I believe that men and women can lose their belly fat and get flat lower abs with fast fat loss workouts. I even believe you can “spot reduce” and lose your tummy fat with a specific type of exercise — and no, it’s not ab crunches. Plus, specific abdominal exercises can flatten your lower abs.

The classic ab crunch is generally a waste of time because the ab crunch doesn’t work the entire main ab muscle (rectus abdominis). There are other better, unique ab exercises that men and women can do to flatten their lower abs.

And if you want to lose belly fat, forget about doing long, slow boring cardio for fat loss. You’ll get more results in less time in your fat burning workouts by using interval training for fat loss. This was proven by a research study from Australia, who found that only interval training helped women lose belly fat, while doing cardio for twice as long did not!

Some of my favorite abdominal exercises can be done with just your bodyweight or need only a common exercise ball.

Here’s a list of just a few of my favorite total body ab exercises that will help you get a flat stomach (provided you combine these exercises with interval training for fat loss):

Exercise Ball Ab Rollouts

Kneel on a mat and place your clasped hands on the top of a medium sized ball. Brace your abs and slowly lean forward and roll your hands over the ball while the ball moves away from your body. Keep your body in a straight line and go as far as you can with perfect form. Contract your abs and reverse the motion to return to the upright position.

Hanging Leg Raise

Hang from a chin-up bar using an underhand grip. Brace your abs. With a slight bend in your knees, curl your hips back and raise your legs up in front of you until they are parallel to the floor. Don’t use momentum. Go slow and controlled both ways.

Side Planks

Raise your body in a straight line so that your body hovers over the mat. Keep your back straight and your hips up. Hold your abs tight. Contract them as if someone was about to punch you in the stomach, but breath normally.

Plank with Your Arms on the Ball

Place your clasped hands on the top of a medium sized ball. Keep your body in a straight line from shoulders to toes and keep your abs braced.

Plus, if you have access to a commercial gym, here are my favorite resistance exercises for your abs — to help you build a set of 6-pack abs — include:

Cable Chops

Stand sideways beside a cable stack with your right shoulder closest to the stack. Attach a handle to the highest pulley position. Grasp the handle over your right shoulder with arms extended and a slight bend at the elbow. Your knees should be slightly bent and your hips slightly pushed back. Prepare for the exercise by bracing (contracting) your abdominals from top to bottom. Without bending at the elbows any further, bring your arms down and across the body using your abs to initiate the movement. Focus on working your abs and obliques. Bring your hands across to your left hip pocket and then slowly return to the start. Perform all reps for one side and then switch.

Kneeling Cable Ab Crunches

Attach a rope handle to the top of a cable pulley system. Kneel in front of the pulley and hold the rope behind your head. Brace your abs, and curl your torso forward. Your arms should remain above your head during the crunch. Slowly return to the start position.

Do two exercises twice per week, and do intervals 3 times per week for best results.

If you are going to the gym and spending too much time while not getting the results you deserve, then you probably aren’t using the right exercises.

Over my 16 years of training and training men and women for fat loss, I’ve stumbled across the “Big 5″ movements that must be used in a total-body fat burning, muscle-building workout.

The “Big 5″ movements are guaranteed to boost your metabolism and help you lose belly fat. If you don’t have these types of exercises in your program, then you are wasting your time and money when trying to lose fat.

So I designed this workout around the Big 5, and put them into a circuit to help you get more results in less time. But first, let’s go over the Big 5 fat burning exercises…

Actually, let me clarify something. The Big 5 are not specific exercises. Instead, they are specific movements, but this allows for a huge number of exercises to be used, and therefore a lot of variety in your workouts. And don’t forget, variety is one of the 3 main principles that explain why the short, burst exercise workouts work so well.

Here are the Big 5 movements, starting with the most important of them all.

1) Squat movements

This could be a barbell squat to a dumbbell squat, it could be a deadlift because that’s the same type of movement, or it could even be a kettlebell or dumbbell swing, which is becoming a very popular exercise these days.

Kettlebells are becoming more popular for fat-burning because it’s just that movement of pushing your hips back, bending you knees, and dropping your body. You’re moving your entire body there.

The squat movement allows you to do a lot of mechanical work which is one of the keys to burning a lot of calories. So that’s the first movement in the “Big 5″. Always start your Big 5 workouts with a squat.

Please note: Lunges and split-squats also qualify as a “Squat-type” movement, even though you will also be able to use them in the Single-Leg Exercise category below. Sometimes the lines blur between movement types for such great multi-muscle exercises.

2) Pushing exercises

The next exercise to use is any type of push-up or dumbbell press or bench press or even standing shoulder press. Again, very large amount of muscle to be used in those exercises that burn a lot of calories.

