Question 029: Love-handles
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Abdominal exercises will strengthen and tighten the abdomen, but they will necessarily make the waist and love handles any smaller. Spot reducing is not possible; if it worked, tennis players would have one skinny arm and shoulder and one normal size arm since they only use one arm for hours at a time.
Regular FIT (Frequent, intense, and long time) exercises and proper diet will cause fat loss over the entire body. Over time, the waist size will be reduced but the love handles are there for life. Once they appear, they never go away. You could lose half your body weight, but when you look in a mirror—there they are—not as big, but still big in relation to the thinner body. Moreover, to add salt to the wound, abdominal exercises make the underling muscle bigger, which adds to the size of the love handles.
To perform bicycle abdominal exercises:
- Lie on your back.
- Interlock hands behind the neck.
- Pull both knees toward the chest.
- Push one leg out to full extension, parallel to the floor, as if pushing on the pedal of a bicycle.
- At the same time, twist the upper body and touch the elbow on the same side as the extended leg to the knee of the opposite leg.
- Repeat with the other leg and elbow.
- Continue doing reps with upper body doing abdominal twists as the legs pedal the “bicycle.”
- Fully extend the leg each time while touching elbow to other knee.
- Do not pull on neck with hands, use abdomen to pull elbow to knee.
- Pedal forward for half the time and backward for half the time.