One of the most common questions I have gotten for years from fitness clients is, “What exercise can I do to get rid of ‘this?’” People usually ask this as they hold onto some flabby or fatty part of themselves– the belly, the butt, the back of the arm etc.
Though most exercisers at some point ask a version of this question, let me reiterate the scientific conclusion that this (spot reduction) does not work.
Muscle and fat are 2 separate biological entities and, while working muscles certainly use fat as a fuel, the distribution of fat on your body is not (at least according to western physiology) primarily determined by the amount of work done specifically by the muscles that lie just beneath the targetted fat layer.
Rather, burning fat is based on a general balance between the amount of energy (calories) you take in compared with the amount of energy your body uses and also on the nature of your metabolism. (For example, a 16 year old boy is more likely to turn calories into muscle than a 70 year old woman. Largely because of hormones…)
Bottom line: if you’re holding a roll of fat on your belly and wondering how to get rid of it, as opposed to dropping to the floor immediately to do crunches, you might instead think of how to cut some of those extra, especially junky, calories from your diet and maybe how to increase your overall metabolic fuel usage– like by moving. We don’t like crunches anyway. But that’s for another post…