Spot reducing fat – it works – but not really

Everyone knows that spot reduction has been proven not to work in multiple studies, repeated time and time again. You simply can not train one body part “spot reduce” the total amount of fat it’s carrying, without an overall fat reduction. If this were possible, cyclers would have ripped legs and relatively normal looking upper bodies, kayackers would have ripped upper bodies and completely normal legs (which are essentially immobalized during their sport). But the most recent study on this phenomena actually suggested that you can lose upper body fat by training just one leg (although you won’t lose fat in that leg!!).

Seven men and 4 women (aged 23 6 1 years) trained their nondominant leg for 12 weeks, at 3 sessions per week, consisting of a single set of 960–1,200 repetitions (!!!) on the leg press, at 10–30% of their one repetition maximum. Before and after training, body mass, bone mass, bone mineral density (BMD), lean mass, fat mass, and fat percentage were recorded. After 12 weeks,  body mass, bone mass, BMD, lean mass, or body fat percentage were not significantly changed…but body fat mass decreased by 5.1%, with a significant decrease in fat mass in the upper extremities and trunk. Which is, minimally, counterintuitive, right?

So these people literally trained one leg and instead of seeing changes in that leg, they lost fat mass off their upper body! The scientists concluded that training one leg (for a bazillion reps, 3x a week, for 12 weeks) can reduce overall bodyfat, but not in that leg. Which seems to make sense, since doing that many reps is going pretty far into the cardio zone, so regardless of whether it’s unilateral training, it’s going to have some kind of fat reducing effect on the entire organism.