Spot reducing doesn't work. Instead, your genes, hormones, sex, body type, body composition , diet, and other factors determine where and when the fat comes off.

However, there are some things you can do to make the process less frustrating. Compound exercises involve more than one body part. In fact, some of the best compound exercises involve many muscles throughout the entire body. Examples include a plank or a push-up.

Engaging more muscles helps you to burn more calories and burn more fat. For instance, you'll expend more energy doing a squat than doing a bunch of leg lifts. A squat is a complex exercise that works the glutes, the hips, the thighs, the calves, and even the core. A leg lift, especially if you're lying down , only works the outer thigh of one leg.

You'll also burn more calories by involving the larger muscles of the body: the glutes and thighs in the lower body, and the chest and back in the upper body.

You can even go further and do combination exercises like squats with an overhead press. Abdominal crunches—once the most popular exercise for attaining a tight midsection—have been replaced by more effective exercises that work to strengthen your entire core.

Core exercises using balance tools like an exercise ball and even standing ab exercises challenge your stability and force you to work muscles throughout the body. Try to focus on working your entire body and try to involve as many muscle groups as possible for each exercise.

During most strength training exercises, you'll be working your core and strengthening the abdominal muscles, as well.

When you lose weight, you may want it to come off in certain places, but it may not come off in that area. Take a look at your family members and evaluate their body type, it may tell you quite a bit about your own body. Does everyone tend to store excess fat around the middle?

Or maybe there's a distinct pear shape in the family? Genetics influence how your body loses fat. Accepting and respecting your genetics might help mitigate the frustration you may feel when your body doesn't respond like you think it should. Keep in mind that healthy, fit bodies come in all shapes and sizes.

Your genetics may determine to some extent your body shape, but they don't determine your level of fitness, strength, or overall wellness. Embrace the body you've been given and then take steps to make it as healthy and strong as you can.

No one can really know what their body is capable of achieving. The only way to know how much you can change your body is to set goals and take consistent steps to reach them. Perhaps your goal is to reach a healthy weight, improve your overall strength, or increase your cardiovascular endurance.

If you are clear about your goals, then you can design a plan to execute consistent steps to make them a reality. Practice your goal-related behaviors and don't worry if it takes longer than you think to get where you want to be. Once you get some consistency, your body will respond.

When you see your body making changes, you can adjust your goals as necessary to continue to make progress. Untangle yourself from the idea that you can spot reduce fat—no matter how often you see it perpetuated in magazine articles, online, or in television infomercials.

Some health clubs may even sell the promise of a perfect body to sell memberships. Once you're aware of it, you'll start to notice it everywhere and you'll be too smart to buy into these false promises. Ramírez-Campillo R, Andrade DC, Campos-Jara C, Henríquez-Olguín C, Alvarez-Lepín C, Izquierdo M.

Regional fat changes induced by localized muscle endurance resistance training. J Strength Cond Res. Kordi R, Dehghani S, Noormohammadpour P, Rostami M, Mansournia MA.

Effect of abdominal resistance exercise on abdominal subcutaneous fat of obese women: a randomized controlled trial using ultrasound imaging assessments. J Manipulative Physiol Ther. Vink RG, Roumans NJ, Čajlaković M, et al.

Diet-induced weight loss decreases adipose tissue oxygen tension with parallel changes in adipose tissue phenotype and insulin sensitivity in overweight humans.

Int J Obes Lond. Cha S, Kang JH, Lee J-H, et al. Impact of genetic variants on the individual potential for body fat loss. Kak H-B, Cho S-H, Lee Y-H, et al. A study of effect of the compound physical activity therapy on muscular strength in obese women.

J Phys Ther Sci. Zemková E, Kyselovičová O, Jeleň M, et al. Upper and lower body muscle power increases after 3-month resistance training in overweight and obese men.

Am J Mens Health. Sekendiz B, Cuğ M, Korkusuz F. Effects of Swiss-ball core strength training on strength, endurance, flexibility, and balance in sedentary women.

Dimitrov Ulian M, Pinto AJ, de Morais Sato P, et al. PLoS One. Matthews, Jessica. Advertisements, magazines, internet trainers, and social media continue to push the idea that exercising small isolated muscles, such as abdominal muscles, will help the fat above the muscles disappear.

Fitness professionals say this is false, yet even trainers still use phrases like "burning fat" and targeting "troubled areas" like "muffin tops" to pull people in.

These phrases are considered misleading to those trying to lose weight. Fat cannot physically "burn" off one's body. The burning feeling people describe when practicing resistance training is caused by the production and accumulation of lactic acid in muscle during exertion via the process of anaerobic respiration , and has nothing to do with the fat surrounding the area.

