Exercises to reduce stomach and back fat

How to do a Turkish get-up: Holding one kettlebell by the handle with both hands, lie on your side in a fetal position. Roll onto your back and press the kettlebell up toward the ceiling with both hands until the weight is stable on one loaded side. Release your free arm and free leg to a degree angle with your palm facing down.

Slide the heel of the loaded side closer to your butt to firmly grip the floor. Pushing through the foot on the floor, punch the kettlebell up with the loaded arm and roll onto your free forearm. Don't shrug your shoulder toward your ear with the supporting side. Be sure to keep your chest wide open. Straighten the elbow on the ground and lift yourself up to a seated position. Weave your front leg through to the back.

To protect your knees, your shin on the back leg should be perpendicular to your shin on the front leg. Perfectly align your arms: wrist over elbow, shoulder over elbow over wrist. Raise your torso to make your upper body erect. Swivel your back knee so that your back shin is parallel with your front shin. Get a grip on the floor with your back toes, then take a deep breath, and stand up.

Phelps suggests adding a medicine ball to your burpee to increase the intensity of the exercise and boost your metabolism —all while building a sleek set of six-pack abs. How to do medicine ball burpees: Standing with your feet shoulder-distance apart, hold a medicine ball with both hands. Extend the ball up overhead, then slam the ball down on the ground as hard as you can, hinging over and sitting your butt back as you slam. As you hinge over, bend your knees. Place your hands on the ground outside of your feet and jump back into a high-plank position. Keep your body in a straight line.

Then, jump your feet back towards the outsides of your hands so that you are squatting. Pick up the ball and press it overhead, extending your body and standing tall. The sprawl is basically a burpee on steroids—a full body exercise that works as many muscles as possible and burns calories while shaping and toning upper- and lower-body, especially your abs.

What is belly fat?

How to do a sprawl: Standing with your feet shoulder-distance apart, squat down and place your hands on the ground. Jump your feet back to a plank and lower your body to touch the ground. Push yourself up to a plank and then jump your feet outside of your hands into a squat. Stand back up.

On the surface, the obliques, hamstrings, quads, biceps, and shoulders are the primary movers of this exercise. Doing side-to-side ball slams versus overhead slams incorporates more oblique ab work. How to do lateral medicine ball slams: Stand with your feet about shoulder-width apart with the medicine ball on one side. Pick up the ball and simply rotate your body as you slam the ball a few inches away from your pinky toe.

Make sure to pivot your feet and bend the back knee as you come into a split squat position to catch the ball on one bounce. Alternate sides.

Make sure you tighten your core as you bring the ball overhead and to the side. Overhead medicine ball slams strengthen your core as it works against gravity. This exercise also tests your endurance, getting your heart rate up each time you pick the ball up and bring it overhead. To get the most out of this exercise, be sure to use a heavy weighted ball.

How to do overhead medicine ball slams: Standing tall with your feet hip-width apart, hold a medicine ball with both hands. Reach both arms overhead, fully extending your body. Slam the ball forward and down toward the ground. Squat to pick the ball up and then stand back up. The Russian twist is a core exercise that improves oblique strength and definition, explains DiVecchio.

The move, typically performed with a medicine ball or plate, involves rotating your torso from side to side while holding a sit-up position with your feet off the ground. How to do Russian twists: Sit up tall on the floor with your knees bent and feet off the ground. Hold a medicine ball with your hands at chest height.

Lean backward with a long, tall spine, holding your torso at a degree angle and keeping your arms a few inches away from your chest. From here, turn your torso to the right, pause and squeeze your right oblique muscles, then turn your torso to the left and pause to squeeze your left oblique muscles. The movement should come from your ribs and not your arms.

You know that your cardio sessions are crucial when it comes to burning the layer of fat sitting on top of your abdominal muscles. But it's still important to work those abs even as you're trying to shed fat, says New York City-based personal trainer Adam Sanford, founder of Adam Sanford Fitness. His favorite move to do that? Holding plank on a BOSU ball. It's more challenging than a normal plank where your hands are on the floor, because the BOSU tests your balance, says Sanford.

Strengthening these core muscles also helps increase your metabolism , ultimately helping you to burn more calories and fat. Hold the plank for 30 to 45 seconds, increasing the time as you get stronger.

Running at an incline rather than on a flat surface has been shown to increase total calorie burn by as much as 50 percent, says Jill Penfold , a Los Angeles-based personal trainer. Whether you're outside on a hill or at the gym on an inclined treadmill, start out walking for five to 10 minutes, suggests Penfold. Try this treadmill workout: Walk or jog on an incline for five to 10 minutes. Maintain a jog for another five to 10 minutes, then pick your pace up again and start running.

Spend five minutes running, then drop your pace back down to a jog. Continue alternating with five to 10 minutes of jogging and five to 10 minutes of running for 30 to 45 minutes. Just because you may not have access to open water, it doesn't mean you can't weave this fat-blasting cardio workout into your gym routine. Not only does using a rowing machine get your heart rate way up, which helps you blast calories and burn fat, but it also works muscles in your legs, core, arms, shoulders, and back , says Penfold.

That's enough activity to kick-start fat loss and create healthy habits that last a lifetime. When you're ready, ramp up to double that recommendation — minutes of moderate cardio or minutes of vigorous cardio per week — for even more health and fat-loss benefits. From there, continue adding physical activity until you start seeing the weight-loss results you're looking for. Generally, a weight-loss rate of 1 to 2 pounds per week is considered healthy and sustainable over the long term.

Anything that gets your large muscle groups moving rhythmically for at least 10 minutes at a time is helpful for burning belly fat. That means all the cardio machines in the gym, including treadmills, stationary bikes and stair climbers; group fitness classes; swimming or water jogging; and anything you can think of outdoors that breaks a sustained sweat, from mowing the lawn to inline skating, hiking or paddling a kayak.

But when it comes to losing fat from the abdominal area, you don't necessarily have to spend all day on an exercise machine. You can make your workouts shorter by upping the exercise intensity. One proven strategy is high-intensity interval training, or HIIT: Combining short, high-intensity sprints with periods of active recovery. A meta-analysis published in the journal Sports Medicine found HIIT to be a time-effective strategy for reducing fat all over, including around the abdomen. There is some variation in exactly what's considered a proper HIIT workout but, in general, you can turn almost any cardio activity into high-intensity intervals by alternating sprints with brief recovery periods.

Keep moving during the recovery periods, just at a lower intensity than the sprint. Strength training is a critical part of any weight-loss program, for several reasons. First, building muscle burns calories, which helps with fat loss. Second, lean muscle is about four times more metabolically active than fat — which means you burn even more calories just by existing. And third, although you can't spot reduce any "trouble areas" in your midsection, strength training will help create a firm, sculpted physique that becomes visible as excess fat melts away.