Exercising your Love Handles

Have you been carrying around your spare tire for ages, only to see it grow from a spare to a Perelli super deluxe all-weather belt radial? Your high-performance machine could probably use a transmission overhaul if this is sounding familiar to you. Your love handles, the flabby area that hangs at your waist, is the most common area where men gain weight as they reach middle age. Love handles are notoriously stubborn and like to hang in there for the long haul. What can you do about it?

Maintaining a fit body is a combination of proper diet, exercise, getting plenty of sleep, drinking lots of water and living a healthy lifestyle. I am sure it’s no surprise to you, as you sit there hunched over at your computer eating a bag of Doritos and sipping on a Coke, that most of the population is lacking on complete total body fitness. Sedentary lifestyles and lack of exercise can wreak havoc on our bodies and mental state. If you want to change the tire, you have to first unscrew the lug nuts and that means disassembling your poor eating habits and popcorn bowl-to-mouth exercise regime and starting to build a program of good health.

Good health starts with good nutrition and eating right. Combining a healthy diet with exercise will take you on the road to physical fitness and working out your love handles will be a side effect of better overall health.

A program of intense cardiovascular exercise such as running, swimming, biking or any activity that gets the heart racing and burning fat will get you in good shape.

In addition to cardio training five times a week, you should work out the abdominal muscles with a daily series of crunches and oblique exercises. Spot training the abdominals alone won’t rid the body of unsightly, bulging love handles but it will strengthen the underlying muscle to tighten up the stomach once the fat is burned off.

So you have six-pack abs and a killer body but a little extra fat hanging from your middle? Don’t sweat it, you’re probably the only one who knows. While everyone else is appreciating your muscle tone and you’re thinking about your love handles, remember that some people like “more cushion for the pushin’”.