Sorry, but That New TikTok Dance Won't Help You Lose Weight
Updated May 3 2021, 10:59 a.m. ET
Mega-popular social media app TikTok has become a treasure trove for pretty much every single hobby or niche interest you could possibly have. Whether you love art, thrifting, recipes, or exercise, there is a corner of TikTok dedicated to people curating their profiles specifically to that, and sometimes, that content goes viral.
Such is the case with the latest TikTok exercise trend, which involves a pretty strange dance that can supposedly help you lose weight. So, what exactly is the dance, and is it actually effective? We have all the details below!
The TikTok dance involves intense abdominal strain.
TikTok user @Janny14906 went viral with her intense abdominal exercise that is taking over users’ For You pages. The concept of the dance is to lift your chest up and down while simultaneously jerking your hips forward and backward quickly. The gesture kind of looks like doing crunches very quickly while standing up. There also seems to be some core tightening happening while you jerk your body back and forth as well.
The goal seems to be to target the ab muscles to get rid of fat around the stomach and shrink the waist. Janny’s TikTok is more or less dedicated to videos of her classes in which she is coaching women with this technique. Some of her videos have gained millions of views, with the most popular video gaining 9.2 million views.
The video of Janny doing the dance plays along with the caption, “The coach is demonstrating the correct abdominal weight loss exercise. The coach is telling to ‘come on.’ Stick to five minutes a day and see results for a month.” She also captions almost every one of their videos with the message: "As long as you enjoy the skinny come together."
Health experts have deemed the workout to be dangerous.
TikTok users and health experts have found some problems with Janny’s claims. Not only is her promise of a skinny body and the promotion of diet culture problematic, but her unique exercise dance in question is being questioned by health experts. According to Insider, Janny’s claims are a myth.
The outlet reported, “Janny claims in their videos that the exercise will ‘reduce the abdomen,’ but it's a myth that you can target fat loss from a specific body part, personal trainer Sohee Lee told Insider. Much like endless clam-shells won't slim your thighs and arm pulses won't reduce your bingo wings, ab-specific exercises won't give you a flat stomach.”
Janny’s claims about diet have also been called into question.
Not only have health experts debunked Janny’s claims that her dance workout will burn stomach fat, but they have also called into question her claims about diet. Janny claims multiple times that you will see results no matter what you eat as long as you do her dance every day for five minutes.
"This person is promoting this exercise as what do if you want to get skinny. She also has other posts where she says multiple times, 'Exercise for an hour a day and eat whatever you want,' which of course is completely incorrect and this kind of advice is exactly what gets people into a lot of trouble where they go for a run then eat their faces off and end up gaining a bunch of weight," Sohee Lee told Insider.
"No matter how much exercise you're doing, if your nutrition is not dialed in, if you're not eating in a calorie deficit, you're not going to shed the body fat," she said. "Exercise should come secondary to that.”
