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Can You Really Shrink Your Waist with Ab Workouts? Here’s A Quick Research Review
If you’re active on social media, you’ve probably come across fitness sensations like Chloe Ting, Alexis Ren, and Daisy Keech, who have become famous for their abdominal-centric workouts aimed at trimming down waistlines. It’s hard to miss the success stories, too — people flaunting reduced waist sizes in just a couple of weeks. This leads to an intriguing question: Do these ab workouts genuinely shrink your waist? Is it feasible to witness such changes in as little as two weeks?
The workout above is a dynamic HIIT routine, specifically designed to cause hypertrophy of your abdominal muscles. Having personally tested this workout, I can vouch for its difficulty, but did all the sweating and shaking do anything for my waistline?
So, what’s the deal with ab workouts and waist-shrinking? Does a good ab workout lead to a spot reduction of fat around your waistline? The short answer is no, but the long answer is kind-of-maybe-under-certain-circumstances. A study¹ from 2017 delved into ‘spot reduction’ (AKA localized fat loss). This particular research focused on the effects of resistance training on one muscle group (either arms or legs), followed by cardio, over an eight-week period. The findings hinted at a slight link between targeted training in a specific area and increased fat loss in that region. This small uptick in fat loss might be attributed to increased heat and blood circulation in the worked-out area. However, it’s important to remember that the study was relatively small and the participants were leaner on average than those typically seen in weight loss studies.
In the case of the #chloetingchallenge, what’s likely happening is that participants are reducing their overall body fat percentage, which in turn diminishes the fat volume on their bodies, including around the waist. Two weeks might seem like a brief period for weight loss, but consider this scenario: a 125lb woman with 24% body fat loses 4 lbs of fat in two weeks. This drop would bring her body fat down to 20%. It’s no surprise, then, that some already slender women see dramatic results from this challenge.
While fat loss can indeed slim down the waist, what about the impact of muscle gain? Does an increase in abdominal muscle volume not…
