Elevate your home workout routine and transform your core with these dynamic standing exercises, designed to strengthen and shape your midsection.
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As we age, stubborn fat around the lower abdomen and hips often becomes a persistent challenge. For many, these “love handles” appear due to decreased physical activity, hormonal changes, and a waning metabolism—truly frustrating. One thing remains certain: these love handles demand action if they’re to disappear.
According to Domenic Angelino, MS, MPH, CSCS, CPT, Chief Exercise Scientist at FitCraft, “Love handles are fat deposits that lie just beneath your skin atop your muscles. Building larger muscles won’t remove them; they’ll merely stretch over a wider area, reducing visibility slightly. Ultimately, the best strategy for tackling love handles is engaging in exercises that swiftly burn calories, making fat loss more achievable.”
In our conversation with Angelino, he disclosed the optimal approach to tackling these persistent fat pouches. To set you on the right path, he presents four effective standing exercises that promise to tackle love handles more efficiently than your standard gym workout routine after 60.
Angelino elaborates, “Standing exercises targeting the core are generally simpler compared to their counterparts requiring you to lie on your back. They also provide the advantage of prioritizing calorie expenditure, which is far more effective at reducing body fat and minimizing love handles than solely focusing on muscle training.”
With this in mind, let’s explore four effective standing exercises that can help reduce body fat and strengthen your midsection.
Standing High Knee March
“This exercise is a great blend of burning a lot of calories and involving your abdominal muscles. You’ll go through a relatively large range of motion as you lift your legs up with each step. This allows it to target your muscles in a way that can increase their strength,” Angelino tells us.
- Stand tall with your feet placed shoulder-width apart and your knees soft.
- Make sure your spine is long and your arms are crossed high in a “genie” position.
- Then, lift one knee up toward your chest.
- Lower it.
- Lift the other knee up toward your chest.
- Continue to alternate in a marching fashion.
Standing Cross-Arm Toe Touch
“This exercise is helpful because it allows you to work on your flexibility while also using your core muscles to lift your body back up from a bent forward position. It’s great because it’s highly functional and achieves multiple important things at once, making it very time efficient,” Angelino explains.
- Start standing tall with your feet placed hip-distance apart and arms reaching out to your sides.
- Activate your core and maintain slightly bent knees.
- Hinge at the hips and allow your torso to slightly rotate as you reach your right hand down toward your left foot.
- Use control to return to standing.
- Repeat on the other side and continue to alternate.
Standing Jog In Place
“This is a great exercise for burning a lot of calories. Because it doesn’t involve bringing your legs through a large range of motion, you can take a lot of steps before you get tired and burn out,” Angelino says. “Your core helps stabilize you while you jog, and this will translate to helping strengthen core muscles that are important for daily activities like walking.”
- Begin standing tall with your feet hip-distance apart and arms at your sides.
- Activate your core and maintain a tall chest.
- Start to alternate taking quick steps in place, lifting one foot and then the other.
- Gradually pick up the pace until you are jogging in place.
- Continue to do so for the prescribed time.
Goblet Squat
“This might seem a bit unconventional for the goal here, but it’s effective at increasing core strength by targeting your lower back muscles while you’re essentially transitioning from sitting to standing,” Angelino explains. “It helps you get used to using your core muscles to keep your back upright in a healthy way, strengthening them in a way that can reduce back pain. This exercise involves using free weights, like a dumbbell or kettlebell, and that means you can keep progressing as you get stronger.”
- Stand tall with your feet slightly wider than shoulder-width.
- Grasp a dumbbell or water bottle with both hands, holding the weight in front of your chest with your elbows pointing down and tucked in.
- Hinge at the hips and bend your knees to squat, keeping the weight in place.
- Squat as far as you can with a straight back.
- Push through your heels to return to the starting position.