Come January and there are two things I can guarantee you in any gym; that people will be on treadmills and people will be doing sit ups.  People assume that if they do enough sit ups they’ll lose weight and tone their stomach.

 

But this is a huge misunderstanding of how fat loss works.  This is called spot training, and spot training works on the principle that if you work an area your body will prioritise using the fat in that area to burn off.  But no one’s body does that. 

 

You can’t choose where your body loses fat from first, your body determines this by vital need.  It will therefore choose to burn body fat from around the neck and face, before it burns fat from around the organs.  Women will burn fat from the stomach before they lose with around the hips, because stomach fat could affect a woman’s ability to bear children.  Men will lose it from around the hips and legs before the stomach, because men are evolved to go and hunt, and hunting requires the ability to run. 

 

For either men or women, that stomach fat that everyone is desperate to lose is one of the last or the last places where body fat comes. 

 

Sit ups, then, don’t benefit this.

 

What they would benefit is toning and building out the abdominal muscles, so when you are lean enough the muscles will show in the way you want.  But that is in the second phase of training, rather than something you should concern yourself with initially.