Give me an exercise to target the fat on my......

Almost every single client who’s looking to drop some fat or tone up always ask me to give them an exercise that will help them lose fat _______ .  You can insert any number of different body parts.  The thing is there has been no research to prove or indicate that there is a strong relationship between doing exercises that will target specific areas of fat.  For example, just because you have more fat on your stomach doesn’t mean that doing crunches or any other ab exercise is going to burn more fat in your stomach than anywhere else in your body.

Most people don’t have an understanding of how the body gets rid of fat.  Here is a quick explanation of the way that you “burn” fat is that your fat cell gets the correct signal from your body indicating it needs energy.  You fat cells will release fat into the blood stream which will take it to the muscles and the rest of the body to be used as energy.  But your body doesn’t necessarily take fat from the area that is being worked, it will take fat from fat cells all over your body.  For example, just because you do crunches doesn’t mean your body is going to use fat from around your stomach.

Another reason most people think that they can lose fat in a specific area is that there is a myth out there that fat will turn to muscle or that muscle can turn to fat.  This is not true, fat cells and muscle cells are two completely different structures.  They do not totally transform, it would be equivalent to brain cells turning into heart cells.  This is another reason that it isn’t really possible to target a specific area to lose more fat through an exercise.  Even though you can target a specific area to increase the amount of muscle that doesn’t mean that the fat will disappear in that area.

Tune in to our next blog post to learn how you actually can target specific areas of your body to lose fat......I’ll give you a hint it has nothing to do with picking the right exercise.

For more free information to help you reach your goal check out our free resource section of our website at http://www.peak-personaltraining.com/resources.html.