Plus, using the “non-compete” principle of the short, burst exercises, by using a pushing exercise next, we let our leg muscles recover (and often our grip strength too, depending on the first movement used).

3) Pulling exercises

The next movement is any type of pulling exercise, so it could be rowing or pull-ups, dumbbell rows, seated rows, anything in a pulling motion is going to work a lot of musculature so a lot of your upper back, some of your arms, your lats, and even a little bit of your lower back if you keep that - by holding yourself in that static upright position.

This is a powerful fat burning, muscle-building movement. You could even use the deadlift at this time because it is a pulling movement. Again, often the lines blur between movement types for such great multi-muscle exercises.

And at this time, you’d have gotten about 80-90% of your results. So if you are really crunched for time, you could stick to only the first 3 movement patterns. But if you want to put the finishing touches on your body and rev up your metabolism even more, then you’ll need the last 2 pieces of the Big 5 circuit.

4) Single leg exercises

This could be a dumbbell lunge or split squat or a reverse lunge or a single leg squat, anything that works one leg at a time. Because you’re using the lower body, it’s a lot of musculature.

This is a tricky movement to do right after the Pulling movement, because your grip strength will be fatigued from the rowing or chin-ups or whatever you did. So try to use a bodyweight only single-leg exercise, such as the 1- leg squat or 1-leg lying hip extension.

This would also be a great place for a single-leg stability ball leg curl, or a single-leg exercise holding the barbell across your back. If you must use a dumbell exercise, choose the Bulgarian Split Squat or DB Step-up because less weight is needed than for lunges or split squats (and therefore less competition for grip occurs).

5) Total body ab exercises

The final movement in the Big 5 circuit could be anything from a mountain climber to a stability ball rollout, it could be using the old infomercial gadget - the Ab Wheel since that works great - or it could be a hanging knee raise. Alternatives include cable chops and cable crunches if you have access to cables in a gym.

But you’ll notice these aren’t just basic crunches. Instead, you’re working your arms, legs, and torso. That’s why you must use a total-body ab exercise to finish off the Big 5 circuit workout.

Those are all the exercises that you could use for the Big 5 movements.

Fortunately, you have an endless variety of exercises and set-ups that you can choose.

If you did those exercises, you would have a total body workout, you’d have an incredible muscle-building, fat-burning, metabolism-boosting training session and if you did that type of stuff 3 days per week and maybe did your interval training after each circuit you’d lose a lot of belly fat. Man, it would just melt right off!

That’s my Big 5 exercise movement system for building a better body.

If you want to burn fat, you want to build muscle, and you want results that are absolutely guaranteed, implement the Big 5 into your workout today.

To recap, here are the Big 5 Movements:

Squat

Push

Pull

Single Leg Exercise

Total Body Ab Exercise

The truth about cardio for fat loss is that it WILL work for some people.

However, most of those people are generally younger men, you know those guys who are in university or just out of and, therefore, also have lots of time to train, so that’s what generally works best for.

It probably works for fewer people than it doesn’t work for. In fact, some researchers/trainers believes cardio can make a woman’s thighs even fatter.

So if you’ve found your upper body getting skinnier but your thighs getting fatter after doing a cardio program, then I guarantee cardio is not the best fat burning workout for you!

Unfortunately, cardio simply does not work for most of the people reading this article, and in some of the recent research that I’ve studied, came across, I found one study from the UK that showed that when some people do cardio, they actually have an increase in their appetite.

Now to be fair, some people in this study lost a lot of weight. But some people in the study also gained weight. Imagine that! Doing exercise and gaining weight. How frustrating!

They did this study over about eight weeks and found that some people actually gained weight over an eight week cardio weight loss study and when they looked at what these people ate, they found that cardio made these people hungrier and increased their appetite, so if that’s you then cardio is not the way to go.

Another study that I came across recently showed that in men and women that had - these men and women did an hour of cardio six days per week for an entire year and they only lost six pounds of body weight on average, so that’s obviously not a very good investment of their time.

Again, the research really isn’t too supportive of long, slow cardio for fat loss and it’s certainly not as good as interval training.

There’s been two head-to-head studies of cardio and intervals and the one is almost 15 years old now and it’s from Canada and it showed that the people on the interval training lost more body fat and then just in late 2006, a study came out of Australia and it showed that a group of women doing a 15-week study, those that did 40 minutes of slow cardio three days per week didn’t lose any weight, but those doing 20 minutes of interval training three days per week actually lose belly fat.

That is the truth about cardio when it comes to research and fat loss studies and it just shows you it’s not as good as most people think.

Certainly, in the real world we see that because there’s a lot of people that don’t change their bodies even though they do six or seven hours of cardio per week. Interval training does work better for fat loss in a short amount of workout time.