Pick up just about any fitness magazine and you’ll find workouts for flattening the stomach, slimming the thighs, shrinking the muffin top, and the like. I wish it were that simple.
While research has shown that training a muscle results in increased levels of blood flow and lipolysis (the breakdown of fat cells into usable energy) in the area, the changes are too small to matter.
Training muscles burns calories and can result in growth, both of which can aid fat loss, but it doesn’t directly burn the fat on and around the muscles to any significant degree.
This is why no amount of crunches can give you abs—for that, you merely need to reduce your body fat percentage to 10-to-15 percent if you’re a man or 20-to-25 percent if you’re a woman.
Which brings me to my next point: Fat loss occurs in a whole-body fashion. When you maintain a calorie deficit, your body reduces fat stores all over, with certain areas shrinking faster than others.
Most women notice that their arms, shoulders, and back are the first to get noticeably leaner when they diet, not their hips or thighs. And most men also find their arms, shoulders, and back responding quickly to a cutting phase but not their stomach.
This is partly a function of the amount of fat in these different regions—most people don’t store much fat around their shoulders, arms, and back, so it doesn’t take much fat loss to produce visible changes—but there’s another factor in play as well.
To lose fat, two things must happen:
- Fat cells must release their fatty acids.
- Those fatty acids must be burned (by other cells) for energy.
The first step is accomplished by chemicals called catecholamines that travel through your blood and attach to receptors on fat cells, triggering the release of fatty acids; and the degree to which the second step occurs depends on moment-to-moment energy demands.
However, owing to a physiological difference in catecholamine receptors, some fat cells are more resistant to mobilization (step one) than others. Hence the “stubborn fat” phenomenon—the areas of your body that take much longer to lean out than others. In women, it’s usually the hips, thighs, and butt, and in men, it’s usually the stomach and lower back.
But the fat in such regions is merely stubborn, not immovable, and doesn’t require any special interventions. It all eventually yields to a calorie deficit like its more malleable brethren. So just keep going.
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