When asked recently by a buddy on my softball team how best to get rid of his “love handles,” I asked him for a day to put together a complete answer for him. Eliminating belly fat involves a few steps, and they are likely not the steps he, or most men, is taking right now.
The key to reducing and getting rid of love handles is a combination of diet and exercise. Let’s address diet first.
There is really no getting around the fact that you are going to have to make some major changes to your diet if you are committed to fighting off the belly fat, and by diet, I mean cutting certain foods and making sure you are eating certain foods. The term, “diet” here truly refers to “nutrition.” First, remove any carbohydrates you are consuming in grain form. Cereal, noodles, bread, and rice, even if high in fiber, are contributing to your spare tire. Replace them with high fiber vegetables, fruits, and nuts.
Plan your meals so that they consist of lean proteins like poultry, fish, and the occasional lean steak. Snack on fruits and nuts, which will supply carbohydrates that will fill you up without exacerbating the belly fat issue. You won’t lose fat by eating pizza and drinking milk shakes, but if losing these things altogether is just killing you, you can allow yourself one “anything goes” meal per week.
Now let’s address exercise. It is very important to be building muscle while losing fat or else you will simply become a thin guy with belly fat. You can spend hours every week focusing on cardio, but if you do not switch your focus to weight training and interval workouts, you will not achieve the results you desire. In order to build muscle while losing weight, you will want to complete six to eight reps of each of five intensive body strengthening exercises three times per week.
The workout would look something like this:
20 seconds of intense exercise, 40 seconds of recovery exercises, repeating for each rep throughout the workout. Be sure to spend time on sufficient warm up and cool down activities as well. Each workout should include exercises for each of the following areas: upper body pulling, upper body push, whole body ab exercise, lower body single leg, and lower body. The idea is to build muscle, especially the traps, deltoids, laterals, and pecs, as you lose fat. Your body will become more balanced and firm, and the muscles will hide what belly fat you have while you are working on getting rid of it.
If you, or my teammate, are like most men, you are spending hours a day on sit ups, crunches, and twists, trying to attack that spare tire, and along with the daily cardio workouts, you cannot figure out why you are seeing no change at all. Well, we addressed the reasons why your cardio work isn’t helping, and truthfully, traditional ab exercises are a waste of your time and energy. I will relieve you of that right now; you can stop putting the time and effort into those particular exercises, and switch gears to interval training. You will be thrilled with the results you will see and how quickly you will see changes.
I’ve tried density training. It was was exhausting but I love its effects in building muscles and making myself look fit. Now, I’m fit and buff at 46 and I love it!
Interval training is the way to go if you have a lot of belly fat to lose. Eat right and work out regularly and you will be surprised at the difference it will make.