When you carry extra fat along the sides of your torso, finding the right outfit can be a challenge. Whether you're looking for a flattering bathing suit or just trying to fight the love handles that appear when you wear formal clothing, you can say goodbye to this flabby frustration through exercise. Love handles is the term that describes the excess fat right above your waistline, while your flanks are directly on the sides of this area. The muscles beneath your flanks are your obliques. A combination of aerobic exercises, such as swimming and cycling, and strength training, such as planks and crunches, can help burn your fat and tone the area's muscles. Spot Reduction Although dedication to an exercise regimen can help you burn away your pesky love handles, it's impossible to solely target your love handles and the fat over your flanks. Spot reduction, the theory that states you can burn fat in a specific area, is a workout myth. The American Council on Exercise reports that commercial products have perpetuated this myth. Studies have shown you'll burn fat throughout your entire body through exercise, rather than exclusively in the area you target. Burning Calories Reducing the amount of fat on your body, including your love handles and over your flanks, occurs when you burn more calories than you consume. For every extra 3,500 calories you burn, you'll lose a pound of fat. An effective way to burn calories is through aerobic exercises such as jogging, swimming and cycling. Aerobic exercises can help you burn several hundred calories in a single workout. For example, Harvard Medical School notes that a 185-pound person will burn 888 calories during an hour of swimming laps at a vigorous pace. MayoClinic.com suggests that losing 1 to 2 pounds per week is reasonable; depending on the amount of fat distributed throughout your body, it might take several weeks before you begin to see your love handles and flank fat shrink, as the fat loss will be throughout your body, not just in your desired areas. Strength Training Although you can add strength training to your workout regimen right away, you won't actually see the muscle growth you're getting until you lose the fat around the muscles. You can't strengthen your love handles, as this term refers to fat deposits that hang over your waistline, but you can build your obliques, which are located on each side of your torso, beneath your love handles and flanks. Bodyweight exercises such as the side plank, side bridge and lying twist are effective exercises you can perform at home to build your obliques. If you work out in a gym, cable and dumbbell side bends, cable seated twists and lever-seated side crunches are ideal. Circuit Training Although a combination of calorie-burning aerobic exercise and strength training can help you burn away your love handles and build strong flanks, circuit training is an effective way to approach your fitness goals. Instead of, for example, going for a 30-minute swim one day and spending 15 minutes performing planks another day, circuit training blends both types of exercise. This practice, in which you alternate 1-minute bursts of aerobics with strength training for 30 minutes, is suitable at home and in the gym, and boosts your metabolism to burn fat faster. Customize your circuit training to include fat-burning aerobics and oblique-strengthening exercises. Even if you don't see muscle growth right away, it's beneficial to your fitness goals; the more muscle mass you build, the faster you'll burn calories at rest. Source
