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Fat Loss for Men – How to Shed Love Handles, Belly and Chest Fat

Improve your body.

Welcome to this guide for fat loss for men.

Jeff from Athlean-X explains how you can lose fat and improve your body.

“The first thing you have to realize is that all three of these areas share the common problem in that they look bad mostly because of the abundance of body fat.”

“You may even have developed muscles underneath, but as long as the fat is present you will never get a chance to see what it looks like.  This means that your priority has to be on cleaning up your nutrition.  If you refuse to eat better, no matter what else you do, you will never look better.”

First Step

“Early on however, you don’t have to get too specific with your eating.  Simply make a pass through your diet and get rid of the obvious garbage that you know is not helping your cause.” 

“Sweets, excessive alcohol, sugars, etc can all be removed and replaced with more nutritious foods.  You don’t have to necessarily worry about your macros at this point but just getting rid of the junk food and liquid calories.”

why you should not eat clean lean bulking Fat Loss for Men

Change Takes Time

“Realizing that it will take some time to see the results of these changes however, you should start chipping away at the trouble spots in another way.”

Fat Loss for Men – Belly Fat

“For the abdomen, you want to first ensure that you can properly activate the muscles in the rectus and transverse abdominis.  Most find this difficult and even when they do perform ab exercises they get frustrated at not being able to feel them.”

“Next, you want to start adding in ab training but mostly in the form of rotational ab exercises.  Instead of trying to do crunches and having the fat get in the way of the movement, you can work your abs without having to crunch.”

“Finally, you want to incorporate moves for your entire core, such as this 7-minute ab workout included below.”

Fat Loss for Men – Love Handles

“When it comes to the love handles, you want to start by working the lats.  Here especially, you want to focus on full contractions and range of motion to ensure proper development of the muscles that actually insert onto the top of the pelvis near your waistline.”

“The more you can build these muscles the greater the visual differential between your waist and your shoulders and the better the v taper.  Next add in direct ab work and finish up with direct oblique training for the best look as your diet gets dialed in.”

Fat Loss for Men – Chest

“Finally, for the chest you want to stretch it and strengthen the muscles of the rotator cuff to posturally improve the visual appearance of your chest.  From here, work the serratus anterior.”

“This will give your chest more natural underlying support will helping to visually chisel out the area underneath.  Finally, you want to make sure that as your body fat levels decrease and fat loss continues that you are working your chest in all three heads.  Use the angles of the band work as an example of how to hit the upper, lower and middle chest.”

Video

Learn More

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New Exercises to Learn

Add Nordic Curls or Reverse Hyper Extensions into your training.

Calorie Balance

Calorie balance is the ratio between calories taken in and calories expended in any one individual at any given time. It is a good idea to measure this out over the course of a week to cancel out most fluctuations, such as drinking more water.

TIP: When measuring fat loss (or muscle gain) over time, weigh yourself first thing in the morning, before you eat or drink anything. Measure your weight 2-3 times per week and record all results. This will give you a clear and consistent record of your progress.

There are 3 states of calorie balance:

  • Negative calorie balance (hypocaloric diet)
  • Calorie balance (eucaloric diet)
  • Positive Calorie balance (hypercaloric diet)

It is impossible to be in more than one of these states at any one time.

Negative Calorie Balance

A negative calorie balance will always result in weight loss. “Even though body water alterations may occasionally mask this loss of tissue, it is always going to occur, with ZERO exceptions so far discovered.”

Eucaloric Balance

A eucalorie balance means that the athlete will not gain or lose weight because they expend as many calories as they consume.

Positive Calorie Balance

A positive calorie balance means that the individual is consuming more calories than they are using.

In order to maximize your chances for muscle gain or fat loss, you must know when and how to enter a hypo, hyper, or eucaloric state.

This can be dauting at first, but help is always on hand when you want to learn more. If a diet is truly hypocaloric, it will ALWAYS result in weight loss over the medium and long term. This links back to the primary principle of weight loss that we outlined above.

To put it simply, if your weight is steadily rising, you’re hypercaloric. If your weight is stable, you’re eucaloric, and if your weight is steadily falling, you’re in a hypocaloric state.

Correct Macronutrients

The second most important factor for transforming yourself is to consume the correct macronutrients to support your body and the goals that you are working towards. These consist of proteins, carbohydrates and fats.

Having the right ratio between these three parts of your nutrition will differ depending on your exact goal, weight, sex, age, height and the way that you train.

Macronutrients

Macronutrients consist of:

  • Proteins
  • Carbohydrates
  • Fats

When it comes to macronutrients, the following points are important to consider

  • Protein is the most important macronutrient for muscle gain and retention
  • About 1g of protein per pound of body weight is best for most people
  • Healthy fats are needed for health and hormonal function
  • Healthy fats are the main macro added during massing phases and removed during cutting (fat loss)
  • Carbs are secondary to protein but very important to fuelling and recovering hard workouts
  • Higher carbs should be eaten with higher workout volumes and daily activity levels

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