I’ve often heard statements to the effect that situps will slim down someone’s stomach, squats or other leg exercises will slim the thighs, etc. Now as I understand it, exercising a certain part of the body will exercise the muscle, but not necessarily remove fat from that particular area. Rather, it will just trigger a general fat burning process throughout the body. Am I right in assuming that ideas like the aforementioned are a bunch of nonsense?
You are precisely right. The myth of spot reduction is one of the most pervasive in exercise today. The upside is that while people build muscle, that muscle alone will increase the person’s metabolism and they will burn more fat, but it will come off first in the places that the body decides to take it off.
To burn fat with the least apparent effort, exercise the largest muscles, i.e., those in the buttocks and legs. Lifting weights with your pinkey may seem hard, but it ain’t going to get you where you want to be.
I believe that the myth is perpetuated in part by the illusion that is created as muscle becomes toned. My gut may not have any less blubber after a few months of a sit-up regimen. But said blubber is now hanging from a firmer edifice, which can make it look as if there is at least some reduction in only the spot you concentrated on…
Arms are another example. As you gain ground with your benchpressing, the “cut” that begins to emerge from a more-defined tricep, creates an appearance of less flab (even though that might not be the case). Or–even better!–the surrounding flab sort of gives an impression of muscular heft where before it was just amorphously thick. If this is true, you might come to the conclusion that the appearance of spot reduction (even where no real reduction in fat took place) can amount to the same thing.