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Notice that little bulge in your stomach which you have been ignoring till now? Can’t wear your favorite LBD or your favorite pair of jeans anymore? Thinking of losing the belly fat and flaunting washboard abs instead? Well, don’t fret! You have come to the right place as we reveal here 6 ways to lose belly fat effectively.

Apart from stealing your chance to flaunt an hour-glass figure, the stomach bulge also gives rise to serious health problems like diabetes, metabolic syndrome and heart diseases. Some of the primary reasons for stomach fat accumulation are over eating, lack of physical exercise and slow metabolic activity.

If you really want to make a difference, then it is important to follow a healthy diet with a proper exercise regime, which can also include aerobics and yoga. Loosing stomach fat in order to get washboard abs is not as difficult as many people tend to believe. You can’t lose the excess fat overnight as it definitely demands a disciplined and intensive approach to achieve your goal.

Moreover, it’s practically impossible to reduce abdomen fat by decreasing the total body fat percentage. In this article, I have compiled 6 important tips which will help you to lose stomach fat quickly and effectively!

Whether you are planning to reduce your overall body fat or specifically reduce your waist line, it is imperative to keep yourself hydrated all day long. Keep a water bottle/sipper beside you and remember to drink water frequently. This will keep you invigorated and reduce your craving for sugar laden beverages. In a month, you will notice a remarkable difference. Start your day with drinking a warm glass of lemon water with honey or salt. This will help in cutting down the excess fat from your body.

There is no better way to burn the stomach fat than rigorously following an effective exercise regime. In order to build your abdominal muscle and burn the excess fat, you need to work out daily or at least 5 times in a week. Try to do full body exercises like push-ups, pull ups and rope jumping. This way you can lose around 500 to 600 calories every day. You need to perform different sets of exercises in moderation, including weight bearing exercises and brisk walking or jogging. Additionally, you need to actively pursue some non-weight bearing exercises like biking or rowing.

Side stretching can also help you to lose tummy fat.

• Stand with your feet shoulder width apart.
• Raise one arm above your head and lean to your left side as far as possible.
• Repeat the same with your other arm. You will feel a strain at the side of your belly; don’t be alarmed.
• Lie down straight on your back and put a thin support in between your thighs.
• Then, slowly raise your left leg straight towards the ceiling without bending the knees for at least 20 seconds.
• Repeat the same step with your right leg.
• Repeat this procedure at least 5 to 8 times.

You will also need to include cardio exercises in your daily workout routine to lose the excess fat from your stomach. Practice cardio exercise daily for 20 minutes for at least 5 times a week. You can try any of these exercises like bouncing in the trampoline, dancing, running, jogging – any activity which keeps you physically mobile.

One of the most effective methods to flatten your stomach is interval training, which incorporates short bursts of high intensity workouts for a certain period of time and follows it with a low intensity exercise. An example of such training is jogging for around 5 minutes followed by sprinting for 2 minutes. Then, again slow down the jogging session and then do full sprint for around 2 to 3 minutes.

The type of foods you include in your diet determines your waist size and hence, the extent of fat accumulation in your stomach. Natural foods like whole grain breads and white meat should be included in your diet.

Include healthy fruits and vegetables like carrots, peppers, spinach, tomatoes, apple, oranges, broccoli, pineapple and salads in your daily diet.

Avoid junk food and high, empty calories food items like cookies, jam and jellies.

Fast food is the worst enemy in the battle against stomach fat.

Sugar is considered as the biggest reason of bulging stomach, so reduce your sugar intake.

Most of the junk food contains refined carbs and sugar which elevates the blood sugar level.

Avoid aerated drinks like soda and carbonated drinks as they contain more calories than a banana, with no nutritional value at all.

Beer drinkers tend to have a pear shaped body type. Excessive consumption of alcohol leads to fat accumulation near your abdomen. This is because alcohol does not contain any nutrient value but only energy in the form of calories. So, all the calories consumed through alcohol are stored in the form of stomach fat. Hence say no to alcohol if you want to lose stomach fat quickly. Alcohol also stresses the liver to overwork to eliminate the toxins from your body.

