FAT LOSS 101 FOR MEN (Chest Fat, Belly, Love Handles!)
Fat loss from the three most stubborn zones for men can be quite difficult, unless you have a plan. In this video, I share with you a three phase plan for losing fat in the abdomen, love handles or waistline area, and the chest. These spots are where most men carry their fat and are the last to lo
What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. If you’re like most men, you have a problem in either one of the three main areas. That is: accumulating too much fat either on your belly, on your chest, or in the love handle and waist line.
Today I’m going to show you how we can conquer those three trouble spots. Most importantly by taking a phase by phase approach. It doesn’t matter if you have all three. I’m going to show you how we’re going to hit them all in this one video. Right off the bat, guys, the one thing that all three of these areas have in common is that they are body fat issues, first and foremost.
Meaning, if your nutrition is not in check, if you’re not following a proper nutrition plan, you’re never going to be able to conquer these things, and get them to look better. However, you don’t necessarily have to be able to dial it all the way down to single digit body fat levels to be able to start to see improvement. I believe that small improvements are what give us the motivation to continue to make bigger improvements. So when you just get started, the one thing you want to do from a nutrition standpoint is take out the obvious crap. Go through, make one pass through.
You know the things you shouldn’t be eating. Start eating less of those, or start drinking less of the stuff that you know you shouldn’t be drinking, and I promise you, as your body fat levels start to decline you’re going to be able to see the impacts that the first level Phase I changes will make. We start right there. When it comes to the abs, and this belly area the one thing you have to start doing is, you need to be able to feel the abs contracting. I know when you have a lot of mass in that area it doesn’t really feel like anything is working.
As a matter of fact, when you try to crunch things get in the way. So what I want you to do is, I want you to lay down on the ground first, Phase I, and just learn how to activate the muscles under there. The key here is to try to do two things. One: cross your legs over each other so you can squeeze the adductors, squeeze your thighs together as hard as possible, and then pull down on your belly. Try to flatten out what we call the ‘transverse abdominus’.
In other words, we want to act like we just went into this freezing cold lake, and the water is so cold that we have to pull back, and in. When you get the ability to feel that contraction, even though it’s under layers, and layers of fat, potentially, the ability to feel that contraction is going to be a key first step to getting you further down the road in Phase II. Next, moving onto the chest. We can do things here too, in phase I that don’t require having to have those low body fat levels. That means we can start just by stretching the chest muscles themselves and strengthening the muscles on the other side of the shoulder joint.
This is what I’m talking about. If we have a problem with chest fat, we have these rounded shoulder, likely, because everything is brought forward. Especially if we have the belly here in front as well. A flattened out, rounded shoulder look is going to take a bad chest and make it look worse. What we can do, just by getting our chest open, and strengthening the muscles in the other side, is going to get the chest to instantly look better.
Right off the get go, that’s what we’re trying to do because we haven’t had that chance yet to make those drastic changes through nutrition. So here are a couple stretches. You do this stretch right here that I’ve shown you before for the pec major, and as you get this stretch, and you sink it in here – I’ll link the video at the end of this so you can get an in-depth on how to do every, single step here – you also want to stretch the pec minor as well, because that’s going to pull your shoulder blade forward, too. But we get both of these stretches done, and then of course we want to work on that rotator cuff. We do that through some of the banded external rotation work here.
I know it could be boring, but I promise you, even a little bit of this added to what you’re doing right now could have a major impact on your posture. When you add to – as I’ve devoted a whole video to before – the face pull, in just a few sets here at the end of your workouts is going to go a long way toward improving your posture. But this is Phase I, and it will allow you to see a better look to your chest, even as you’re carving away, and chopping away through your nutrition at those body fat levels. Now, when it comes to the love handles we have to understand the anatomy of what we’re talking about first. That is, it’s the oblique muscle covered, again, in too much body fat.
What we can do here, from the beginning – again, realizing that we haven’t really gone too far yet with our nutrition improvements – we can at least start working the lats. The more we can get a lat differential here with the waistline, you’re going to start creating that visual tapering that will be important for you as you start to get more encouraged by how you look, as you’re making those changes. The big key I always point out here is, you want to make sure you’re taking all of your lat exercises to a full contraction. We short change them constantly. Every rep, we try to move as much weight as we can without focusing, maybe, on dropping the weight just a little bit so we can get a better contraction.
The lats will always insert all the way down here, low on the waistline, and if we allow it to get a full contraction on every rep we get a better development of the entire muscle. We want to take advantage of that. So don’t shortchange your reps, and certainly don’t overlook your lats when it comes to making quick changes to the visual appearance as you’re continuing to work on those body fat levels. Moving onto Phase II now. Things are getting a little more serious.
Your nutrition is getting a bit more in check. You’re starting to care a bit more about the macronutrients – maybe not just getting rid of the obvious stuff, you’ve done that – but now you’ve got to get a bit more fine-tuned on optimizing the good things that you are putting into your body. I’m going to tell you, it will become a lot easier for you, and you’re going to become a lot more interested in it because you’ve already started to see the changes, which have inspired you to keep going down this path. So when we go back to these three problem areas, Phase II now, of what I want you to do when it comes to that belly fat, and that lower abdomen is I want you to start including some direct training for the area. Not just feeling the contraction, but using rotational ab training.
You can see that I love doing rotational ab training here, and all it takes is a single band. You need to do this because a lot of times people at this body fat level don’t respond well to crunches because their own body fat gets in the way. As they start to crunch up everything crunches up together. They never feel a really strong ab contraction. They get frustrated, and it’s not the way to go.
You can totally train your abs using rotational ab movements, and it’s definitely something that’s appropriate now, at this stage of the game. As far as the chest now, we have another target area that I want you to start incorporating. That is the serratus. A lot of people are thinking “Why am I training something that’s not related to the chest? ” But it is.
Even just by its own anatomical positioning here, the serratus muscle, which is activated when we push our arms away from our body, almost acts like an internal bra for men. The more you can develop