Muscle development and improvement can be shown more easily in lean people. Those who are overweight have a better chance of reducing fat if they increase their overall fitness levels. This can be achieved by doing both high-intensity interval training cardio and resistance training that focuses on gaining muscle mass in both large and small muscle groups.

This increase in muscle mass will create a larger need for energy that comes from fatty acids in stored fat cells. Although professionals know spot reduction is a myth , many people still believe that it is possible to choose where fat can be lost on one's body because of the continual misleading information fitness settings and the internet are providing.

This belief has evolved from the idea that gaining muscle increases metabolism , resulting in fat reduction. People think that fat loss in a specific region could be targeted by building muscle around it.

All body shapes are different, meaning people carry fat in different places. Moreover, research suggests that variation in both overall adiposity and regional fat distribution is highly genetic.

For many people, abdominal fat is more metabolically active and can be reduced easier than fat in the lower regions of the body.

The reduction of these metabolically active sites is not due to an increase in abdominal muscle contractions. These create a negative energy balance in the body.

Fat is reduced over the whole body. Exercise of certain muscles cannot signal a specific release of fatty acids for the specific fat deposits above those muscles being activated. In a randomized control study, scientists sought to determine a link between skeletal muscle size and surrounding fat on a specific body part when exposed to strength training.

They compared the muscle and fat content of high-caliber tennis players' dominant and non-dominant forearms. The method used in this study to examine the amount of subcutaneous fat between the tennis players' arms, was a skinfold caliper. There are a multitude of tests that can help determine body fat percentage.

After measuring the two arms, they found that the girth of the dominant arms was greater because these muscles were used more than the non-dominant arm muscles.

However, the skinfold measure showed no difference if the amount of subcutaneous fat on either of the arms. This proved that the muscles on the dominant arms grew due to hypertrophy of the muscle, yet the amount of fat surrounding the muscle on the dominant arms was not reduced from this increase.

There was no proof of spot reduction taking place. In another randomized study, scientists divided 24 sedentary adults, ages 18—40, into an exercise group and a control group.

The exercise group added 7 abdominal exercises, 2 sets of 10 reps each, 5 days a week, for 6 weeks, into their daily routines. The scientists discovered that at the end of the 6 weeks, through comparing a variety of endurance tests, body composition tests, and anthropometrics, the subcutaneous fat around the abdominal region did not shrink.

However, muscular endurance of the core region did improve when comparing the before and after of the number of sit-ups between the post-study exercise group and control group. Therefore, even though an increase in muscular development of a certain region in the body took place, it did not remove the fat around the muscles.

Again, there was no proof of spot reduction taking place. Contents move to sidebar hide.

These fat stores serve as a vital energy reserve, with our bodies mobilising to access stored triglycerides to provide energy during periods of prolonged exercise.

Instead, they use a process called lipolysis to convert triglycerides into free fatty acids and a compound called glycerol, which then travels to our muscles via our bloodstream. Research reinforces how our bodies burn fat when we exercise, confirming spot reduction is a weight-loss myth.

This includes a randomised week clinical trial which found no greater improvement in reducing belly fat between people who undertook an abdominal resistance program in addition to changes in diet compared to those in the diet-only group.

Further, a meta-analysis of 13 studies involving more than 1, participants found that localised muscle training had no effect on localised fat deposits.

That is, exercising a specific part of the body did not reduce fat in that part of the body. Read more: Does exercise help you lose weight?

Factors outside of our control influence the areas and order in which our bodies store and lose fat, namely:. our genes. our gender.

Our bodies, by nature, have distinct fat storage characteristics driven by our gender , including females having more fat mass than males. This is primarily because the female body is designed to hold fat reserves to support pregnancy and nursing, with women tending to lose weight from their face, calves and arms first because they impact childbearing the least, while holding onto fat stored around the hips, thighs and buttocks.

our age. The ageing process triggers changes in muscle mass, metabolism, and hormone levels, which can impact where and how quickly fat is lost. Post-menopausal women and middle-aged men tend to store visceral fat around the midsection and find it a stubborn place to shift fat from.

Read more: Is menopause making me put on weight? No, but it's complicated. This includes two recent studies by the University of Sydney that examined data from more than placebo-controlled trials of herbal and dietary supplements. None of the supplements examined provided a clinically meaningful reduction in body weight among overweight or obese people.

While you may not lose the weight in a specific spot when exercising, all physical activity helps to burn body fat and preserve muscle mass.

