Spot Reduction: The Surprising Facts!

Spot reduction is the kind of idea that you'll see on TV late at night, on one of those shopping channels shot in a gym full of mirrors and inflatable balls, where a spray-tanned, muscular person tells you that you can attach electrodes to your midriff, or that a thigh trainer or other piece of eleven-minute-miracle merchandise can tone and shape the parts of you that you're most insecure about.

If you have a spare tyre round your waist, spot reduction would be doing abdominal exercises to reduce that spare tyre. Meanwhile, systemic "across the whole body system" fat reduction would be using diet and whole-body exercise to encourage your whole body to consume that fat around your waist.

For years, people who know about fitness have been trying to educate their clients, readers, friends, partners, and well, anyone else who will listen, to understand that fat isn't lost in just one place. The muscles under your spare tyre don't reach up and start eating your belly when you do sit-ups. When people use "spot reduction" protocols effectively, what's really happening is that stronger abdominal muscles with better tonus (resting length) are giving them a flatter abdominal wall and better posture, while the extra calories they're consuming are eating into their reserves of body fat. So when famous bodybuilders attribute their chiselled midriffs to a thousand sit-ups a day, we mutter about how they're obviously huge, and, yes, they're strong, you must admit; but still, how much do they really know about training science? Aren't they just genetic freaks with a crazy work ethic?  And most of them are on juice too, right?

Which is true.

See Also: Spot Reduction - Is It A Myth?

Researchers have the facts to back up the good doctor's hypothesis. In The American Journal of Physiology, Stallknecht and colleagues found that "an acute bout of exercise can induce spot lipolysis and increased blood flow in adipose tissue adjacent to contracting skeletal muscle," answering the team's own question: "Are blood flow and lipolysis in subcutaneous adipose tissue influenced by contractions in adjacent muscles in humans?"

So there's more to the science of spot reduction than initially meets the skeptical eye. But what should that mean for our training?

Adding Spot Reduction to Your Training: What Not To Do

Let's imagine two people, Bill and Bob. Bill doesn't believe in spot reduction. He doesn't believe in much and he doesn't read much either. He jumps rope and does big heavy weight training exercises, typically doing between 10 and 25 reps in a set and between 2 and 5 sets of each exercise. Bob has read this article, and he's also read absolutely everything else. He's taken its apparent message to heart and is working on spot reduction protocols including using an abdominal crunch machine in a fasted state.

Anyone?

Bill, right? Because he's simply burning a huge amount more calories, he's building muscle and he's creating a hormonal environment that's conducive to fat burning and muscle building through his highly effective, systemic approach. It's not the perfect program, maybe, but no thigh trainer is going to come close.

How should that be done?

Well, the evidence is that the warmer your fat is, the better it is absorbed into the bloodstream and burned at the muscle. So warm up, and preferentially warm up the area you want to lose fat from. Wear something warming over it; Dr. Lowery recommends a weightlifting belt worn backward over the abdomen!

Increased vascularization in the muscle that lies under the fat you want to lose increases the efficacy of spot reduction. So how to increase vascularity? Well, in terms of the actual numbers of vessels that are there, rather than increasing their visibility, it seems that endurance exercise helps, and so does more intense exercise. Adding some moderate rep-ranges sets of assistance exercises into your training will help boost blood flow and may improve arteriogenesis (the creation of new blood vessels). It's blood flow that's really important.

Finally, let's look at the big picture.

But Dr. Lowery is pretty explicit that there's no replacement for that. What he argues is that spot reduction can help the physique athlete with stubborn fat deposits in "unsightly" places. I'd go further: maybe by helping to increase blood flow and local fatty tissue absorption at the sites of the majority of body fat, spot reduction can help ordinary people who are trying to lose weight and get fit and healthy.

Most people store the majority of their body fat in their buttocks, upper thighs and lower abdomens. That makes sense it's where you'd hang a bag or pouch, holster a tool or pocket your keys. The centre of the body is a good storage place for things you'll need later. It's also the site of the body's biggest muscles: the powerful muscles of the hips and upper legs, like the quads, glutes and hamstrings. Could deadlifts, swings and squats contribute to a "spot reduction" effect by increasing bloodflow here even as they make the biggest systemic contribution to fat loss too? I offer the idea for what it's worth. For most of us, spot reduction is a secondary concern, but it does seem to be real. It just won't deliver in eleven minutes.