Losing fat around the stomach area is important for reducing the risk of obesity related health situations, such as heart disease, stroke and type II diabetes. Being comfortable with how your stomach looks will also improve your self-confidence. While abdominal exercises are beneficial and losing fat around the stomach is possible, it's unfortunately not possible to target the stomach for fat loss.
Ab Exercises
Abdominal exercises are strength training activities that target the development of the rectus abdominis and oblique muscles at your stomach. They're typically completed on a mat or an exercise ball. According to the American Council on Exercise, the best abdominal exercises that recruit the most stomach muscle fibers include the bicycle crunch, straight leg crunch and crunch on an exercise ball.
Muscle Vs. Fat
It's important to understand the difference between muscle and fat tissue. They are completely independent of each other, and most of your fat tissue lies over the top of your stomach muscles. As you complete abdominal exercises, you cause activity to occur only in the muscle tissue and you increase your abdominal muscular strength and tone. Abdominal exercises will not impact the fat around your stomach.
Losing Stomach Fat
To lose stomach fat, you must focus on losing overall body fat. Unfortunately, it's not possible to target where you will lose fat from. As you lose overall body fat, you will see it come off from all over, including your stomach area. Losing fat requires that you burn more calories than you consume, so participation in regular cardiovascular activities that burn a significant number of calories, and limiting your overall calorie intake by eating and drinking healthy, is the most efficient way to cut down the fat around your stomach.
Considerations
While abdominal exercises do not burn stomach fat, completing them regularly will improve your stomach muscle tone. That will go unnoticed if you have excess stomach fat, but as you lose overall body fat, the toned muscle will be revealed. Abdominal exercises can be completed three days per week. It's important that you allow your muscles 48 hours of rest in between training sessions, just as you would after any strength-training workout; the rest time is when the muscles can heal and develop.
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