This will lead to a change in your body shape over time and it will also help you with long-term weight management. This is because your metabolic rate — how much energy you burn at rest — is determined by how much muscle and fat you carry.

If you want to lose fat in certain areas of your body, a comprehensive approach that addresses physical activity and nutrition is likely to be more effective.

To lose fat , you have to burn more calories than you eat. When you do that, you create a calorie deficit that causes your body to use energy stored in your cells in the form of fat. When those cells are used for energy, they start to decrease in size.

As a result, the body may get smaller because it holds less stored fat. Here's where things get frustrating. The body doesn't only draw energy from the cells in the area you're working.

It gets energy from the body as a whole, which means that leg lifts alone won't do much for removing fat from the thighs. However, exercising your legs can increase strength and endurance in your lower body. So, while targeting specific body areas during exercise can be effective to build muscle and shape those areas, it won't necessarily help you lose fat in that specific area.

Instead, you'll need to address your overall diet to reduce the amount of fat that is stored, and increase your activity level to try to burn the fat that has already been stored throughout the body. So, what do you do if you want to lose fat from a certain area of the body?

The bottom line is that you may not be able to pick and choose where fat is lost on your body. Spot reducing doesn't work. Instead, your genes, hormones, sex, body type, body composition , diet, and other factors determine where and when the fat comes off. However, there are some things you can do to make the process less frustrating.

Compound exercises involve more than one body part. In fact, some of the best compound exercises involve many muscles throughout the entire body. Examples include a plank or a push-up. Engaging more muscles helps you to burn more calories and burn more fat.

For instance, you'll expend more energy doing a squat than doing a bunch of leg lifts. A squat is a complex exercise that works the glutes, the hips, the thighs, the calves, and even the core. A leg lift, especially if you're lying down , only works the outer thigh of one leg. You'll also burn more calories by involving the larger muscles of the body: the glutes and thighs in the lower body, and the chest and back in the upper body.

You can even go further and do combination exercises like squats with an overhead press. Abdominal crunches—once the most popular exercise for attaining a tight midsection—have been replaced by more effective exercises that work to strengthen your entire core.

Core exercises using balance tools like an exercise ball and even standing ab exercises challenge your stability and force you to work muscles throughout the body. Try to focus on working your entire body and try to involve as many muscle groups as possible for each exercise.

During most strength training exercises, you'll be working your core and strengthening the abdominal muscles, as well. When you lose weight, you may want it to come off in certain places, but it may not come off in that area.

Take a look at your family members and evaluate their body type, it may tell you quite a bit about your own body. Does everyone tend to store excess fat around the middle?

Or maybe there's a distinct pear shape in the family? Genetics influence how your body loses fat. Accepting and respecting your genetics might help mitigate the frustration you may feel when your body doesn't respond like you think it should.

Keep in mind that healthy, fit bodies come in all shapes and sizes. Your genetics may determine to some extent your body shape, but they don't determine your level of fitness, strength, or overall wellness. Embrace the body you've been given and then take steps to make it as healthy and strong as you can.

No one can really know what their body is capable of achieving. The only way to know how much you can change your body is to set goals and take consistent steps to reach them. Perhaps your goal is to reach a healthy weight, improve your overall strength, or increase your cardiovascular endurance.

If you are clear about your goals, then you can design a plan to execute consistent steps to make them a reality. Practice your goal-related behaviors and don't worry if it takes longer than you think to get where you want to be.

Once you get some consistency, your body will respond. When you see your body making changes, you can adjust your goals as necessary to continue to make progress. Untangle yourself from the idea that you can spot reduce fat—no matter how often you see it perpetuated in magazine articles, online, or in television infomercials.

Some health clubs may even sell the promise of a perfect body to sell memberships. Once you're aware of it, you'll start to notice it everywhere and you'll be too smart to buy into these false promises.

Ramírez-Campillo R, Andrade DC, Campos-Jara C, Henríquez-Olguín C, Alvarez-Lepín C, Izquierdo M. Regional fat changes induced by localized muscle endurance resistance training. J Strength Cond Res. Kordi R, Dehghani S, Noormohammadpour P, Rostami M, Mansournia MA.

Effect of abdominal resistance exercise on abdominal subcutaneous fat of obese women: a randomized controlled trial using ultrasound imaging assessments. J Manipulative Physiol Ther. Vink RG, Roumans NJ, Čajlaković M, et al. Diet-induced weight loss decreases adipose tissue oxygen tension with parallel changes in adipose tissue phenotype and insulin sensitivity in overweight humans.

Int J Obes Lond.