Stress and anxiety can cause the over production of certain hormones like cortisol, which increases weight gain around the belly region. Here are some easy yet effective ways for combating stress everyday:

• Adopt a good sleeping pattern. We all need at least 7 hours of adequate sleep every day.
• Don’t get stressed out; learn to relax and unwind.
• Indulge regularly in a spa or aromatherapy session to keep the stress at bay.

Starving for longer period of time induces the body into a catabolic state, which means that the body breaks down muscle tissues for energy and starts conserving fat. Rather than eating three large meals, switch to five small meals. Smaller portions will keep you satiated for a longer period of time and will keep you away from hunger pangs.

The cause of epicondylitis is an inflammation of the muscular insertions on the epicondyle of the elbow; its an array of tendonitis. Lateral epicondylitis, also called “tennis elbow” is the term used when the muscle inserts on the side of the elbow are inflamed.

Medial epicondylitis or “golf elbow” refers to inflammation of the muscle inserts on the inside of the elbow. In both types of epicondylitis pain can occur at the muscle insertion into the bone of the elbow or may radiate into the muscles of the forearm and occasionally to the wrist.

Epicondylitis is usually related to overuse or direct trauma to the area. The pain is more intense after an intense or repetitive use of the limb. Activities involving strong grip or forearm rotation are particularly aggravating.

How to relief the pain

Tennis elbow relief can be accomplished, on the most extreme or chronic cases, by surgery, but for the rest of us non invasive procedures are enough to get rid of the pain. The non-surgical treatment has three main components: protection, inflammation reduction and strengthening the muscles and tendons.

Decreasing the time or intensity of activity

Other methods of protection are the use of an elastic elbow brace, strap, band or wrap and occasionally, support with plaster or magnetic immobilization. A stretching program can be useful to reduce muscle tension on the tendon affection. Stretching includes the affected arm as well as the neck, upper back and shoulder, hand, wrist, forearm and triceps.

How to reduce the inflammation caused by tennis elbow

The second component of non-surgical treatment aims to reduce inflammation of the tendon. This can be done with ice, various forms of physiotherapy (such as ultrasound or iontophoresis), anti-inflammatory medication and infiltration with corticosteroids (a class of steroid hormones).

You can apply these simple treatments at home:

Apply ice after exercise/work periods to reduce inflammation and get temporary pain relief. To apply the ice wrap the elbow and forearm with a damp cloth and place a bag of crushed ice on it. Keep the ice on it for 15-20 minutes.

Friction massage and ice: It can be used to reduce inflammation and promote healing of the inflamed tendons. Ice causes the constriction of the surface vessels; the friction dilates them. To give yourself an ice massage, fill a plastic cup with water and put it in the freezer; cut the top half of the plastic cup and gently massage the painful area with ice for five minutes.

For the friction massage, use the tips of the thumb or index fingers to rub on the painful area. Start with light pressure and gradually increase it until you apply firm pressure; continue the massage for 3-5 minutes. Alternate ice and massage, always ending with the ice application so that the affected area doesn’t remain inflamed. Repeat 2 or 3 times a day.

When to start doing exercises for tennis elbow

The third component of the non-surgical treatment consists of stretching and strengthening exercises of the muscles and tendons that were affected; usually this is done after the above steps to decrease the pain. In some cases, when the pain does not improve with other methods, a strengthening program will lead to the complete resolution of symptoms.

Start with the exercises once you have remained pain free for several days. The stretching and strengthening exercises are necessary for a proper rehabilitation. Stretching the muscles of the forearm flexors and extensors as described in the exercises section will help prevent muscle imbalance.

