My Abdomen Area Is Flabby. Any Advice on Exercise to Tighten It Up?

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My abdomen area is flabby. Any advice on exercise to tighten it up? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times Times best selling author, celebrity nutrition expert and fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert Ann Marie Adamowicz. I hope I said that right. Anne Marie on Facebook says my abdomen area is flabby. Any advice on exercise to tighten it up? I've been on a Ltd. Protein 4 1/2 pound ounces lunch and dinner, 2 cups of veggies each meal and 2 fruits per day, 80-90oz of water, tea, black coffee per day. And she's lost nearly £15 for the last three weeks. Lots of inches everywhere but the belly area is just hanging and flabby. Now I know there's no one exercise for this area, but which ones would be the best? Jj, please help. Well, how could I say no when you ask that way? All right, there are some things you can do here. I'll be right back with the answer. Stay tuned.

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Okay, so the first question here on the abdomen area being flabby is, is it skin or is it fat? Now here's the good news. If it's fat, that, that, that fat right above your right on top, like right below the skin above on top of the muscle. It's called brown adipose tissue and it's actually the easiest to burn. So we're always going to start first with diet. And it sounds like you're doing a lot of good things with your diet. You probably could have a little bit more protein and up your, your fat intake. Because I was like, where is your fat intake? So let's get some fat. You need to eat fat to burn fat, right? And then throw in some intermittent fasting. So that would be my first thing is let's take it down to bringing in some two a day meals. Instead of eating three times a day, throw in some intermittent fasting. Get some better fat in there. Especially easy to burn fat like omega 3s. Okay, now that's number one. Number two, so let's work on your exercise. And it sounds like you've been losing weight, but you're not thrilled on your belly fat. Again, I'm looking at diet first to help with that. And that's where sugar impact diet. Making sure sugar's not seeking in anywhere. Getting good healthy fats and then also starting to shrink the eating window can help. But now let's talk exercise. All right, so first thing I love is high intensity interval training. I say burst to blast fat for a reason because it's gonna help you burn off that fat and Create a caloric deficit. So that's the first one. But let's think specifically what we're gonna do about that area. And yes, while it's true, you cannot spot reduce, you can't say, you know what, I'm gonna do a ton of sit ups cause that's gonna burn that belly fat. Nope, it does not work that way. You lose fat systemically, not in a spot. However, you build muscle and it's like you just created your metabolic spanx because muscle holds everything in tighter. So while you can't burn the fat off specifically, and we're gonna do that through resistance training, high intensity interval training and the right diet. And again, remember that diet. I wanna see some good fats in that diet. Right? And adding in the intermittent fasting. Let's look at what you can throw in to your workouts to help tighten everything up. And again, create the metabolic spanx. Now shout out to my fast fitness program that I created because it's fast. Yay. And there's a whole part in there about this specific area. I talk about the core. Four, four different areas in your body that you want to work on. One of them being your power core. And that is both your abs and your back muscles. You do not want to work one without the other. If you got super, super strong on your abs, you would have problems with your back. So you gotta work em both together. That's the first thing to think about is we want to work both. But when I think about power core, I'm gonna throw some exercises out and again I go through these, I show you how to do these in the fast fitness program. And you can also, of course you can go on YouTube and go, well, what the heck is she talking about? I wanna go look. So first thing I would tell you is get yourself one of those big fitness balls and one that you could sit on and you'd have your knees and hips at a right angle. That's the right height for you. For most people that's probably a 55 centimeter one. I'm six feet tall, I need a 65er. So do that. Because what's great about doing abs using one of those fitness balls is you can go past where you could on the floor pre stretch your abdominals and now they work harder. So that's super awesome. So love doing sit ups on those balls. So that's the first thing you is doing that. Now when you're thinking about your abdominals, you want to realize that you have a couple different things going on here. We have your. Your long abs. Those go from, like, basically where your pubic bone, you know, the bottom down there all the way up to your top ribs. And those make you crunch together. And then you've got your deep abs, which are what everybody thinks is your lower abs. They're really deep and they're under. They're underneath the. The big rectus abdominis. And then you've got these side abs that help you do twisting and side bends. And a lot of the side bend stuff also happens from the muscles in your spine, so you want to work all of them. And so a couple things that I love. I love planks. And so that's one thing. There's this. This thing called a stealth trainer. Stealth trainer. That is the hardest way to do planks you'll ever do. But it makes it fun, it gamifies it. You might want to check that out, but planks are a great one. Yoga. There's so many great core exercises in yoga. Oh, my gosh. I love just simple crunches where you're lifting up both your tailbone and your shoulder blades. I love soccer sit ups. It's another one you can look up. And of course, abs over the ball. And there's so many of those that you can do. You can also, and I just had the experience of doing this, planks on the trx. Holy moly. Next one, working your back. And when you're working your back, you get bonus points because you're working your glutes and hamstrings, too. Stiff leg deadlifts, back extensions, you can do that over the ball. Superman or Superwoman. So those are some things that you can do. But the big takeaway there is make sure that you're working both your abdominals and your back extensor muscles, too. They work together and. Well, they work together. But when you're working your abs, your back extension extensors are basically taking a break. When you're getting back extensors, your abs are taking a break, but you can't strengthen one a whole lot without strengthening the other. It would put you out of balance, which would be bad. But the big takeaway here is build that muscle, because it's going to hold everything in tighter, and you'll like that better. Plus, it's great for having a great core. All right, thanks for the question.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert.

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