That was a question a client recently asked.

His heart was in the right place. He wants to get rid of his gut and love handles, and wanted to know the best love handles exercise.

I don't know if he liked my answer at first, but once I explained it, he got the point and was pretty satisfied, at least I think he was.

When it comes to love handles exercise, there really is no such thing as "the best" love handles exercise.

There are lots of exercises that work the area of the love handles, but even they don't delier much benefit as it directly pertains to losing the fat that makes up the love handles.

Sure you could do some oblique crunches, twists, etc. as a love handles exercise, but to be quite honest, they won't do that much when it comes to actually losing your love handles.

You need to focus on a couple things.

First, you need to switch your mentality from "the best love handles exercise" to doing full body abs exercises and full body fat loss workouts.

That doesn't mean you need to spend all your free time in the gym. Actually, it means quite the opposite.

Because when you work your entire body in your fat loss workouts and do full body abs exercises, you are able to drastically cut down on the total time you need to spend exercising.

So, when it comes to a love handles exercise, I would have you doing exercises like push-up variations including spiderman push-ups, "T" push-ups, medicine ball push-ups, etc.

I would also have you doing full body abs exercises like mountain climbers, or you could do cross body mountain climbers as they put a little bit more emphasis on the love handle area and actually count as a love handles exercise.

I would also have you doing exercises like overhead squats and lunges. Doing those variations of squats and lunges, put extra emphasis on the "core" which includes the love handles, so you not only work your legs and shoulders, you're also working your abs, core and love handles, making those two leg exercises very good love handle exercises.

One thing that usually gets overlooked when it comes to love handles exercise and losing stomach fat is nutrition.

Most people just don't want to worry about their nutrition as it pertains to losing fat. They would rather "out exercise a bad diet", but that really is impossible.

If you want to lose fat, more specifically, if you want to lose your love handles, you need to spend some time cleaning up your diet.

You should totally eliminate all processed grains. So things like white bread, crackers, chips, white pasta, white rice, etc. are out.

Focus instead on getting your carbohydrates from fruits and vegetables and whole grains. Bring some fruit with you to work to have as a snack, or leave an apple in your car to have on the drive home.

Eat at least 1 vegetable with every meal...and don't ruin it by loading it up with some sort of dressing.

You should also make sure you eat breakfast every morning. Start your day off right with a fat burning smoothie, or an omelet with vegetables in it and whole wheat toast and real fruit juice. Or if you're a cereal person, just make sure it's a high fiber cereal that doesn't include a lot of processed grains.

And when it comes to cardio as a form of love handles exercise, stick with interval training rather than boring, moderate-intensity cardio.

Interval training, when done properly, keeps you burning fat for hours upon hours after you're done while the fat burning from steady-state cardio pretty much stops when you stop. Plus it's very boring and takes way too long to complete.

Interval training will have you done with your cardio workout in around 15-20 minutes and only needs to be don a few times a week.

It's an excellent love handles exercise that you should incorporate today.

If you follow even 2 of the 3 love handles exercise tips I gave you, you will be well on your way to losing stomach fat, and more importantly, the love handles within weeks.

Don't wait. Start right now.

Copyright (c) 2008 Ed Scow