To start off your quest for a flat belly this summer, why not begin with a simple and versatile exercise you can do whenever you have a spare 5 minutes? Flat planks engage your core, and they are the single most effective move that works every muscle in your body. Whether you’re doing some flat planks while you watch TV at night or in your office during some downtime, they will have your abs (and the rest of you) looking fit and toned in no time. “If you can only do it for 30 seconds before collapsing, try to add 10 seconds to it each time you attempt it”.
Reducing your body fat percentage isn’t easy, though. If it was, everyone would look like this. But if you follow the right program, you can. Stick to the following plan and reducing your body fat percentage — and losing some pounds of belly fat — is almost assured.
But, first, let’s get a couple of things out of the way.
One, it’s impossible to “spot reduce.” While you can target certain areas of your body in terms of building up the muscles in that area, you can’t decide to just lose weight in your stomach, or your thighs, or your rear. It doesn’t work that way. You can’t remove subcutaneous body fat from specific areas of the body by doing exercises that target those areas. Doing hundreds of crunches will certainly strengthen your abs, but that won’t reduce the amount of fat stored in your torso. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have certain areas where we’re predisposed to put on fat. If I gain a few excess pounds, most seem to appear on my stomach. Other people tend to put on pounds in their thighs or rear. They’re gaining weight everywhere, of course, but it seems to appear more readily in a certain area. On the flip side, if I lose five or six pounds, my waistline gets noticeably less soft. Once you start eating, your body shifts into the fed state. Even after you’ve finished eating, you stay in the fed state for roughly three to five hours (depending on what you’ve eaten, how frequently you’ve eaten, your metabolic rate, and other factors).
