Will Elevated Leg Crunches Help Lose Belly Fat?

Unsightly belly fat can decrease your self-esteem, makes getting into your favorite clothes difficult and increases your risk of disease. Belly fat reduction requires you to burn fat throughout your body. Elevated leg crunches do little to reduce belly fat, especially when performed without other forms of exercise and a healthy diet.

Elevated Leg Crunches

Crunches performed with your legs elevated help strengthen and tone your abdominal muscles the same as crunches with your feet on the ground. The exact abdominal muscle toned by each crunch depends on the way you perform each crunch. Crunches requiring you to lift your hips or your head and shoulders straight off the floor primarily tone the rectus abdominus and the transverse abdominus. Crunches that require you to twist as you elevate either your hips or your head and shoulders help focus the crunch on your obliques. Unfortunately, your toned abdominal muscles cannot show through the layers of fat covering them.

What Elevated Leg Crunches Can't Do

Crunches burn very few calories when compared with aerobic exercise and full-body, strength-training exercises. "Elevated leg crunches help increase your heart rate faster than regular crunches, but your abdominal muscles wear out before you can increase your heart rate far enough to initiate fat burning," explains Patricia Pierce, a professor of Rehabilitative and Exercise Sciences at Slippery Rock University in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania. If you continue to try to burn excess calories and fat performing any type of crunch, you may overwork your abdominal muscles and cause yourself a lot of post-workout pain.

Effective Belly Fat Reduction

A combination of aerobic and resistance exercises provide an effective way to burn belly fat. Include a 30- to 60-minute aerobic workout into your schedule three to five days a week to increase your ability to burn calories and eliminate belly fat. Activities such as walking, swimming, cycling, running and active sports that cause you to increase your heart rate and breath heavily provide a fat-burning aerobic workout. Add at least two days of resistance training that focuses on most of the muscles in your body each week to help increase the amount of lean muscle tissue on your body and increase your metabolism.

Dietary Support

The number of calories you consume can prevent you from losing belly fat, even with a top-notch exercise program. If you find you cannot lose belly fat or weight, start reducing your calorie consumption. Common practices to reduce calories include cooking at home, eating mostly unprocessed foods, snacking on fruits instead of chips, watching portion sizes, drinking plenty of water and avoiding prepackaged or processed foods. If you continue to have trouble with weight loss, consult a health care worker trained in weight loss.