If you have come back from holiday carrying a few extra pounds and have made a promise to yourself to exercise more and improve your fitness, we have some good news for you. Leading trainer Matt Roberts, is that it’s not all about doing hundreds of sit-ups – in fact, to take inches off your belly, you don’t have to do any sit-ups at all.
“Reducing your waist size through exercise is about taking steps to reduce fat and build muscle, which will improve your body composition over the long term,” says Roberts, who has trained the likes of David Cameron, Naomi Campbell and Amanda Holden.
In 2019, he founded Evolution, two London gyms where he collaborates with physiotherapists, dietitians and other experts to deliver a whole body service combining evidence-informed practice and innovation.
“When clients want waist reduction, we will do regular Dexa scans on their bodies to measure visceral fat throughout their programmes so we know what we are doing is working to reduce it.” Here are some of the key things that work to reduce waist size for Roberts’ clients.
Do Zone 2 training four times a week for 40 minutes
Where the last decade has been all about high-intensity interval training or HIIT, where you alternate periods of high and low intensity, Zone 2 training is about long periods spent doing cardio at a medium intensity. It’s where more and more trainers are pointing if fat burn is the goal.
“To reveal your waistline you need to burn the fat on it and one of the best ways to do that is 40 minutes of Zone 2 training four times weekly,” Roberts advises.
This could be a brisk walk, rowing, bicycling, hiking, the cross trainer or a dance or spin class – anything that gets you moving and breathing harder. But not too hard. “Zone 2 training is done at 60-65 per cent of your maximum heart rate.” You can calculate that for yourself here. If you wear an activity monitor, Zone 2 is usually the green fat-burning zone (Zone 3 is orange and 4 and above are red).
“It can get a bit boring to sit on the bike/walk or whatever at the one speed and not deviate but I just watch a TV show on my phone,” says Roberts. “It’s really something everyone should be doing for fat burn, regardless of their fitness levels.”
What else is going on though? “This training gets your mitochondria functioning better so your body becomes more of a fat-burning furnace as you go about your life, not just in the gym,” says Roberts. Your mitochondria are the energy-producing powerhouses in all your cells, and Zone 2 training increases their efficiency so you burn more fat even at rest. “Zone 2 helps adapt to burning fat for energy instead of glycogen (sugar), which is the body’s first response,” Roberts explains. “By going for 40 minutes or more, you’re moving into the fat-burning range.”
Build the big-burn muscles
Visceral fat around your middle is hard to shift, so you need to press all the buttons you can to increase your body’s day-to-day fat burn capacity and as a result, your metabolism. “To build your body’s fat-burn efficiency you need to build up the large muscle groups as these are the ones that demand the most calorie burn,” says Roberts.
Your basal metabolic rate (BMR) is the energy your body needs to maintain basic physiological processes such as breathing, circulation and cell maintenance, even when you’re at rest. Your BMR is the number of calories your body needs to perform these processes. “Strong bodies need more energy, so your aim is to build some strength,” says Roberts. Muscle tissue is metabolically active, which means it burns more calories than fat while you’re at rest, thus increasing your BMR. It’s the key reason trainers insist you add strength training to any programme of weight management.
For two to four days a week, do 30-60 minutes of strength training, Roberts suggests. Focus on exercises that build the biggest muscles in your body – the quadriceps, hamstrings, glutes, chest and back – for maximum at-rest burn. “To use the major muscle groups in your workout, make sure you include squats, deadlifts and lunges for the lower body muscle groups and bench press, rows and pull-down work for the upper body,” Roberts suggests. “Lifting the heaviest you can is ideal for muscle building [and women don’t worry, it’s incredibly difficult to get ‘big’] at a weight where you can only complete five reps.’ If that’s not your thing, you can also use bands or your own body weight to build muscle too.
“Remember too, that any strength exercise you do will be engaging your core, from squats to bench presses, so make sure you’re really tensing and holding in your abdominal muscles to get maximum effect,” says Roberts.
Now sculpt
For waist size changes you need fat-burning. Then, once the waist starts to reveal itself, you can start sculpting to create more strength in the mid area with exercises like planks, side planks with arm reaches and leg raises and core mobility work. These give you some waistline tensing and firming and an increase of muscle in the mid-torso area, says Roberts.
“Rotational work with cables or bands is also really helpful for sculpting the waist – try woodchoppers with a ball or cables, which really engage and overload the abdominals and the oblique muscles at the side of the torso as well as the lower back – so it works the whole core which extends right around your middle.”
Ditch the sit-ups
