Welcome to the Get Fit guys quick and dirty tips to slim down and shape up.

My name is Ben Greenfield and hopefully I'm becoming a familiar voice as you're wandering through the gym,

huffing and puffing on the treadmill or pumping dumbbells in your basement.

Now today I'm going to talk about a very controversial topic in exercise,

and that is spot reducing.

Wouldn't it be fabulous if there actually were a convenient way

to take one specific area of your body, like your butt, your abs,

the back of your arms, or your thighs,

and magically make all the fat in that

area instantly disappear? Well, that's basically what spot reducing is understood to be. But, as you may

have guessed, there is no magic wand you can wave or one special exercise you can do that will

tone a specific muscle or body part and make the fat there disappear.

If performing one exercise actually worked, then you could do just a few hundred crunches a day

and have magazine cover model washboard abs. Unfortunately, that doesn't actually work. Trust me,

I've tried. But in this episode, you'll learn the next best thing,

a method for spot reducing that involves a combination of targeted exercise and cardio. Before you

learn how to spot reduce, let's take a quick look at how fat burning actually works. The best

way to explain it goes something like this. Imagine you have a big

barrel of crude oil in the trunk of your car. Even though your car's engine uses gasoline and crude

oil is used to make gasoline, all that crude oil in your trunk isn't doing you a bit of good

unless it somehow gets converted into gasoline and put into

your engine. And your body is no different. Think of all that fat around your waistline to be like

...