Can't Lose Your "Love Handles"? (THIS ALWAYS WORKS)

[00:00] Any discussion of losing body fat or specifically was going on down here in terms of the love handles is gonna have to start not down here but up here. We're talking about what you're putting in your mouth. That is to take two simple numbers.

[00:13] 12 and 15, if you look in the mirror, if you have visible abs, then what you're gonna do is take your body weight and multiply it by 15. If you do not have visible abs, you take your body weight and multiply it by 12.

[00:26] And what that gives you is a simple starting point. A caloric total that you should be targeting each day so how long does this last? Just two weeks. If you fall in eating plan which should roughly be the same types of foods

[00:39] every day or so for the next two weeks, you can identify a caloric starting point that you can now start to make adjustments to that will give you the confidence of knowing you're moving in the right direction to ultimately losing those love handles and getting the physique that you want.

[00:52] I mentioned eating roughly the same foods. There's a reason why because all foods are not created equally. If you eat a steak at home, but then you go out to Applebee's and eat steak, the one you had at home is probably 500 calories

[01:05] or so grilled nicely on your backyard grill. The one at Applebee's with all the extra butter and sauces they throw on it is probably closer to 1,800 calories. So in order to be very accurate in determining what that maintenance level of calories is,

[01:17] you wanna make sure you're giving it accurate information. The other thing is something called the thermic effect of food. Proteins come in a higher cost, calorically for our bodies just to even break them down. So if you start to shift the amount of protein

[01:29] that you eat versus carbohydrates during this time, you're gonna maybe lose some of that accuracy. So again, trying to eat the same type of foods during this two week testing period is really crucial. Once you have that number, then the only thing left to do

[01:41] is just watch and see what happens. Now if you find that you're not losing weight, you just adjust your calories down by 10%. So if you're at 2,000 calories, drop them by another 200 and then once again reassess. Once you've reached a level of maintenance

[01:53] where you're not gaining or losing weight over the course of the two weeks, well then you can start to adjust from there where there'd be very aggressive by about 500 calorie deficit or so, or maybe less aggressive, 200 or 300 calories.

[02:05] The point is you can start to ensure that you're actually getting into that hypochloric state required to lose the body fat to put you on the right path to losing those love handles. Hey guys, real quick, I wanna give you something for watching this video.

[02:18] If the love handles aren't really determined by the exercises that you do, what else might be? Well, if you have a stomach that sticks out further than you wanted to, it could be that you're actually doing the wrong exercises because there's a specific muscle that will help that to be pulled back in.

[02:31] And I put together a complete routine 22 days to a flat stomach that you can have for free just by going over at the next.com slash flat stomach. I think you're gonna find it helpful. And again, it's yours totally free. Now, that's in the video. Now the good news is creating that deficit

[02:43] that's capable of giving you that tapered waistline isn't all the responsibility of what you put in your mouth, but actually the activity that's going on down here. No, Jesse, not that kind of activity.

[02:57] You actually don't have to run. As a matter of fact, you might wanna start walking some more because that's much more effective when we're talking about creating fat loss. Why? Because it's more sustainable. A lot of us find the task of running

[03:10] to be either too hard on our joints or too demanding to repeat multiple times during the week, but simply taking an extra walk throughout the day or multiple times in a week is actually much more obtainable and achievable. So what are we talking about?

[03:23] Well, 180 pound person can burn an extra 300 in 30 calories by walking for an hour at a pace of just three and a half miles per hour. That's not really that fast, but again, it's something that we can easily do.

[03:35] You can take the stairs or you can park your car further away. We can deliberately try to get more steps in our day, realizing that with every extra step we take, we're burning a few additional calories that will help to contribute to that deficit

[03:48] that is required to help you to get to those leaner levels of body fat. Now I know what you're thinking, but Jeff, doesn't the extra intensity of the hit training actually lead to more calories burned? That's actually not how it works because even if it took a hard exercise,

[04:01] one of the hardest, a burpee, and performed it for a minute, you're gonna burn 15 calories, which is much more than you do in a minute of walking, but how many minutes are you sustaining burpees for? Like could you even do burpees for 10 minutes straight?

[04:15] Likely not. So the 10 minutes at 15 calories burned is only 150 calories burned, whereas again, we talked about 330 in a more sustained low intensity effort like walking. And this is actually easier work,

[04:27] so it's more likely you can actually do it. Now what if there was a cheat code or a hack that allowed you to visually attack that waistline of yours through exercise that didn't involve a single exercise for your waistline?

[04:39] Specifically, no side bends. Don't ever do a side bend. What I'm talking about here guys, is actually fixing the appearance of that waistline of yours by visually creating a wider physique

[04:51] through the use of exercises that target your shoulders, specifically your middle delts, and your lats, so you get more of that visible V taper from the top to the bottom. You actually create what we call this Dorito chip shape.

[05:03] And the reason we get this is because we get the middle delts becoming more prominent and we get that tapering with down towards the waistline from a well developed set of lats. We're gonna need to do some exercises that do that.

