Having spent well over a decade as a personal trainer and having been an adjunct instructor for the last six years, I have had the pleasure of working with thousands of people and hundreds of students. I also enjoy having countless amounts of conversation with family members, friends, and strangers about fitness-related topics. One of my main focuses as a personal trainer is to educate my clients, as well as anyone that is willing to listen to me talk about fitness. Yet, there has been one fitness fallacy that seems to always come up when talking to someone about working out – spot reduction.
In my opinion, the number one lie when it comes to working out is when someone targets an area on their body in order to reduce excessive body fat at that area through exercise, which is called, ‘spot reduction’. For an example, if a woman wants smaller inner thighs she will work her thighs using a Thigh Master or do hundreds of Scissor Kicks.
The main areas that are targeted for spot reduction are the abdominals, buttocks, and thighs. These areas began being targeted in the mid-80’s, which led to a study conducted by the University of Massachusetts in which subjects were to do 5000 vigorous abdominal exercises over the course of 27 days. Fat biopsies were obtained from the subjects' abdomens, buttocks and upper backs before and after the exercise program. The results of the study revealed that fat decreased similarly at all three sites—not only in the abdominal region. Simply put, there is not sufficient research supporting ‘spot reduction’ – it just does not work.
Proponents of spot reduction often ask ‘If it doesn’t work then why did their fat decrease?’ It decreased due to the abundance of exercise, which burned the sufficient calories to see a reduction. Research conducted by the American College of Sport Medicine found that spot reduction training could lead to over training, which can be counterintuitive and can cause an increase in body fat. So in this case more is not always better but rather can be worse.
Spot reduction is a fallacy, so do not get caught up in the trap of practicing spot reduction!
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