Can you spot reduce body fat?

Can you “spot reduce” body fat?

When I was in school, the answer was a flat-out, “No.” We were always taught that there was no such thing as spot reduction when reducing body fat in certain areas. In other words, you could do all the crunches in the world and may not do much to reduce belly fat. However, I came across an article from the group at Sports Performance Bulletin that cites a study that may prove differently. I thought I’d share my thoughts about it with you. 

As I said, we were always taught that there was no such thing as spot reduction in body fat because energy derived from fat didn’t just come from the exercise area. It came from all over. Then you can get into certain things like types of fat and it can be a complicated situation. However, according to SPB, there are some flaws with the research that we have all come to use. 

1. Most notably, in these studies, strength training and not aerobic training was used to test the theory. A big issue here is that strength training, in the way it was conducted, was primarily an anaerobic exercise. 
2. In studies that compared aerobic to strength training were not matched for caloric expenditure. As you can imagine, strength training burned a lot less calories than aerobic exercise did, which would definitely make it harder to compare body fat losses. 
3. Also, some studies looked at exercising very small muscles and then measuring with fairly inaccurate skin calipers. 

Given these flaws, there is a more recent study from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway that took a more rigorous look at the problem. 

Some highlights of what they did:

1. Measured effects of treadmill and abdominal exercises (crunches) at 4x per week for 10 weeks on fat mass distribution using DXA technology. 
2. These were compared to a control group of energy matched treadmill endurance training. 
3. Tested the hypothesis that reductions in fat mass in trunk, total fat mass, and body weight would not be different. 

The subjects:

• 16 overweight males with BMI average of 29.5 
• Two randomized groups
  • Combined treadmill running @ 70% of HRmax for 27 minutes and 4×4 minute bursts of crunches. These were done at 30-40% of 1 RM. This was to make the exercises endurance like. 
  • Control group only did 45 minutes of treadmill at the 70% HRmax number. 
  • Caloric expenditure was matched for groups. 

Results: 

• No surprise that both groups lost weight, reduced BMI, and reduced waist circumference. There were no significant differences between the groups. 
• However, fat mass in the trunk was significantly less in the combined group than the control group. (30.8% to 28.9% in ab group vs 25.9% to 25.2% in the control group)
• From what I gathered, more weight was lost in the control group, but higher percent fat loss in the combined group. 

Practical implications

• While this is the first study to my knowledge that has shown “spot reduction” is possible, it’s far from changing the idea of targeting body fat is now the gold standard. For one, you only had 16 subjects and it was a very specific group. It’s a start, but not changing my overall outlook. 
• I do think the study highlights how weight loss doesn’t just translate to fat loss. My guess is that the treadmill only group lost some muscle weight and bone weight over the 10 weeks. With that, adding some resistance training will help preserve muscle and bone tissue while increasing fat usage. A lot of times what I see with runners is they don’t really need to lose weight, just work on their body composition. 
• I think it also highlights that because of the extra “stuff” you lose when just running, that weight loss should not be a primary goal when training hard. It may be a byproduct, but shouldn’t be a goal. However, in the off-season, this may be something to work on. b
• Lastly, I wish their would have been more about how diet was controlled in this study. There was only one sentence about it and it made it sound like it was self regulated, so we all know how well that can go. 
• The folks at SPB made a good point, spot reduction probably only needs to be in places you aren’t using during your training, anyway. In other words, it doesn’t make much sense for a runner to worry about spot reduction using low intensity strength on their calves. That’s just going to happen naturally with their training. It’s probably going to make more sense to work on areas like the trunk, and maybe the arms and back. 

Where I would consider using:

If I had athletes that came to me and were low volume and looking to increase exercise capacity, then this might be a good starting point. To get their exercise time up and improve body composition so that we could transition to more running. This could improve overall endurance and exercise capacity. Both of these would improve running performance.In any case, I thought it interesting to see the initial results. Like I said a lot more studies will probably be done on this. If anything it highlights how flawed research can be, even though we’ve been using it for decades as the gold standard.