Many personal training clients want to work on their waistline. Many exercises target this area, but it's important to understand the difference between uncovering the abdominals and conditioning them.

The differences are more than skin deep. In fact, they are two entirely different concepts.

Uncovering means fat loss in the midsection, while conditioning involves training the midsection. If you are an experienced resistance trainee, this should come as no big surprise. Never train abdominals with the intention of losing fat around the waist. Instead, try to approach your abdominal training as a part of overall core conditioning.

Flatter, not Fatter

Let's face it, what do clients ask for more than anything? A flatter stomach! What do trainers and fitness enthusiasts immediately focus on when fat loss in the abdominal region is the challenge? You guessed it: abdominal exercises. While apparently logical, this practice has some serious flaws. 

In the absence of dieting and/or improving your fitness lifestyle in other areas, if you were to do nothing but abdominal exercises you would show no results when it comes to revealing those invisible abs. This may be one of the single greatest reasons why beginners lose their motivation to train. They often focus exclusively on working the abdominals and never show signs of improvement. When a person does see fat loss progress while training abdominals, it is almost always because there are other newly added components of their fitness program that are responsible. With regard to fat loss, abdominal training alone is of little value.

To understand why this is so, imagine impermeable sheaths of tissue separating subcutaneous fat stores from muscles throughout the entire body. For our purposes here, these sheaths separate subcutaneous fat from its underlying muscles and make it impossible for localized fat to move directly across to trained muscles. Now imagine the cardiovascular system being able to transport fat to muscle. When muscle energy is expended and is being replaced in any location in the body, under the proper dietary conditions, fat burning hormones and enzymes circulate to every fat cell the vascular system can reach -- that is, almost all fat cells in the body --  simultaneously. As a result, there is a general fat release throughout the body, not a localized or isolated fat release as some still believe.

Frequent, low- to moderate intensity full-body workouts that include a moderate amount of aerobics, together with a sensible diet will go a long way to improving general fat loss -- and that includes that waistline.

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