“What’s better to lose my tummy flab… crunches or situps?” You can replace the location and the exercises with any other relevant area or body part. And people think it works.

The problem here is that while doing a bunch of situps might make your abs harder, they won’t target and burn off only belly fat, your body doesn’t work that way. Losing body fat is based almost entirely on diet. You can workout many hours a week and still put on body fat if you are eating crazy amounts of crappy food. Just like you can lose body fat without working out at all by changing your diet.

In order to get nice firm arms, or “6 pack abs” you need to do both. You need to work the areas in order to firm up the muscles underneath, and clean up the diet to shed the fat that covers it. Make sense?

But how do I clean up my diet? Eat real food, and don’t eat tons of it. Meat, vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, no sugar, little to no starches… Eat enough to sustain your lean body mass and eventually the rest will go away. Why eat so much that you are also supporting all your body fat? That isn’t productive now is it?

This also leads into “toning” by doing high rep sets at low weight… you know really “feel the burn” and tone those muscles. I can understand why people believe this. They associate “the burn” with burning fat from the specific area, creating nicely defined toned muscles. However this is not the case. You can’t spot lose remember? What the high rep low weight toning crowd doesn’t realize is that lifting that way actually creates sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. This is more frequently known as “pump”. So while they think they are toning nice firm defined muscles, they are in reality creating larger puffy muscles, and when combined with a poor diet, doesn’t get rid of any fat, making them look even bigger and softer then before.

The right way is by doing heavy, low rep (1-5 rep maximums) compound barbell lifts, deadlifts, squats, cleans, presses, jerks, snatches… to build denser, stronger and actually useful muscles. Couple that with a proper diet and you are on your way to being leaner, stronger and more “toned” then you have ever been.

Chris Walls is a Personal Trainer at the Crossfit Kelowna training centre. For more information on Crossfit, please visit http://www.crossfitkelowna.com