Can you lose fat from one area?
Barely: training a muscle does not meaningfully slim the fat over it, and the trials that found any local effect found a small one.
Fat is used as fuel from all over the body, not from the area you are working. In the cleanest tests, training one limb or the abdominals left the fat there unchanged, while fat came off elsewhere as well.
A few trials do report a small local effect, so the question is not fully settled. What is settled is the size: a few hundred grams at most, against the kilos that come off through a calorie deficit.
So “toning” an area comes down to two things: losing fat across the body, and building the muscle underneath, which changes the shape of that area.
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- Vispute, S.S. et al. (2011). The effect of abdominal exercise on abdominal fat. J Strength Cond Res 25(9). Six weeks of daily abdominal work, diet held steady: no change in abdominal fat, only better muscular endurance.
- Ramírez-Campillo, R. et al. (2013). Regional fat changes induced by localized muscle endurance resistance training. J Strength Cond Res 27(8). Twelve weeks of one-legged training: fat fell in the arms and trunk, not in the trained leg.
- Kostek, M.A. et al. (2007). Subcutaneous fat alterations resulting from an upper-body resistance training program. Med Sci Sports Exerc 39(7). 104 people trained one arm: MRI showed fat loss spread over the body, while skinfolds suggested a local effect in men only.
- Brobakken, M.F. et al. (2023). Abdominal aerobic endurance exercise reveals spot reduction exists: a randomized controlled trial. Physiol Rep 11(22). The other side: 16 men, matched energy use, and the abdominal group lost about 700 g more trunk fat than the running group.