While you can exercise to lose belly fat, there isn’t a specific exercise you can do which will target just the belly fat in your body. In other words: You can’t spot target specific areas to lose fat from.

Exercising specific areas of your body will target those particular muscles of course, so you can tone, firm, strengthen and grow the muscles themselves. But targeting specific muscles or muscle groups won’t necessarily help you lose the extra fat from around those same muscles.

This is why doing tons of situps or crunches every day won’t usually help you lose belly fat. All it does is help firm and tone the muscles which are underneath of your belly fat instead. To actually lose the belly fat, you must do exercises which help your body burn fat in general.

Burning belly fat is done by burning fat on your body. Since you can’t just burn fat from one area, you must instead work at burning fat all over. And the best way to burn extra fat from all areas of your body, is by increasing your metabolism.

Increasing the body’s metabolism means that you’re improving the rate and efficiency at which your body burns extra fat, calories, and other fuels it gets from the foods you eat. A body with a high metabolism rate is burning fat and calories at a faster rate than one which has a slow metabolism. And in order to lose the belly fat you’ve put on over the years, you’ll get the best results from burning more fuel than you’re consuming.

If your body is not given enough fuel to cover the amount it’s using in your day to day activities, it starts burning the stored fat reserves instead. And once you’ve gotten your body to start burning those reserves, that’s when you’ll start noticing the belly fat disappearing.

Increasing your metabolism can be done through changes in the foods you eat, through exercise and physical activity, or both. Eating foods which your body must work at to digest for example, is one excellent way to boost your metabolism. Broccoli is a food for instance, which your body spends more energy digesting when you eat it raw, than it actually gives you in the form of calories.

So if you eat 40 calories worth of raw brocolli but it takes your body 80 calories worth of energy to digest it, then you’ve essentially given your body a negative calorie state, which boosted your metabolism a little at the same time. And since your body needs more calories to digest that food than what it’s getting from the food, it must find the source of energy somewhere else. One of the things already in your body which can be burned for fuel is the stored source of fat in your stomach area.

You can also lose belly fat by increasing your metabolism with exercise… and almost any kind of exercise can work. Building up your muscles helps because muscles take more energy for the body to maintain. In other words, your body will burn more fat just because you have extra muscle for it to take care of.

Bursts of activity are excellent for burning belly fat and boosting metabolism too though, because these cause your body to quickly use up any of it’s immediate fuel reserves from recent foods you’ve eaten. And once those immediate reserves are used then it has to start taking fat from the stores around your belly instead.

There are actually many forms of exercise to lose belly fat too. These can include interval training, playing sports, doing aerobics, hiking, walking, jogging, swimming, gardening, house cleaning and others you may not think of. We’ll cover several of those in future articles.