As you are probably aware of there is no such thing as spot reducing. So if you do abs exercises it doesn’t mean that you’ll necessarily be burning fat from your abs. To say that ab workouts do not help reduce belly fat is not a correct statement and probably comes more out of frustration when a trainer sees someone doing 1000 crunches a day in hopes that they’ll get abs, but they don’t do much of anything else. Doing an abs workout burns some calories and if you add a bit of muscle to your abs you’ll burn a few more calories throughout your day. This adds to your caloric deficit which will burn fat from your body.

The caloric deficit is really what you are aiming for when your goal is to burn fat. If you want to get the most bang for your buck you should be performing workouts that will burn a significant amount of calories during the workout as well as the afterburn effect when the workout is complete. With that being said, exercises such as squats and dead lifts will burn a lot more calories than a plank or crunches, simply because they use much larger muscles, which require more energy to perform these movements. But it’s not like you’re going to do squats and dead lifts every day because they burn more calories than most other exercises. It’s important to have a well rounded program that burns the maximum amount of calories, sculpts your body, and allows for proper recovery time.

If you really want to burn the fat as quickly as possible you should focus on creating your caloric deficit through a combination of nutrition, resistance training, HIIT, and long duration cardio such as your bike ride. You may even want to do some intervals while out on your bike ride. Go fast for 30 seconds and slow for 60 seconds. Do that one day and the next day just maintain a moderate pace.

As you are melting the fat from your body I’m sure that you’ll be even more excited to reveal a stunning six pack rather than just a flat tummy. That’s where a lot of the benefit from the abs training comes in handy. As your body fat gets lower the work that you put into sculpting your abs will really pay off. Plus you’ll have a strong and healthy mid section when you perform the right abs exercises and work your core and lower back too.

I guess to sum it up, the abs workouts are great when you combine them with a complete program, healthy nutrition, and are in a caloric deficit. If all that you do is abs workouts it will take you an awfully long time to burn the fat to get your abs to show and will be impossible if you are not in a caloric deficit.

This is a great topic that deserves more attention so I’ll be sure to write a full length article soon. Thanks for the question Patti.

Scrolling around looking at stuff…

I have a question for you. I hear things about ab workouts NOT reducing belly fat. That all they do is build muscle. Can this be true? It doesn’t seem right. What’s the REAL story. I love doing this ab workout, but what is it really doing for me???

Thanks for taking time to help me out on this.