it’s pretty much all down to diet and lifestyle. You cannot outrun a bad diet.

It’s a little more complicated than that saying, as we have to make sure we are not only eating the correct foods in the correct amounts. We also need to encourage that food to be stored correctly in to our muscles and energy systems, rather than as fat reserves.

This is where fasting, sleep and stress, exercise, meal timing, these kinds of things becomes relevant.

As a basic guide, if we are trying to get that six pack look, we should aim to eat more whole foods and less rubbish. We need to remove as much sugar from our diet as possible and increase the amount of vegetables we eat.

The good news about training our core is that we don’t really have to target it for those muscles to work. If we do regular exercise using these compound exercises such as squats, overhead press, push ups and boxing, then we use a lot of movement and stabilisation in the core.

Those muscles are constantly getting a baseline level workout. If all you do is target your core, you are not really training your core. A bit of a weird concept.

Focus on the big movements that tire you out the most to see the biggest results.

Charlie Hart is an experienced personal trainer, having worked with more than 100 clients clients in and around Cambridgeshire.

His interests in fitness, health and how they intersect help his clients to transform their bodies, sleep better and feel better in themselves.

Talk to Charlie today if you'd like help improving your well being.

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This

Found it useful? Share it!