Losing belly fat and trimming your waistline requires that you create a calorie deficit --- ingesting fewer calories than you burn --- through diet, exercise or a combination. Aerobic and resistance-training exercises are particularly beneficial, because both help to promote immediate calorie burn and boost your metabolism to help burn calories long after each workout. Focusing exclusively on exercising your midsection is not an effective approach. Instead, exercise your entire body, and a slimmer waistline will result. Consult your doctor before beginning any new exercise or diet regimen.
Crunches
Crunches specifically target the abdominal muscles, so it's an effective exercise for building and toning these muscles. Strengthening your abs will lead to several benefits, including helping to flatten your belly. Avoid full situps, because these can lead to pain in your back and neck if done incorrectly. As your abs become stronger, add light resistance to the exercise by holding a small weight on your chest. Gradually increase the resistance week after week to maintain steady gains in strength. As you lose weight throughout your body with exercise, you'll reveal abs toned through crunches.
Jogging or Walking
Both jogging and walking are effective fat-burning exercises that require nothing more than a good pair of running or walking shoes. An hour of jogging at 5 miles can burn 584 calories for a 160-lb. person, MayoClinic.com calculates. Walking briskly can burn 277 or more calories per hour for the same person. Based on these figures, jogging or walking for an hour a day will burn 1.16 or 0.55 lbs. per week, respectively. That will certainly help you lose inches from your waistline.
Interval Training
High-intensity interval training is a type of aerobic exercise that ramps up the intensity level to help burn fat more efficiently. A University of Virginia study, the results of which were published in 2008 in the journal "Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise," found that HIIT helped reduce abdominal fat better than traditional exercise. Using short intervals of vigorous exercise followed by equally short periods of rest helps you burn more calories in a shorter period of time. You can use any type of aerobic exercise, including jogging, swimming, biking, elliptical training or rollerblading.
Resistance Training
Building muscle through resistance training, such as weightlifting, is effective at boosting your metabolism and burning calories. According to MayoClinic.com, muscle burns far more calories naturally than fatty tissue. Thus, increasing the amount of muscle you have in your body will help you melt away the fat from your midsection more quickly than if you avoid resistance training altogether. During three 30- to 60-minute workouts per week, target your entire body rather than just your midsection. Compound exercises can help speed up your workouts by exercising multiple muscle groups at once; examples include bench presses, squats, shoulder presses, military presses, planks, lunges and pullups.
References
- MayoClinic.com; Exercise for Weight Loss: Calories Burned in 1 Hour; Dec. 1, 2009
- "Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise"; Effect of exercise training intensity on abdominal visceral fat and body composition; B.A. Irving, et al.; November 2008
- MayoClinic.com; Metabolism and Weight Loss: How You Burn Calories; Oct. 6, 2009
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