If you are struggling with love handles, the best way to reduce them is to clean up bad eating habits and familiarize your body with exercise. If you fail to do anything about your diet, you will compromise your fat loss efforts. When it comes to working out, include more than oblique exercises into your program.
Cardiovascular Exercise
If you want to lose fat in one area, you need to do cardio to burn fat through your whole body--including your love handles. All types of cardio help to burn fat, such as running, brisk walking, elliptical training, rowing, stair stepping or inline skating. Do a five-minute light warm-up to get your core body temperature elevated and start your workout. To lose weight, the American College of Sports Medicine recommends 60 to 90 minutes of cardio. For the fastest results, do cardio at least three days a week.
Interval Training
High-intensity cardio will cause you to burn more calories as you do it and will keep your metabolism lifted for the hours after you exercise. Interval training satisfies this requirement. Instead of doing your cardio at a slow and steady pace, alternate your intensity back and forth from high to low. Take running for example. After doing a light warm-up, run hard for 30 seconds, then jog lightly for 60 seconds. Either do this for your whole workout, or mix in 10-minute intervals throughout.
Weight Training
Building overall muscle in the body is an overlooked, but important part of losing love handles. Muscle is a highly metabolic type of tissue. The more you build, the more calories your body will burn when you are resting. To achieve the best gains, perform multi-joint exercises that target more than one muscle at a time. Lunge presses, squats, deadlifts, bench presses, pull-ups and dips are examples. When doing these exercises, have a training partner on hand for assistance. To keep your caloric expenditure high, take short rest breaks in between your sets.
Oblique Exercises
The obliques are the muscles on your sides that are masked by love handles. They get recruited when you do any type of lateral bending motions or trunk rotating with the body. Doing exercises for the obliques will help tone and tighten your sides as you melt away the fat with your other exercises. Bicycle crunches, stability ball side crunches, Russian twists, hanging oblique knee pull-ins and side bridges are examples. When doing your exercises, make sure to maintain proper form. Move through a full range of motion, squeeze your obliques forcefully at the mid-point of the movement and do not use momentum. To increase the intensity, fasten ankle weights to your lower legs and hold added resistance like weight plates or medicine balls.
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