Losing belly and chest fat can be difficult for men because male-pattern fat storage protects these fatty acid reservoirs. Exercise techniques that stimulate the release of potent natural fat burning hormones can help to directly target these trouble spots. Add a few simple workout techniques to your training arsenal to banish fat from your belly and chest areas for good.
Compound Exercises
Building your workout program around compound, multi-joint exercises can help you to directly target belly and chest fat. Examples of compound exercises are squats and deadlifts for the legs, pull ups for the back, bench presses for the chest, upright rows for the shoulders, bar curls for the biceps and weighted dips for the triceps. According to "X-treme Lean" by Steve Holman and Jonathan Lawson, those exercises cause the body to produce more of the potent fat burners testosterone and growth hormone, which target trouble areas.
NA or Negative-Accentuated Sets
NA or negative-accentuated training means slowly lowering weight at a controlled pace. For example, on the bench press you would lower the weight to a slow count of six seconds, then lift it back to the top naturally and repeat. NA sets cause micro-tears in muscle tissue that burns extra calories for up to 72 hours. It's important to remember to use a slightly lighter weight than usual and focus on the negative or lowering stroke of the exercise. If you lose sight of the controlled slow cadence, then you will not get the fat-burning benefit of this technique.
Drop-sets
Drop-sets are done by completing one full set of an exercise, then "dropping" or lowering the weight and doing another full set to exhaustion. This technique works great on isolation and/or contraction exercises to finish off a muscle. For example, do a set of cable curls with 70 pounds of resistance to exhaustion, then immediately drop the weight to 60 pounds and do another full set to exhaustion. The extended tension causes lactic acid to build up in muscle tissue, which is a trigger for the body to release more growth hormone, according to Holman and Lawson.
Shorter Rest Periods
A great way to increase fat burning and amplify the intensity of your workouts is to reduce the amount of time between your sets. Typical rest times between sets of weight-training exercises run 60 to 90 seconds. You could incrementally shorten these rest periods to make the workout more challenging and bring aerobic, fat burning stimulus into play. For example, you could start by timing your rest period with a stop watch for exactly 60 seconds between sets. The following week, you would decrease that rest time to 45 seconds. Then the week after that you would reduce your rest time to 30 seconds between sets.
References
- "Xtreme Lean", Jonathan Lawson and Steve Holman, 2006
- "Combat the Fat"; Jeff Anderson, 2008
- "Optimum Anabolics"; Jeff Anderson; 2004
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