Lateral epicondylitis exercises are very effective to relieve pain and reduce inflammation. Lateral epicondylitis is a scientific term for a common stress injury called tennis elbow. It is an inflammation in the tendons located at the outside part of the elbow. This kind of injury affects tennis and other racquet players, golfers, bowlers, gardeners, housekeepers, industrial workers, carpenters, those whose occupation demands repeated activities of hands and forearms, and any other individual who are prone of any major injury. Its symptoms include pain and swelling at the lateral side of the elbow and pain when lifting or gripping.

Tennis elbow exercises restore the strength and flexibility of the muscles and the forearm and wrists as well. The exercises ensure proper blood circulation to the injured part and promote healing. The amount of exercise should be increased gradually and you should avoid doing the ones that are painful. Lateral epicondylitis exercises consist of stretching and strengthening exercises at the wrist forearm and elbow.

Some tennis elbow exercises include ball squeezing exercise, stretching exercise and strengthening exercise. Ball squeezing exercise builds up the power on the muscles and durability to promote your stamina for weight exercises. Just hold a soft squeeze ball in your hand for a few seconds and release. Do this exercise for about ten to fifteen time, twice a day. In a stretching exercise, it warms up your elbow joint and your wrist joint before an exercise for the muscles. The standard range of movement at the wrist is composed of flexion, extension and lateral deviations of the palm.

Stretching exercises should be practiced two to three times in set of ten. For pronation and supination of the forearm as a stretching exercise, rotate your palms downwards and upwards respectively without bending the wrist. For strengthening exercises, rest the forearm with wrist and palm facing downwards at the edge of the table. Grasp a weight of around four hundred to five hundred grams in your hand and bend your wrist downwards and then straighten it. Repeat this exercise for two minutes until your wrists are exerted sufficiently.

Another strengthening exercise is to rest the forearm with wrist and palm facing upwards from the edge of the table. Hold the weight in your hand, next flex your wrists and then lower it down. Moreover, you can also stand upright with the arms held out. Hold a stick in your hand and attach weights to it with a rope that reaches the ground. Roll the rope around the stick completely with the rotational movements at the wrists. Unroll the rope so that it touches the ground. This should be repeated with palm facing downwards and upwards. This aids in strengthening the wrist flexors, as well as the extensors. You can also practice pronation and supination with appropriate weights.

You can also place your wrists on a table with thumb facing upwards. Hold a hammer in hand and raise the wrist for the thumb to point towards the ceiling. Strengthen the wrist and repeat the exercise for 2 minutes. You can also use the same method while moving the wrist outwards towards the little finger.

One of our goals during each and every workout is to activate and work as much muscle as possible. It doesn’t matter whether you’re training a single muscle group or your entire body, more muscle involvement means more calories burnt and more stimuli for muscle growth.

There are several ways to do it but besides adding more exercises to the workout or increasing weights, there’s a single easiest method that you can use to activate more muscle during most exercises. That way is extending the range of motion.

Now, first of all, you need to understand that not every exercise benefits from the extended range of motion. Some exercises, like the bicep curl, for example, actually benefit from the limited range of motion because that way the muscles spend more time under tension. Extending the range of motion to lock the elbows at the bottom or to push the barbell against the chest at the top will actually allow the muscles to rest in case of the bicep curl.

But there are many exercises that become more intense because of the greater range of motion and they activate more muscle at the weakest spots as a result. Here are some of the more common examples.

Decline Push Up

You can extend the range of motion of a push up if you elevate your arms on weight plates, kettlebells or even dumbbells. This works best with the decline push up because you need to raise your legs to the same or greater level to keep the top part of the exercise at the same difficulty. This way at the bottom of the exercise you have to push yourself from a dip like position which adds more intensity, activates more muscle and works on the most difficult part of the push up.

Pull Up

It’s easy to extend the range of motion of a pull up by pulling your chest up to the bar rather than only the chin. This exercise is one that is commonly limited as far as the range of motion goes because guys tend to cheat and don’t pull themselves up enough to complete more reps. However, that works against them because incomplete reps really cut the benefits of this great exercise. If you go for the extended range of motion you can guarantee that those upper back and shoulder muscles get hit really hard.

