Abs, Crunches & Spot Reduction

You can’t out-train a bad diet.

That statement plays like a broken record in gyms all across the world. Yet, day after day, almost hour after hour, you still see the same clueless lifting junkie in the corner of the gym hammering out hundreds of crunches hoping to see his first 1 or 2 abs.

Don’t pretend you didn’t believe spot reduction wasn’t possible. We all have. We’ve all been 15%+ body fat, and spent 15-20 minutes of our workout doing crunches/reverse crunches/bicycle crunches, and almost any other torturous exercise we could think of. We do this all while consuming milkshakes, cookies, pizza, and whatever else we wanted throughout the day.

Oh how we were so wrong. We wasted so much time doing useless, if not dangerous exercises, with the false belief we’d get that ever-so sexy 6 pack we desire. Check out this brand spankin’ new study that confirms we were all once idiots.

Diet? That’s for fat people. Cardio? That’s for marathon runners. All I need is a few hundred crunches, and I’ll get that 6 pack I’ve always dreamed of.

Vispute, SS, Smith, JD, LeCheminant, JD, and Hurley, KS. The effect of abdominal exercise on abdominal fat. J Strength Cond Res 25(9): 2559-2564, 2011

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of abdominal exercises on abdominal fat. Twenty-four healthy, sedentary participants (14 men and 10 women), between 18 and 40 years, were randomly assigned to 1 of the following 2 groups: control group (CG) or abdominal exercise group (AG). Anthropometrics, body composition, and abdominal muscular endurance were tested before and after training. The AG performed 7 abdominal exercises, for 2 sets of 10 repetitions, on 5 d·wk⁻¹ for 6 weeks. The CG received no intervention, and all participants maintained an isocaloric diet throughout the study. Significance was set at p = 0.05 for all tests. There was no significant effect of abdominal exercises on body weight, body fat percentage, android fat percentage, android fat, abdominal circumference, abdominal skinfold and suprailiac skinfold measurements. The AG performed significantly greater amount of curl-up repetitions (47 ± 13) compared to the CG (32 ± 9) on the posttest. Six weeks of abdominal exercise training alone was not sufficient to reduce abdominal subcutaneous fat and other measures of body composition. Nevertheless, abdominal exercise training significantly improved muscular endurance to a greater extent than the CG.

In other words, stop wasting your time performing crunch after crunch after crunch. Check your diet and add in a few HIIT sessions per week. Want results real quick? Add 400m sprints twice per week. You’ll see the fat melt off your stomach!