How to Lose Love Handles Forever (No Bullsh*t Guide)
If you want to know how to lose love handles forever and would prefer a simple 4 step plan for doing that, then you’ve found the right video. Here I’m going to show you a four step process for losing love handles and getting a trimmer waistline.
What’s up guys? Jeff Cavaliere, athleanx. com. So, if you got those stubborn love handles that you just love to get rid of, well, I’d love to help you. And to do that, I’m going to share with you a simple four step plan that when followed, I guarantee works for every single person that does it.
And it starts here at the top with the mouth and most importantly, what you put in it. Woah, I get it. The nutrition part is never easy. But when it comes to love handles, specifically, the approach you’ve been taking all along was almost destined to fail. But the good news is there’s a better way.
You need to create a caloric deficit to create fat loss, but how you do that is oftentimes what sets you up for failure. Because a lot of times we take too aggressive of an approach. You’ve probably done it yourself. You jump on a diet plan that creates a big caloric deficit per day, maybe even upwards of 1,000 calories. Or you make too big of a departure from what you eat right now to try to aggressively lose your body fat.
That’s a giant mistake because the love handles are the most stubborn. In other words, they are oftentimes the last area of body fat that you’re going to lose, which requires sustainability. If you were to stay on a diet plan in a much more moderate deficit, 200 calories, 300 calories, maybe 500 calories maximum, you’re not going to have to make the big giant wholesale changes that create too much of a departure for how you like to do things now. And with that, you’ll get the sustainability that will allow you to finally reach these love handles that oftentimes, as I said, come last. You might actually even this time, enjoy the process with a lot less restriction and by doing that, be able to stick with it forever.
And that brings us to step two in this top-down approach and this time we got to start focusing on training. But a very specific area because we’re talking about lat training. Now, of course, an overall resistance program is a great thing when it comes to looking better esthetically. But when it comes to the love handles specifically, your lats are actually going to be one of your biggest friends. Because visually they are responsible for creating the V taper or creating that visual differential between your upper back and your waistline.
And the bigger your back can become, or the wider it can become because of the development of the lats, the smaller your waistline is going to look, just even relatively speaking. Now, you don’t have to be Arnold Schwarzenegger to make a visual impact here. Most people don’t train their lats at all because they’re focused on the front side muscles, so even doing just a little bit of lat work will go a long way. And two of my favorite ways to do this are with a standing or a kneeling One Arm Cable Pulldown. And when you’re specifically trying to do here is create the strongest lat contraction that you can.
And that requires you to take that lat through its full excursion, a full stretch all the way down to a peak contraction. And what most people don’t realize is the origin of the lats is right there on the pelvis, in the same exact area of the love handles. So, try to drive your elbow down to the back of your hip on every single repetition. Try to wrap it around and touch your spine to make sure you’re getting the extension that ensures full contraction. And a good mind muscle connection here, done consistently, is going to give you the widening effect of your lats all the way from your armpit down to your waist.
That’s going to make those love handles that you have right now look even better than they are. But we continue to work our way down this time, stopping square in the middle at your abs. And you might be saying to me, but Jeff, I’m really concerned more about this area over here. Trust me, your abs are key to that because there’s two big advantages that training your abs will provide you. Number one, if I were to make a picture frame out of this, no matter how good the frame looks, if there’s no picture in it, you’re not going to look good, so you need to train your abs.
But the second most important thing is, I mentioned this top-down approach, well, fat loss also occurs in a top-down approach specifically for guys. Remember I talked about losing fat in your face first and then maybe your neck or your chest and your arms, and then maybe up here. Well, you start to see that upper row of abs before you see anything else, long before you’ll see any elimination of love handles, you’re going to start to see that top row of abs. And guess what? That can keep you nutritionally motivated to stay back on step one on track.
Now, what kind of ab training should you do? Honestly guys, you don’t need to do a lot of it, but you do need to be consistent. I’ve talked about many times the ability to train the abs every single day. They’re very resilient muscles that allow you to train them. But again, not for very long, a five-minute commitment is all you need to make sure you hit the six key major functions of the abs.
If you want to see a perfect example of how to do that, I’ll link for you at the end of this video a short home abs routine that you can do that will accomplish all of those goals. But suffice it to say, when the ultimate goal is not just to get rid of your love handles, but let’s face it, just look better overall, you’re going to want to make sure that your abs are included in your game plan. And that brings us to step number four and one of the most frustrating myths in fitness. Stop me if you heard this before, training obliques makes your waist look blocky. And that’s just flat out not true.
You see, the obliques are just a muscle like any other muscle in your body. It just so happens that they have the unfortunate placement to lie underneath that area of fat that happens to be most stubborn. So, as you accumulate body fat over the top, yeah, it might be easy to confuse the obliques as the source of your problem, but when you actually get rid of that body fat, look what lies underneath. Not just a muscle, but one that actually does a better job of tapering your waistline in because of its orientation at that oblique angle, running down and in. So, stop blaming the obliques and train them already.
And my favorite way to do this is with a simple resistance band that will allow you to target both the internal and external obliques. Each side of your body has both of these muscles that actually lie perpendicular to each other, and you’re going to have to make sure you cover both functions to fully train them properly. If you’re going to take this band and align it in the same direction of those fibers and simply move along that direction, you’ve now applied resistance in actually effectively train those external obliques, leading to better development. The same could be said for the internal obliques, except this time you’re going to be moving in the opposite direction. And if you wanted to make it a lot simpler than that, you can perform bottom-up rotation exercises or top-down rotation exercises.
I just happened to show you two top-down rotation exercises. The bottom-up rotation just requires that you’re focusing on moving your pelvis and twisting. That’s it. Don’t just simply move your legs through space, because that’s going to target your hip flexors and not your obliques. Move the pelvis, curl it up and apply a little bit of twist and you’re home free.
The bottom line is that any love handles solution must start with getting rid of that long standing myth that’s done nothing but keep those love handles o