Even as a fitness instructor I had a firm belief for a while that I could effectively lose stomach fat fast by doing endless repetitions of different stomach exercises.

Of course doing stomach exercises will not only increase strength in your abdominal area, but to a certain degree you will be able to lose your stomach fat too.

Why should anyone go through such trouble if there were more effective ways to lose stomach fat fast?

A few years a go I had to stop playing sports after an injury. Having been used to a very active life and not really having to watch my diet, I suddenly realised what had happened to me. After about two years of a less active life due to my injury. I had put on 10kg of weight.

Unfortunately gaining body fat does not occur overnight, we would be able to tackle the problem immediately if it were to happen, instead putting on body fat is a process that gradually occurs.

Life gradually changes too. It is only after a while that we realise what had taken place. I think one of the worst symptoms of weight gain, is the drain of energy.

Does this sound familiar to you? This is what happened to me, once energetic, I have now become a sluggish overweight person.

Fortunately I received a wake up call from my physician, who warned me about the dangers of overweight and especially in the abdominal area.

In the meantime my injury had no longer any effect on my ability to play sports and I started exercising regularly again.

As the summer was approaching I thought it would be a great idea to get rid of my fat stomach not to be embarrassed when I took my shirt off at the beach.

Well, I was in for an eye opener, I had thought that with my stomach exercise routines that I did before I would get rid of my stomach fat fast, but unfortunately this was not the case. My weight loss was becoming a nightmare.

Although I saw some results in the first weeks, I now had hit a plateau. The thing that bothered me the most was, the fact that I was not losing the fat around my stomach as fast as I had anticipated. My exercise routines existed mainly out of cardiotraining and special stomach exercises.

When I spoke to a friend of mine about my problem, not losing stomach fat fast enough, he gave me some interesting advice. Desperate to reach my goal before beach time I started doing what he told me.

Instead of going on long walks or slow jogging I switched to more intense body workouts and sprinting uphill or stairs in our local stadium.

I had also cut back on some of my stomach exercises. Although I was sceptical at first, the going school of thought at the time was cardio training, after about 2 weeks I started noticing a change.

For the first time I realised that I was losing not only fat faster, but the fat around my stomach was melting quicker than I had imagined in the beginning.

This gave me hope and I started adopting a complete different training schedule that was not only less time consuming, but a lot more effective.

When summer came I had not completely reached my goal, but at least my big stomach had virtually disappeared.

If you had difficulty in getting rid of your stomach fat fast, there is a solution that will work even in the most difficult cases.

So in my opinion the fastest way to lose stomach fat or weight in general would be to adopt a different approach to your training and diet:

• Less cardiotraining

• More full body workouts involving all the main joints

• More sprinting than slow jogging

• Implement more weight training in your workouts