Food and Beverage

If so much doubt may be cast on laboratory experiments, does this mean that they should be ignored? Certainly not, because meticulously designed experiments can be of enormous benefit to the furtherance of knowledge. It is just vital that one carefully examines all research findings before religiously quoting or applying them, especially in the light of the most extensive practical experience in the same fields.

If we wish to assess the validity of research into local spot reduction, we must simultaneously examine the experience of the most competent practitioners. In body shaping and conditioning, we are fortunate that bodybuilding and weightlifting have provided an enormous base of experiential findings with which to evaluate research. For example, all bodybuilding competitors carry out a concentrated phase of training for definition or \’cuts\’ for several weeks before contests. Not only do they measure their food intake very carefully, but they concentrate on certain body regions to \’get ripped\’ in those deficient areas which appear to carry a little too much fat. What do they do? They do set upon set of high repetition medium resistance training which targets the offending areas. One can find their \’ripping\’ or \’cutting\’ programs in every bodybuilding magazine or book and physiques of their authors, usually prominent bodybuilders, certainly show that their programmes do work.

In other words, bodybuilders rely on training regimes both to enhance muscle mass and to increase definition (i.e. to spot reduce!), but research indicates otherwise. Is this possible? Isn\’t the difference in results between bodybuilders and ordinary gym clients who try spot reduction routines due to the restricted dieting of the former. Not necessarily, because the average client may be on an even more meagre diet. The difference may lie in the fact that bodybuilders do not simply execute unweighted sit-ups for defining the abdominals, but do them with much more concentrated effort to failure, plus other resisted routines using supersetting, forced reps, negatives and other techniques to ensure that sufficient metabolic demands are placed on the working muscles. On top of that, the bodybuilders use progressively planned programmes with each phase aimed to produce a different result, such as hypertrophy, definition and strength.

It would be interesting to undertake further research using the very demanding definition routines of serious bodybuilders to ascertain if spot reduction really works to some extent or not. The experiential observation remains that bodybuilders may have developed routines that may cause some local decrease in bodyfat, though this surely would be far less than is implied by those marketing all of those futile “fast fix” abdominal exercising devices.