Saturday, March 14, 2009

How To Get Rid Of Love Handles

By John Alvino

Why is it that the term "love handles" has no lovely connotation to it whatsoever? I have never understood why such a nice term is so unsightly!

During my long career as a fitness professional, I have had thousands of desperate people contact me, hoping to learn the secret of how to get rid of love handles fast and forever. For most of these people, contacting me seemed to be a last resort after failing to lose their love handles with traditional methods.

The typical recommendation for losing love handles is simple: eat less, do more cardio and perform high repetitions of oblique exercises, which include various side-bending and rotational movements.

Unfortunately this simple plan may seem logical but in reality it yields very few results. This article will help to explore why this supposedly "simple" plan is so ineffective.

Typically, a weight loss regimen will require you to eat less while exercising more. When following a plan like this, you will more often than not lose water weight and lean muscle yet see very little fat loss.

Merely working your obliques directly will not necessarily rid you of the fat that lies over the muscle. Unfortunately for everyone...the body just doesn't work that way! If you are just working the obliques with side-bending and rotational movements you're not buring fat, just building muscle which will creative more mass and a larger mid-region.

What we need to do is create a program that builds and mantains lean muscle mass while stimulating metabolism. Believe me, I realize how stubborn love handle fat can be but not to worry--after many years of trial and error I have created a multi faceted approach to rid yourself of stubborn love handles forever!

1) Sprint training- The best cardio activity for your body is sprinting; it not only burns body fat but also increases your metabolism which in turn works those pesky love handles away!

2) Make sure you are performing a properly designed resistance training program. This is of the utmost importance. Although high rep resistance training is typically advocated for fat loss, I believe integrating low reps is critical for permanent fat loss results.

Using high reps exclusively can actually cause you to lose lean muscle during a fat loss phase. This will have a negative impact on your metabolism, thus making it that much harder for you to continue to lose fat at an acceptable rate.

Resistance training is critical for any fat loss plan but it needs to be designed properly to ensure optimsl results. The best way to do this is to create a balance between higher rep exercises and lower rep esercises.

3) Make sure you have a variety of calories. When you wan to lose fat you need to create a "caloric deficit" which will (over time) cause your matabolism to slow down. Unfortunately this slowdown is something you cannot avoid when using following these regimen.

To avoid this undesirable effect, you must not decrease calories for more than five days straight. I recommend that after 3-5 days of dieting you increase calories for 1-2 days to stimulate your metabolism.

The most critical thing to remember when you want to lose stubborn body fat is keep your metabolism in check. You'll notice that each aspect of this program has a metabolism-boosting effect to ensure adequate fat-burning.

Now that you have this newfound knowledge of how to create the lean midsection you've always wanted--get to work? What are you waiting for?

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