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Targeted exercise w/o muscle building?
Delzhand
Registered User, Transition Team regular
Registered User, Transition Team regular
This isn't for me - oh no. I weight in at 145 on a heavy day. So does my wife, though, and this upsets her. I managed to get past the barriers today and get her to tell me what she really thinks, attempts which are normally met with jokes and self-deprecating humor.
She's bothered by some belly flab. She eats right, doesn't snack, and exercises five days a week, but can't get rid of it. But here's the problem - she's an opera singer. She can't have rock hard abs, because that affects the diaphragm's ability to move around the way a singer needs it to. Or something. She does mostly intense cardio, but I was wondering if there are any good exercises for getting rid of fat from the stomach area.
She's bothered by some belly flab. She eats right, doesn't snack, and exercises five days a week, but can't get rid of it. But here's the problem - she's an opera singer. She can't have rock hard abs, because that affects the diaphragm's ability to move around the way a singer needs it to. Or something. She does mostly intense cardio, but I was wondering if there are any good exercises for getting rid of fat from the stomach area.
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I don't have much to offer other than I had never heard of this about opera singers. It's not like the muscles sit there contracted like a stack of bricks at all times, they're also outside the fascia... wonder how that works.
No such thing as target fat loss, your body stores it where it wants and uses it from where it wants, for me it's reverse order. If I get a belly then some fat on my arms, the arms go first.
That said, if she's really concerned about it, she could try upping her exercise routine a bit. She's not going to jump from having belly flab to accidentally having a rock-hard sixpack overnight or anything, she would need to try for that for it to happen. But she's probably at the point of diminishing returns already, if she's in decent shape - if she's currently doing, I don't know, half an hour of cardio every day, and looking great, would it really be worth jacking that up to three hours so she could look a tiny bit better?
Ultimately, it's up to her: she can accept the way she is, soft belly and all, or she can work her ass off to try to get rid of it. But there's no easy fix here.
I'm not sure where she heard this, but it's crap.
Working her abdominals will only help her diaphragm, not hurt it. If her lower (or oblique abs) haven't gotten much work (unlikely if she's doing actual intense cardio, not peddling her ass off on a recumbent bike), then she might feel some soreness for a couple of weeks while she brings them up to the level of her upper abs, but that's it.
If she wants to do something that's "craft-related", she could take a ballroom dancing class. That'll work muscles and also teach her a new skill she can apply on-stage (or hone her current dancing skills).
So if your wife went down to 90lbs she still wouldn't have a 6-pack stomach unless she was developing her stomach muscles.
However, weight loss, unless you have some sort of medical condition, is basic math. You need to consume fewer calories than you spend. Your wife may eat right and not snack, but that doesn't mean that her food is necessarily low-calorie. It's hard. For example, the lowest calorie sandwich at Panera is 800 calories, which is half or more of what someone should eat for a day on a diet. It's actually better to eat a whopper jr.
Anyway, I've noticed that among my friends, if the man stays the same size but the woman increases in size, it's usually because they eat identically. Same portions and quantities, same content, and since women are typically shorter than men, they're eating "man-sized" portions, without even really knowing it.
Have your wife count up how many calories she eats in a typical day. I would almost guarantee that she's going to be surprised by some foods, and it doesn't take much to keep your body in a weight equilibrium.
As necroSys stated, strengthening your abdominals will not hurt your ability to move your diaphragm. I could see if she did a lot of ab work and never, ever stretched that it could become more difficult, maybe sort of, but that's really, really extreme.
But that's completely moot because ab work isn't how you get rid of belly fat. You get rid of belly fat the same as you get rid of any other kind of fat - using more calories than you consume. Building up some muscle will help with this process as her basal metabolic rate will rise as she gains muscle, and the easiest, most useful place for her to gain strength in will be in her legs. Squats and deadlifts are the key to building not just strong legs, arms and backs, but also to increasing your normal, sitting on your ass metabolism between workouts.
Combine that with some good ole cardio and you're doing what you can. Provided that you maintain a clean diet and work out regularly, you will lose fat.
The other key factor to remember here is that as you become more fit, especially if you're not particularly strong to begin with, you may not end up losing any weight. This is because you will be developing muscles that were previously mostly dormant, and muscle tissue is very dense. It weighs a lot. You'll have less belly flab and more defined legs, but the scale won't move much. That's how it is. It's important to know this up front, so that massive disillusionment does not set in when the scale doesn't reflect the visible changes that accompany increased fitness.
This is also why scales are completely useless, unless you're trying to get into a specific weight class for a fighting competition. Throw out the scale, get a gym membership and get to work. You and she will both find that it is easier to stay motivated if you have someone to work out with, so you might want to consider this a golden opportunity to improve yourself at the same time as helping her meet her goals.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
As others have pointed out, targeted weight loss is a myth. However, that being said, she'll have an easier time losing belly fat that she would if she were a dude; for women, the first places fat goes and the last places it leaves is the breasts and butt, whereas with guys it goes straight to the gut.
She needs to be especially careful about any sort of starvation diet or anything like that as an opera singer, because it can cause her to pass out on stage if she isn't getting proper nutrition.
And the calorie range is tough, because it's based on height and body type. For instance, a 5'4" woman needs to consume under 1400 calories to even consider losing weight. Yet a 6'1" dude has a daily "standard" intake of around 2800 calories, and should consume under 1800-2000 to lose weight.
And it's doubly tough because if you fluxuate around those numbers, instead of being consistently under, you don't do anything. One or two "bad days" a week will just keep your weight the same, because your body stores up the excess. But you also don't want to go too far because, like Than says, if you're really starving yourself that makes physical exertion pretty rough.
You still want to snack between meals, even if the main meals you eat are "bigger." The point is to curb your hunger with nutritious, low calorie snacks so that you're not starving at lunch and dinner and don't end up eating more than you should.
You're oversimplifying how many calories someone needs on a daily basis. Height and weight play a part, but what they are actually doing on a daily basis plays a large role as well. It might be obvious, but someone who's more active during the day needs more calories. Hell, you burn about 100 calories an hour just by standing, and I'm guessing opera singers do a lot of standing throughout the day.
I'm not sure if "singing opera" is on any calorie calculation charts, is what I mean, and I honestly have no idea how many calories it would burn. And is that an actual exercise or does it count into the "normal day activities" for someone's diet? Of course someone who is working out for an hour a day doing cardio activities is going to probably need more calories, at least right before the activity, but then you get into stuff like whether the exercise is burning the calories you just ate (which is what athletes want) or is it burning through some of the fat stores (which is what dieters want)?
The thing that my wife hates about a nice simple diet (eat fewer calories than you burn) is that the math eats up a fair portion of the day. Looking up how many calories are in all of the foods you eat, and then tallying them up as you go so you know what you can eat next is tiring -- which is why a lot of people give up after a couple months, despite losing some weight.
I'm partial to the ab belts that electrocute you.
If you're getting regular exercise and eating quality food, you can simplify it further. Eat an amount of protein and an amount of carbs equal to the size of your clenched fist or the palm of your hand 5-6 times a day.
Obviously, this doesn't work if your protein is bacon and your carbs is ice cream, but like I said, assuming you know how to pick good quality macronutrients, it works fine.