5 Tips To Stop Arm Fat From Jiggling
If you’ve got issues with “bye-bye” arm fat–you know, the kind that keeps waving, long after you’ve stopped?–then Get-Fit Guy’s 5 tips on how to say “bye” to jiggling arms can help.
Ben Greenfield
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5 Tips To Stop Arm Fat From Jiggling
If you heard my episode How To Tone The Backs Of Your Arms, you might remember my term, “bye-bye” arms–you know, when the flapping fat on the back of your arm keeps on waving long after you’ve stopped? My mom used to call her arms “flopping fish,” and flab on the underside of the arms is also known as “lunch lady arms,” “quail flanks,” and “bingo wings.” (Thank you, Urban Dictionary.);
Regardless of what we call them, the jiggle on your arms can be a big, annoying reason for avoiding t-shirts and tank tops. In that first episode, you learned how to tone the back of your arms using moves like Narrow Grip Pushups, Tricep Pushdowns, Dips, Skull Crusher and Close Grip Bench Press.
In this episode, you’re going to get five more tips on how to stop arm fat from jiggling (based on a recent conversation that I had with health and fat loss expert JJ Virgin.)
Don’t Burn Fat, Burn Sugar
Rather than focusing on burning fat by spending long periods of time in your “fat burning zone,” you should instead focus on short, high-intensity bursts of cardiovascular intervals, which cause your metabolism to remain elevated for a long period of time after you’ve finished your workout.
In other words, your jiggly arms aren’t going to ever go away from a 60-minute treadmill walk or a 30-minute bike ride. Instead, I’d recommend doing as I describe in the episode Which Workout Burns The Most Fat. Basically. this involved doing a series of full body movements such as:
- upper body pushing
- upper body pulling
- lower body pushing
- lower body pulling
- a core movement
- a quick, 60-second burst on the bike, rowing machine, treadmill, elliptical trainer, stair climber, or jump rope, before going back into the circuit of weight training exercises
Also skip light, high-rep, low-weight exercises in favor of ones with challenging weights that require you to lift more explosively, and to use more strength than endurance.
Note that most of the fat loss won’t actually happen during your workout, but during the time you spend incorporating my next tip.
Move More
Move MoreHaving your butt planted in a chair for 8 hours a day is practically guaranteeing that you’ll never be able to fully tone your arms–no matter how hard you exercise at the beginning or end of the day.
Instead, you need to change your home or office environment to enable yourself to stand more, move more, stop for quick bursts of exercise (such as 20 squats every time you go the bathroom). and engage in light physical activity throughout the entire day, so that you are constantly burning more fat.
I have several previous episodes about how to do this, including:
7 Ways To Burn Calories By Standing More
Get Fit Guy’s Tips For Sitting Less
5 Ways To Burn Calories Without Exercising
Throw Curveballs
In the recent episode, How To Vary Your Workouts for The Best Results, I describe how your body quickly adapts to the demands that you place on it, and how if you do the same workout day after day, week after week, month after month, you simply won’t see results as quickly as you would by varying your workouts.
So, never exercise for more than 4 weeks in a row without changing up your workout style or the type of exercises that you use. If you’re usually doing a dumbbell overhead press, for examples, try it on the machine, or with barbells. Or if you’re usually doing a leg press, try doing squats or lunges. instead. Swap a cardio burst on a bicycle with one a treadmill, or increase the weight for your reps and do 8 reps for each set, instead of 10. The sky’s the limit when it comes to those curveballs!
Skip The Smoothie
Walking out of your workout and grabbing a giant post-workout juice smoothie is a fast track to jiggly arms forever. Although most people have the best intentions with juicing and really do want to improve their health, they are juicing completely wrong–and what they include in their juices actually hinders their performance and balloons their waistline. How can this be?
The problem is that people include far too much fruit in their juices. As you juice fruit, you’re stripping away the fiber and concentrating the sugars from many, many servings of fruit into a single serving of juice. Just try it sometime and see how many freakin’ apples it takes to make just a tiny fraction of apple juice!
The digestion of liquids (like concentrated fruit juice) occurs significantly more quickly than digestion of solid foods. This means that all that fructose sugar you’re putting into one place and consuming in a short period of time is being digested and absorbed far more quickly than if you had eaten its solid, fiber-filled counterpart (e.g. chomped on an apple or a carrot, instead.)
This means that your blood fructose levels can spike quite intensely and quickly, and there are some pretty significant differences between a fructose-spike and a glucose-spike, specifically:
- Every cell in your body, including your brain, utilizes glucose. Therefore, much of it is “burned up” immediately after you consume it. In contrast, fructose is turned into free fatty acids (FFAs), VLDL (the small, easily-oxidized, and artery damaging form of cholesterol), and triglycerides, which mostly get stored as fat.
- The fatty acids created during fructose metabolism can accumulate as fat droplets in your liver and skeletal muscle tissues, eventually causing insulin resistance and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Insulin resistance can then progress to metabolic syndrome and type II diabetes.
- Fructose is the most lipophilic of the carbohydrates. In other words, fructose converts to an activated form glycerol called glycerol-3-phosphate, and this is directly used to turn free fatty acids into triglycerides. The more of this form of glycerol you have, the more fat you store (glucose does not do this.)
- If you eat 120 calories of glucose, about less than one calorie of that is stored as fat. But 120 calories of fructose results in 40 calories being stored as fat. So eating high amounts of fructose is essentially the same as consuming fat!
- Fructose goes primarily toward replacing liver glycogen, not muscle glycogen. So unless you happen to be at a huge calorie deficit (in which case, your liver may actually get some glycogen storage from fruit juice), instead of replenishing the energy stores in your muscles, you are efficiently preparing your body to store body fat…which is of course the polar opposite of what most people are trying to accomplish when juicing!
Sleep More
Yes, it may seem counterintuitive, but when you prioritize sleeping 7-9 hours for every 24 hour cycle, you reduce stress and you reduce cortisol. Excessive amounts of cortisol can cause a reduction in appetite controlling hormones, a decrease in the effectiveness of metabolism-boosting thyroid hormone, and a drop in fat-burning testosterone levels.
So while you’re doing your hard cardio efforts, moving more throughout your day, varying your workouts, and avoiding those giant juices, be sure to also prioritize sleep. A good article to begin with is “The Last Resource You’ll Ever Need To Get Better Sleep, Eliminate Insomnia, Beat Jet Lag and Master The Nap.”
If you have more questions about how to stop arm fat from jiggling, you can leave your thoughts over at Facebook.com/GetFitGuy.
Lifting weights, Jumping figure, and green juice images courtesy of Shutterstock
About the Author
Ben Greenfield received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from University of Idaho in sports science and exercise physiology; personal training and strength and conditioning certifications from the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA); a sports nutrition certification from the International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN), an advanced bicycle fitting certification from Serotta. He has over 11 years’ experience in coaching professional, collegiate, and recreational athletes from all sports, and as helped hundreds of clients achieve weight loss and fitness success.