OK, as many of you know, I have been losing a lot of weight over the last eight months (78 pounds and counting!). I still have another 10 pounds or so to go until I hit my goal weight.
Part of the Weight Watchers program is to do regular exercise. My exercise of choice has been walking. Part of the reason for this is that it is something simple that I can do on my lunch time (I usually go over the Brooklyn Bridge and back) and I don’t have to belong to a gym to do it.
Well, I’ve found that while my legs are starting to look OK, my stomach has some flab in it from losing all that weight and not toning any of the muscles in it. I would like to do some exercise to try to trim that up a bit. Unfortunately, I don’t have a great deal of free time, and I can’t afford a gym either.
I tried doing a search on Yahoo! for advice on exercise and muscle toning, but came up short. Does anyone have any advice on exercises that I can do for this, that can be done at home and that I don’t need to buy expensive equipment for?
Thanks for your help.
Zev Steinhardt
Zev, with all the resources on the Web you come here?
quote you: I would like to do some exercise to try to trim that up a bit
Zev, you can’t trim it up directly by exercising. if you have flab down there, keep doing what you’ve been with losing weight. You cannot spot reduce.
Get you body fat checked as a % of your weight. You have no shot of seeing real muscles down there until body fat is below 20%, and more realistically below 15%.
Just about anything from basic sit ups, crunches and leg raises (search these terms) will build the muscle since you haven’t done anything to your gut in a while.
Ab tone is 80% the result of low body fat. If you were very heavy, you might have so much excess skin and empty fat cells lingering that you need a ‘procedure’ to trim it. (78 pounds and counting = thick skin and leftover fat cells that might prevent you from having a toned ab regions, unless you choose a procedure)
If I read him right, I think he means not so much that he wants to spot reduce, since he’s already lost a good deal of fat, but that he wants to tighten his stomach up beneath the remaining fat. Crunches are good for that, don’t take too terribly much time, and are free free free. Here is a good page on how to do crunches; also, click on the link on the page for vaccuums, another good ab exercise. Yet another is Leg lifts.
These exercises will tighten and tone your abdomen, but like Philster said, won’t “spot reduce”; you’ll still have whatever belly fat you have on top of your tightened and toned abdominal muscles. The only thing that will get rid of that is keeping up the good work you’re doing on eating and cardiovascular exercise. Congrats on all the progress!