Ever wonder how to lose belly fat fast? Have you tried crunches and sit-ups, but nothing is working? Well, the truth is that you cannot spot-reduce fat from a specific area. This means you will have to lose fat all over your body in order to get in shape and lose fat from your belly.
Unfortunately, the belly is the first place that the fat is stored and last place it comes off. How unfortunate, right? Well, not really. There are ways to lose fat all over your body so that the belly fat is gone forever. What you need to do is get on a diet and nutrition plan that is healthy and balanced.
The idea is to boost your metabolism so that you are burning fat 24/7 through proper eating and proper exercise. Skip the pills, potions and workout routines in the fitness magazines… And stay as far away as possible from supplements and “steroids”. Here we’ll lose fat naturally through good nutrition and exercise, the only 2 proper ways to do it!
There are three things that you have to have in order to lose belly fat quickly:
- Good nutrition
- Strength Training
- Cardiovascular Training
This means that you have to change how you live your life… Your lifestyle must change to a positive and active one. You will need to workout at least 3 times per week, minimum, starting slow and adding to your intensity each week. Your diet needs to be stripped of bad foods and replaced with good foods, period.
A wierd tip that actually works is eating more frequent meals throughout the day, remember how I said to keep metabolism high, well, eating 6 small meals per day will help you achieve this goal.
Next you need to be willing to push yourself and build muscle. Muscle is metabolically expensive and requires energy just to sit on your body. This is great! So the first goal should be to build muscle through proper weight training exercises and bodyweight exercises. This might take you 2 months or so to gain some muscle.
You’ll also need to do cardio. Yepp! Cardio, oh no right? Well, not really. Cardio should be fast, hard and intense. None of this 60 minutes on a treadmill stuff. Throw that idea out the door. Instead I tend to focus on short bursts of hard work followed by short rest periods. This kind of training is called interval training, but more known as “HIIT”, high intense interval training. This is the best fat loss stuff you’ve ever seen.
In future posts I’ll post routines and workouts that will help you lose the belly fat fast. You’ll also get information on what foods to eat and things like that. I might also post videos to help you out.
Here I’ll explain to you about how to lose belly fat quickly. Seriously, this stuff melts that stuff away like wildfire. No hype either. Prisoners call them “Prison Workouts”, because you can do it Anytime, Anywhere. I love to do this workout and usually do it 1-2 times per week. I train strength with weights on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
I do this workout or some kind of High Intensity Interval Training on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. The workout I’m talking about is HIGH INTENSITY. It’s HARD. It will make you breathe like crazy. You will feel like you want to die, ok mayeb not, but it’s tough.
The exercise we’ll be focusing on in this workout is the burpee. The burpee is a great exercise for fat loss, strength and stamina.
Here’s a video of how to perform the exercise:
Ok, great! Now to the fun part
How should I make this workout hard for myself? Hehe. That’s easy!
You can do it in a time interval fashion, such as 30 seconds of burpees at full speed, followed by 30 seconds of rest.
This is how I perform my ultimate fat loss workout:
- A few minutes of warm up, jump around or jog in place or whatever gets you warm.
- 30 seconds of burpees (usually about 10-12 burpees)
- 30 seconds of rest (nice one set down, that was easy)
- Repeat this sequence for either 5,7,9, 11, 13 or 15 times.
That means as a beginner you do 6 “sets” of 30/30 reps for a total of a 6 minute workout. If you are more advanced then you just add 2 sets each week until you reach a total of 16 sets for a total of 16 minutes… Don’t go above 16 minutes, instead try to do more burpees each set.
This is the formula I use personally. I’m at 16 x 30/30 burpees right now, and I try to do 10-12 burpees per workout set. This is hard to do and I often get as low as 7 burpees towards the end. I feel very tired.
This workout is hardcore fat loss and works like crazy. Some things to notice after the workout is your pulse. It will be elevated for up to an hour after this workout, seriously. You’ll feel hot as well. This is your body which is trying to get back to normal levels of energy, burning TONS of calories to refresh itself. This is also known as afterburn.
Never do this on consecutive days, always skip a day in between or it may become too taxing on your central nerval system.
This workout is great because you can do it anywhere, at anytime using just your bodyweight. If you do not have a watch or timer to perform this exercise here’s another variation that I like to do when I don’t have access to my Gymboss Intervall Timer.
Alternate Workout For Those Without A Stop-Watch/Friend:
If you do not have a timer or something to keep track of exact times, then I suggest you simply do 10 x 10 burpees. That means, 10 sets of 10 burpees. Keep the rest to about 30-60 seconds here though. Count in your head, approximately 30 seconds, this is fine.
So here is how you would perform it, anywhere, without excuses
- 10 Burpees
- Count to 30 or 60 at a 1 mississippi pace (about 30 – 60 seconds) or even longer if you are very out of breath.
- Repeat 10 times for a total of 100 burpees
As you can see, it doesn’t require huge amounts of equipment or “secret sauce tools” to build a rockstar body. You just have to do the work and keep an eye on your nutrition. With this workout I lost about 8 lbs in 5 weeks without watching my diet. Abs are showing and poppin’ since I started my “cutting phase”, which means I built muscle and gained fat previously.. I usually walk around with a six pack during summer, lol!
Good luck with your workout and hope you stick with this, it’s a very powerful workout that WORKS and doesn’t cost a penny of equipment unless you decide to order a Gymboss Interval timer. I recommend you get one!
Does Crunches Work To Lose Belly Fat?
In a short answer, NO. Spot reduction is a myth. You cannot specifically remove fat from a specific location, such as doing crunches to lose belly fat. This is because you lose fat all over your body. That means that while crunches are good to build your ab strength you should burn off the fat covering your abs to make them visible.
Truth is that the only ab-specific exercise I do nowadays is actually the “plank”.
I’ve built up enough strenght to do it for a few minutes. Now I am adding weight, I do about 1 minute with 60 lbs in my back with plates that a friend helps me put there.
The rest of the time I focus my energy on fat loss or building muscle. You won’t get “ripped” doing cardio and ab workouts, unfortunately. You have to strengthen and build some muscle too. That means eating more first and training with heavy weights to build up strength and muscle size (you’ll gain some fat as well).
Then you have to remove calories, keep strength training and add cardio to your routine. When I’m cutting weight (losing belly fat) I train with weights 3 times per week and do HIIT cardio 3 times per week alternating days.
Monday: Back, Traps, Calves
Tuesday: Burpee HIIT (30 second work / 30 second rest)
Wednesday: Chest, Shoulders + Planks
Thursday: Sprint HIIT (30 second work / 30 second rest)
Friday: Legs, Biceps, Triceps
Saturday: HIIT (30 second work / 30 second rest)
Sunday: REEEEST A LOT!
This is a typical cutting week for me. Sometimes I’m off doing things and I’ll have to do a quick Tabata workout in the morning. I always do burpees with tabata because I can do it in 4 minutes at home, with no equipment or space.
So, all in all. Crunches are good at first, then you should move to planks and adding weight to them. Go for a 1-2 minute hold. This makes your abs thicker and deeper, very nice! It doesn’t burn fat, but makes them nicer once they appear
All the while you need to be strength training to build muscle and doing cardio to lose fat. I hope you really start to work hard, becuase it’s not easy to lose belly fat if you don’t know how. If you know how, then it’s very simple, you just have to do the work. Nothing is free, especially not abs! There are ways to do it “faster”, such as I’ve outlined here. You can probably cut the time from 6 months to 3 months by doing it this way.
Good luck,
– Chris