Kettlebell Sumo Deadlift

You can really get down on the bottom part of the deadlift if you increase the range of motion of the kettlebell sumo deadlift. Stand on weight plates or other elevated platforms so that you pick the weight up from the floor lower than your feet. This makes a deeper starting position and activates more muscle to initiate the lift. This way even when you go back to the standard deadlift, your performance will increase.

Kettlebell Swing

The kettlebell swing is performed by swinging the weight up to the chest level to primarily activate the hips and explosive hip thrust power. But you can easily involve more back muscles and your shoulders if you swing the weight above your head. This obviously requires greater hip thrust power too.

As you can see from these four examples, activating more muscle in each exercise is just a matter of extending the range of motion by making the muscles move more under tension. You can use this method with any exercise as long as the muscles don’t get the rest at the top of the movement (bicep curls, bench press, shoulder press) but increase the tension (squat, row, pull exercises).

It’s clear that for sustained fat loss, training is necessary. A diet alone is not a viable option because it will destroy your muscles as much as it burns fat and do great damage to your metabolism. Training to build more muscle, on the other hand, will improve your metabolism and keep burning fat during workout and rest with fair caloric intake.

But not all training methods are equal and while most workout routines will give you the desired result eventually, there’s nothing like giant sets to make it faster. If you want a training protocol that amps up your metabolic rate and burns fat in the fastest way, this has to be it.

Giant sets are four or more exercises done subsequently without rest. The exercises can target complementing, opposing or different muscle groups. The key here is that they increase workout intensity as high as possible and involve a lot more muscle fibers than any other technique as a result.

Bodyweight Training

While giant sets are used by seasoned bodybuilders mainly as a tool to change things up and break the plateaus, it’s generally advised against beginner giant set use, especially when heavy weights are involved because it can quickly lead to over-training.

But even if you’re not a seasoned bodybuilder, there’s still a lot of benefits of doing lighter bodyweight giant sets now and again (every few weeks). First of all, you get the fat burning and muscle breaking intensity in a shortest workout possible. Secondly, you can see it as a challenge and a milestone for your fitness goals.

The Giant Set

So now that we’ve established the benefits, let’s create a giant set of bodyweight exercises for a full body workout (most effective to burn fat). We’ll use the fundamental exercises for the chest, arms, back, core and legs:

• Push-ups – 6×15
• 6×15 Squats – 6×15
• 6×15 Inverted rows – 6×15
• 6×15 Sit-ups – 6×15

So you’ll be doing 15 reps of push-ups, squats, inverted rows and sit-ups, in this particular order. You’ll do 6 sets with minimal rest, which makes 360 reps in total.

Depending on your fitness level, you might be able to complete this workout in 5 to 20 minutes. Try to go as fast as you can but keep the form of each exercise correct. This makes a great challenge and a fun way to test yourself against time once every few weeks. It will be a good shocker to your muscles and a great metabolic booster too.

Consider adding this or other giant sets to your workouts to keep challenging your muscles in new ways. That’s the only way to sustained fitness. If this routine becomes too easy for you, feel free to add weights, or replace the inverted rows with pull-ups or chin-ups.

To train the abs completely, we have to understand the basic anatomy of this muscle group. We already know that simple crunches will not cut it and you won’t train your abs efficiently with only this one exercise. There are more movements involved in the way abs work besides the top to down muscle movement.

The Basic Anatomy of the Abs

The main parts of the abdominal muscle group are rectus abdominis, external and internal obliques and transversus abdominis. Each of these muscles are responsible for different movements of your core. The rectus abdominis (six pack) is responsible for the up and down flexing movement, the obliques are responsible for the oblique rotation from top to bottom (external) and from bottom to top (internal), and finally the transversus abdominis runs through your waste like a belt and is responsible for your core stability, stopping the movement.