[05:16] And some of my favorite ways to target the middle delts are simply with lateral raises. And there's a lot of ways we can do this. We can either do it with lighter weights with more focused tension on the delts by performing slower repetitions with really good form

[05:29] and no substitution with other muscle groups or we can do something more explosive and powerful like a cheat lateral when it comes to the back. You're gonna wanna focus on the exercises that actually train more of the lats rather than the upper back or the thickness of the back.

[05:43] And these exercises are really more of those vertical pulling exercises like a lap pull down or an underhand pull down or even a pull up or a variation of a pull up. You can even do exercises like the row

[05:55] as long as you're keeping that elbow tucked tight to your side or even something more lat-specific like a straight arm push down. All these exercises do a great job of training the lats to give you more of that visible V taper.

[06:08] And again, create that illusion at least while you're working on the rest of the steps here to get a more broad top and more tapered waistline that will get you liking more of what you see in the mirror while you move on to step four.

[06:21] And so step four is where a lot of you let's face it probably skip four or two because you wanted to find out how to deal with this right here. Again, it starts with all the stuff we discussed already. But if this wasn't a museum,

[06:33] this would be the part you'd likely focus on. Your eyes would go right here and there's a reason for it because a six pack kind of tends to do that. Look, even somebody with definitive love handles looks instantly better when you start to etch in some abs

[06:45] because visibly they actually happen to soften the appearance of those softer love handles by giving you something else to look at. But they also do something much more important than that. This right here becomes the inspiration

[06:57] to keep going in order to get to the point where you can actually lose those love handles. See, what men experience is something called top down fat loss. Meaning when we start to lose weight, we start to see it first in our face

[07:10] and then in our neck and then usually through our chest and then it starts to work its way down into that upper row of abs. And when you can even start to see just that top row, you become inspired to keep going

[07:22] because a lot of us stop long before that point. Do you ever see that cartoon of the two diamond miners where they're digging away trying to get to the diamonds? One's only about halfway there but he's really eagerly going and chopping away. Whereas the one on the bottom is quitting,

[07:35] not knowing that he was only about six inches away from finally hitting Peter, you don't wanna be that guy. So what does that mean? We need the inspiration. Nobody keeps going without something that continues to drive them.

[07:47] And as you start to see that top row of abs, it really behooves you to make sure that you're doing something to train the abs so that they actually look good. So this is where you wanna start doing some ab exercises. So we're talking about exercises like a classic crunch

[07:59] where you're moving those shoulders towards the fixed pelvis or maybe a crunch pull down. Where once again, you're using some additional weight here but you're moving towards a fixed pelvis or even something like a power up which requires more of a sit-up

[08:12] but you're doing it once again with just moving your shoulders towards the fixed pelvis. And if you're looking to get rid of those love handles, guess what you're gonna have to train, the obliques. Because if we look at that picture of art once again, what would happen if I actually got rid of

[08:25] the frame around those abs? It just doesn't look as impressive because when it comes to the artwork, your obliques are framing in your abs. They're actually giving you that visual tapering

[08:37] that makes your abs look a lot more impressive. But as I said, you're gonna have to train them. But this is where we have a problem because a lot of people think the big myth out there that training your obliques gives you a big, thick, blocky waist. No, that's only if you're building your obliques up

[08:51] and you still have them covered by a lot of fat. Because you can see right here, when you get rid of that fat, those obliques look really, really good and really impressive. So when we're talking about training your obliques, you have to do rotational exercises.

[09:04] And I'm gonna tell you this, the faster you can move away from just the bodyweight exercises and add some resistance, the more these muscles in here are gonna respond to start shaping up and carving in and giving that really tapered waistline.

[09:16] So I'm talking about exercises like this to start where you're just using rotation either from the bottom up or from the top down, but then moving into some form of resistance like a band,

[09:28] where you could do rotational work like this. Or even using the weight of your own legs and doing hanging leg raises like this. Again, building up to this, if you can't start here, it's fine. You could actually do this exercise

[09:40] laying on the ground and still getting that rotation to work in. Anything we can do to incorporate the rotation of the pelvis while we're moving is going to help us to start training those obliques. Now, here's the other thing I don't want you to do.

[09:52] Don't be one of those diamond digger quitters, right? Because remember what I said? It's this area that's the last to come off. You could lose all the fat from here and it starts to work its way all the way down. It's that stubborn area around your waistline

[10:05] that's so hard to get rid of. But don't quit. Use the motivation you got from starting to see some of the progress elsewhere and some of these tricks to visually taper in that waistline to keep you motivated to keep going, to keep digging and chipping away until you hit that pager

[10:19] because ultimately there's nobody walking the face of the earth that's genetically disposed to always having fat all around their waist. If you stick to the plan, this fat is not unlike any other fat in your body, it will ultimately come off

[10:32] and when it does, you'll look much better for it. If you're looking for more help on nutrition, then make sure you check out this video over here where I cover two strategies to help you actually speed up your fat loss. And if you're looking to pair down those ab exercises to just two, then check out the only two ab exercises

[10:45] you need here. Guys, remember to turn your notifications and subscribe if you haven't already done so. Check out our full programs and meal plans available over at ATHLEANX.COM. All right guys, good luck.