If you don't work out regularly and watch your diet, you can accumulate fat around the stomach, waist and butt. Strength-training exercises can shape and tone these problem areas. Strengthening the muscles of your midsection, or core, benefits more than just your appearance. Because these muscles help you maintain good posture and also serve to stabilize your body in many different movements, exercising your midsection may prevent injuries and improve back health and athletic performance.

Fat Reduction

Unfortunately, there is no such thing as "spot reduction." No matter how much you work out, you can't lose fat from a specific location by exercising the underlying muscles. Where you deposit and lose fat are due to age, gender and genetic predisposition. However, butt, waist and stomach exercises will make the muscles in your problem areas firmer and more compact. Also, because muscle is more metabolically active than fat, increasing your muscle mass increases your metabolic rate.

Stomach Exercises

The most effective exercises for abdominal muscles, according to a study sponsored by the American Council on Exercise, are the bicycle maneuver, captain's chair exercises and exercise ball crunches. The bicycle maneuver is an exercise that involves lying on your back and first touching your left elbow to your right knee and then your right elbow to your left knee. To work the rectus abdominis muscle on the capatain's chair, start with both legs straight, and bend your knees uintil your thighs are parallel to the floor. For an exercise ball crunch, start seated on the ball with your legs flat on the floor, and your body lying back against the exercise balland then sit up.


The oblique muscles run along your sides and help define your waist. Emphasize the obliques with side-to-side or twisting motions. Do standing side bends by standing with your legs shoulder width apart and leaning directly to one side and then the other. Twist from side to side while holding your pelvis still to work oblique and back musles. Do exercise ball crunches twisting to the side as your sit up to focus the obliques. On the captain's chair, rather than raise your knees directly forward, lift them at an angle so that you finish with your thighs at a 30- to 45-degree angle rather than directly in front of you.


Tone the major muscles of your buttocks with compound exercises such as deadlifts, squats, lunges, side lunges, leg presses and Roman chair back extensions. To isolate outer thigh and buttocks muscles use hip abductor machines.

About the Author


Photo Credits

  • Digital Vision./Digital Vision/Getty Images