So in order to train your abs completely, you have to involve all of these movements in your workouts. You need up and down crunching when your lower body is stable, as well as the reverse crunching when the upper body is stable and your legs are moving up. You need rotation movement from side to side, and you need to be able to stop your body from spontaneous movement.

You have two options here. You can perform different exercises for each movement, or you can incorporate all of them in one exercise.

The Alphabet Ab Workout

Because we often have to work with limited time around a busy schedule, we love exercises that can include several different muscle movements. This increases the workout intensity and saves a lot of time, making the workout very efficient.

The Alphabet ab workout is one of our favorites because of these reasons. It’s a simple and fun technique to train your abs that incorporates all the required ab movements in an unusual way. And the premise is simple, we take a hanging knee raise exercise and spell out each letter of the alphabet with our legs.

So starting with the letter A, while hanging from a pull up bar, we raise our legs up and across, then down and across the other way. Finally, we lift the legs midway and across vertically for that dash in the letter A.

Continue performing leg raises in all these movements to draw every letter of the alphabet or until you fail. This will include all kinds of circular, up and down, and top to bottom movements that will work your abs in all ways possible. That makes this workout technique pretty much all you need to train your abs, especially in limited time.

If you can’t complete all 26 reps, keep improving until you get there. And if the entire alphabet is too easy for you, go for several rounds and try keeping your legs straight, move in bigger motions.

Take any person who works out and chances are one of their main goals is to shed the belly fat and define six pack muscles. To do that, we have a lot of workouts for the abs and we also know that it’s not enough. We need good nutrition, otherwise those abs will be “nicely” covered with fat.

We also know that abs is the group of muscles that can be trained every day and it’s hard to over-train them. But did you know that you can train your abs without ab exercises?

When we talked about training abs every day (read that article), we talked about direct and indirect ab training. The idea is that there are a lot of exercises targeting various muscle groups that also hit your core and abs. If you focus on those exercises more, you’ll be able to train your abs without even targeting them specifically.

So to train your abs at the same time as you train other parts of your body, you have to understand how those exercises engage your core and take a step further to engage it even more. Here are some example exercises.

Single Arm Dumbbell Press

You can engage your core by simply contracting your abs when doing the dumbbell press but if you drop one dumbbell and do one armed press, you will really engage your core. Pressing a single dumbbell puts all weight on one side of your body and you really have to fight rotating with the weight. This way you engage a lot of stabilizer muscles and work your abs while targeting the chest. If you also lift the leg on the same side as the weight, you will make it even harder.

Single Arm Bicep Curl

Yes, you’ve guessed it, unilateral exercises that require extra body stabilization work your core and abs like crazy while you’re actually targeting your other muscles. Bicep curls are no different, if you take one dumbbell at a time, you will work your abs and biceps at the same time.

Knee Up Pull Ups

Pull ups work your core in any variation, but if you also raise your knees during a pull up, you will engage the abs even more. Focus on muscle contraction as you raise your knees and pull yourself up so you can train your abs at the same time as you train your back and upper body.

Seated Shoulder Press

You can train your abs while targeting the shoulders if you destabilize your body while doing the shoulder press. You can do that by sitting on a bench without the back to lean on and keeping your legs straight (lift them off the ground to make it harder), or sitting on a stability ball.

Bodyweight Tricep Extension

What makes the bodyweight tricep extension exercise great is that it engages the core at the same time. You don’t even have to think much about performing this exercise, your abs will work automatically to keep your body stable.

Overhead Weighted Lunges

Many leg exercises engage your core and abs already as it is. Squats and deadlift, for example, work your core without modifications. But you can add ab training to other leg exercises too. Lunges are great to work your legs, but if you pick up a weight and raise it above your head while you do them, it will engage your abs too.

These examples show you how easy it is to add ab training to any workout and you don’t even have to have special ab workouts to train for a six pack. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have ab workouts at all but if you look to add ab training in all workouts that you do, you will really improve your results.