What are the best exercises to reduce visceral fat?

“TL;DR: There are no specific exercises, especially abdominal exercises, to reduce visceral fat.

Stop looking for miracle spot fat reduction exercises (or worse, miracle fat reduction treatments) and focus on cardiovascular exercise (high intensity if possible), a super healthy diet and no alcohol, and visceral fat will reduce.”

FIRST PARAGRAPH

• Specific exercises for visceral fat? Stop looking, they don’t exist…

• Reducing visceral fat with different TYPES of exercise

• Stop looking for mystery magical miracle exercises

• And lose the magical thinking about miracle treatments that shed your belly fat in four sessions - it ain’t gonna happen

• Have a skin tightening/cellulite treatment in London with the experts

• Advanced, infrared / blue / red light therapy treatments in London at LipoTherapeia

• The Cellulite School™: Get advanced training in cellulite reduction and skin tightening

Specific exercises for visceral fat? Stop looking, they don’t exist…

Before explaining the mechanics of visceral fat reduction, let's start with some definitions:

• Visceral adipose tissue, aka VAT or visceral fat, is the type of fat found deep in your belly and between your organs

• Subcutaneous adipose tissue, aka SAT or simply ‘fat’, is found just under your skin either on your belly or anywhere else on your body

• And hypodermal adipose tissue, aka cellulite, is fat found within the deeper part of your skin itself on the thighs, bum and even stomach and arms

Now let's go back to visceral fat reduction.

This is a common question at the clinic: what are the best exercises to reduce my beer belly (or cake belly, for the sugar addicted), with the implication that there must be some special types of abdominal exercises or something else magical that will target visceral fat.

However, the answer to this question is that there exist no specific exercises to target visceral fat, as opposed to other fat.

In fact, there is no such thing as spot fat reduction with exercise. This is a scientific fact known for decades and anyone who says the opposite are either uninformed or simply lying to sell you a product or a service. This is especially true for coaches and trainers who advertise specific abdominal exercises to reduce visceral fat and who should know and conduct themselves better.

So, as there is no spot subcutaneous fat reduction with exercise and spot cellulite reduction with exercise, there is no spot visceral fat reduction with exercise either.

Such a thing simply does not exist.

Reducing visceral fat with different TYPES of exercise

You can indeed reduce fat with exercise but your body will decide where this fat is going to be reduced from (visceral, subcutaneous of cellulite adipose tissue from different body areas), according to the make up of each specific adipose tissue depot, including genetic, hormonal and other factors.

The only thing that can influence increased visceral fat reduction is the type of exercise you do, as in low intensity versus high intensity exercise or cardiovascular versus resistance exercise.

In this respect, high intensity exercise and/or cardiovascular exercise, in general, may help reduce visceral fat faster than other types of fat. But even this is not guaranteed, as different people, and different fat depots in the same person, respond in different ways to the same exercise stimulus.

The only thing that is certain is that high intensity exercise and cardiovascular exercise are the best ways to lose fat overall, and they may - just may - also help you use visceral fat faster than other types of fat in some people.

Stop looking for mystery magical miracle exercises

So the moral of the story is, stop looking on tiktok and instagram for miracle exercises that promise to ‘get rid of your visceral fat’ in some magical mystery way and start doing lots of cardiovascular exercise, if possible at high intensity.

Obviously, neither cardiovascular exercise nor high intensity exercise are possible for some groups of people, especially for those with a health condition.

But still, all is not lost: diet also plays an equally important role, with sugar, excess carbs and alcohol playing a role in increasing and maintaining visceral fat, as well as stress does.

So focus on the things that you have been told a thousand times before to focus on, i.e. consuming more oily fish, lots of vegetables and salads, lots of berry and citrus fruits and enough lean protein; and less carbs, less fat and no sugar or alcohol, and your fat levels, including visceral adipose tissue levels will start reducing.

So get out of social media and start working, or ideally running; throw away those cookies and start snacking on blueberries. It is not simple and requires no magical mystery exercise secrets which only that one specific tiktoker discovered.

And lose the magical thinking about miracle treatments that shed your belly fat in four sessions - it ain’t gonna happen

The last few years we have seen electromagnetic stimulation (EMS), aka HIFEM, exercise treatments:

• that are supposedly equivalent to 30,000 sit-ups (😂, how naive can one be to believe such nonsense?)

• and which allegedly reduce in just 4 miracle 20-minute sessions (🤣) not only subcutaneous abdominal fat but also visceral abdominal fat (now this is bordering on fraud)

All I have to say about wasting anything other than monopoly money on such magical miracle treatments is, ‘Good luck with that, you will need it…’

To be specific, those treatments:

• Are definitely not equivalent to 30,000 sit-ups, they are merely equivalent to a 20’ abdominal workout you can do on your yoga mat at your home, for free and without traveling to a clinic - and without the neuromuscular coordination you gain from doing exercise yourself

• Can help add to the results of your home or gym abdominal exercise routine - but only if you already do your exercises at high intensity and only if you have 10 to 20 EMS/HIFEM sessions, not the 4 misleadingly advertised

• They do not reduce any significant amount of subcutaneous abdominal fat. If you lose 20% of subcutaneous abdominal fat after 10-20 such sessions you will be lucky. The usual average subcutaneous abdominal fat loss from such treatments is 5 to 10% after 10 to 20 sessions.

• Under no circumstances, such treatments will reduce visceral abdominal adipose tissue - don't believe the marketing hype on the fake studies

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