Should you focus on stomach more to lose weight

A

Alevoor

New member
Hello,

This may sound like a naive question but does anyone know for sure whether focusing on stomach (not just abdomen) helps speed up losing weight?

Often we can reduce some weight by dieting alone and a few more pounds by workouts but none of the two work without the other. Barring the genetic reasons, weight gain cases, in my view, have been due to stomach. Whether we eat heavily or continually, or we fail to digest all that we ate, in the end we begin adding weight around our stomach first.

Obviously, fat collects more around stomach because of higher presence of soft tissues there. This is where lies the challenge also.

Any thoughts on this?
 
muscle systems and fat systems of the body work totally independent of each other. so no, focusing on the stomach will not aid in fat loss there one little bit.

calories in < calories out, can't get around this. If you focus on anything focus on working your legs as they are the largest muscle system in the body, which in turn means largest caloric expenditure per time/intensity spent exercising...
 
:iagree: True, the two systems work differently.

But you can't possibly work on one only leaving the other. The workouts to get the equation "calories out > calories in" draws out fat from all over the place irrespective of which muscle you are working on although it helps develop specific muscles. My point was, an ordinary person looking to reduce weight should be targeting his stomach first which is the most visible and ugliest thing.
 
if it makes them feel like it's the best thing to be targeting to lose weight, then all the power to them to keep motivated.

Like it or not, when it comes to losing body fat, caloric expenditure is everything. and the BEST way to exercise is to use movements that work the largest muscle groups in your body. abs are not one of these muscles. You get way more mileage out of squatting or olympic lifting than anything you could ever possibly hope to do with a abs workout in terms of losing belly fat.
 
weight gain around the middle is largely linked to the adrenals in the body, so a holistic approach to all areas of your health is important for weight loss. this includes your diet, the time you are going to bed, time and type of exercise, type of fluids, internal blocking factors, sugar and grain intake amond many others.

all these factors go into one big pot when i comes to stress on the body, hence a holstic approach is required!
 
Alevoor said:
This may sound like a naive question but does anyone know for sure whether focusing on stomach (not just abdomen) helps speed up losing weight?
Click to expand...

I'm going to take the uncool route here and say yes it does help. But only if your stomach focus is a focus on what you put in your stomach, and then it will be the cornerstone of your weight loss.
 
MGR said:
...But only if your stomach focus is a focus on what you put in your stomach, and then it will be the cornerstone of your weight loss.
Click to expand...

Yes, this was one of my points. But I guess working on thigh muscles should be better
 
Alevoor said:
Yes, this was one of my points. But I guess working on thigh muscles should be better
Click to expand...

i'm not quite sure you understand what he said. he said if working on your stomach means watching what you eat, then yes it will be a cornerstone of weight loss.
 
Jynus said:
i'm not quite sure you understand what he said. he said if working on your stomach means watching what you eat, then yes it will be a cornerstone of weight loss.
Click to expand...

Of course, I did and that is what I meant to say in my OP. Nevertheless, one misconception I had about working on the belly area being better than other areas stands busted. Thanks for that.
 
Honestly, it seems to me like your OP was stating that focusing on the stomach in terms of exercises would help by spot isolating your fat loss, and this is not correct.

Your body stores fat for reasons of caloric surplus and other factors like stress and improper hormone levels. However, WHERE it stores that fat is pretty much mapped uniquely to your genetics. When you lose weight it tends to come off in reverse order to how you put it on. Nothing you can do will really change that.

Now, I agree with a lot of people that it's really Diet + (cardio + resistance training) = happy camper. I also feel like diet is the cornerstone of it all. You can lose weight easier just dieting than just exercising, and if your diet is off you can outeat a good fitness regimen and still gain weight. Hence why I said what I did in my last post.

However, in terms of where you should focus the resistance aspect of your exercise routine - which is what I think you were driving at - I would say all over. I like full body routines or full-body splits. I also see the virtue of using large, compound movements that get your biggest muscles and work the most muscles at once.

Bench press
Overhead press
Squat
Deadlift
Clean and snatch and jerk (or whatever you call em)
etc

Really, even if you aren't shooting for size the sort of things that powerlfiters and olympic lifters do are still great for fitness.
 
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