Does Spot Reduction Really Work?

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From Get-Fit Guy:

This week, a new study entitled "Regional Fat Changes Induced by Localized Muscle Endurance Resistance Training" shed new light on the idea of spot reducing. The study looked into whether working one muscle group over and over again would actually cause the fat in that muscle group to go away faster than muscle groups that weren’t being exercised.

In this experiment, 7 men and 4 women trained with just one leg during 12 weeks, with 3 sessions per week. Each training session consisted of 1 set of 960–1,200 repetitions of the leg press exercise with just that one leg. Despite the enormous number of repetitions, that one leg didn’t lose any more fat than the leg that wasn’t exercising. Interestingly, the participants did actually lose fat from the exercise, but it came from their trunk and arms, not their leg.

The take-away message is this: if you want to tone and lose fat in one body part, you need to go above and beyond just exercising that one body part. You also need to eat right, do high intensity cardio intervals, and follow all the same type of potent fat loss rules I outline in the Mighty Mommy Belly Burn Project.

So no, you can not spot reduce fat. Here is a link to the study: http://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/Abstract/2013/08000/Regional_Fat_Changes_Induced_by_Localized_Muscle.23.aspx