Exercise Myths: Spot Training

Spot training, or spot reduction, is an insidious myth that we all secretly foster and want to believe in. Things would be so easy if you could get a 6-pack just by doing enormous amounts of crunches every day. I have spoken to so many female clients who desperately want to believe that they can lose weight in their stomach and arms but not in their butt. But, alas, this is yet another fitness myth.

So what exactly is this idea of "spot training?" This is the belief that you can target weight loss in one area of your body without changing other areas. This is rampant in exercise informercials where a new product is promised to give you "buns of steel" or "rock hard abs."

Let's take the example of abs. I commonly talk to people, especially young guys, who are frustrated because they do, in some cases, a hundred crunches a day and still do not have the abs they want. But when I ask them about their overall diet and exercise program it is severely lacking.

Fat makes up a layer between the muscle and the skin, meaning that it covers the muscle. Absolutely no research, as we will see, confirms the idea that muscles that are being worked consume the fat around them. Weight loss is a function of total body metabolism not individual muscles. Your body does not care where the fat that it's burning is coming from. You don't get to chose. Sometimes it all up to genetics where you lose weight. These crunch-happy guys may have gigantic, sculpted abs but until they shed the fat, the world my never know.

One study had an interesting idea. The researchers thought that, if spot reduction were true, the playing arm of professional tennis players would have much less fat than the inactive arm. While the playing arms were bigger in circumference, they had the exact same fat composition as their other arms. 

But this study was a little light and still left room for doubt.

This next one, however, did not. The University of Massachusetts had 13 male students perform 5000 sit-ups over the course of the 27 day study. Before and after the intense crunch-fest of a study, fat biopsies were taken from the stomach, back and butt of each subject. At the end of the 27 days, fat reduction was the same across all three sites.

More information on this can be found in my previous post on "toning."

Weight loss is a fantastic and essential fitness goal. But be realistic about it and know that in order to slim down your arms, legs, waist, butt or stomach, you're going to have to put the work in to lose weight all the way around.