Spare tire. Beer belly. Mommy tummy. No matter what you call that extra fat around your midsection, it all means one thing - trouble!

It's hard to disguise, it's even harder to get rid of, and it's just not sexy. But that doesn't mean you can't get rid of it and enjoy a flat tummy. All you need is a bit of discipline, and the right information.

Men and Women: We're Different. Use It to Your Advantage

Yes, we're equal. But that doesn't mean our exercise programs and fitness regimens should be equal. The fact is men and women are built differently. And to get the best results possible, we need to tailor our movements to address the unique strengths, weaknesses, and needs of our bodies.

What Women Have That Men Don't

Women aren't built like men. Our joints are smaller and have less strength, making women five to ten times more likely to suffer a stress fracture. That's not all. Because ladies have a larger "Q" angle, we're more likely to suffer non-contact knee injuries and medial rotational instability. Poor diet and too much aerobic exercise makes 30-something women prone to osteoporosis.

Don't worry, though. Women are 40% more energy efficient than men when running the same distance.

What Women Really Need in Their Exercise Program

Ask fitness expert Paul Chek, and he'll tell you women's fitness routines should include four main exercise types: flexibility, stability, strength, and power. And we need to include these four traits into our fitness routines the right way.

Free-Moving Muscles - Start by doing daily stretches and flexibility exercises to loosen muscles restricting your movement. This will give you the ability and freedom to work on the rest of your body without risking an injury.

Stability - Next, build stability in your core, particularly the transversus abdominis region. It will prevent injury and build the muscles in your back, pelvis, legs, and feet. Stability ball and free-weight exercises are perfect for this step.

Free Weights - Instead of sticking to the machines all the time, make sure you do some free-weight routines. Free weights improve your posture and stabilization, rather than forcing you to do most movements in a sitting position. Try some lunges. And don't be afraid of the weights either. Women have high estrogen levels and lower levels of testosterone, so you won't start looking like a body builder.

Power and High-Speed Movements €" If you keep doing the exercises in the previous steps for 8-16 weeks, you should be close to having full flexibility in your joints and muscles, not to mention more strength and stability. When that happens, it's time to ramp things up a bit and boost the amplitude and/or velocity of your exercises.

Beauty and Ideal Body Shape

What men and women see as their ideal body shape significantly influences how they exercise. After all, the whole point of doing all this work is to get the curves in the right places, right?

Women, for example, will exercise their obliques differently than men. And here's why.

Obliques are divided into two groups: the external obliques, located just under your pectoral muscles, and your internal obliques, which run opposite of your external obliques. These two groups work together to compress your abdomen when you exhale. They also contract, rotate, and bend to allow you to bring your left shoulder toward your right hip and vice-versa.

So, women who want a small waist won't work all of their abdominal muscles and will avoid certain movements. They'll also avoid using heavy weights on their obliques to prevent building muscle mass and expanding their waist.

Work Your Abs the Right Way

Charles Poliquin wrote about a Duke University research study, which found that aerobic exercise was more efficient at burning visceral and liver fat stores than resistance training. Soon as others found the study, and they immediately assumed this included the fat around your mid-section commonly referred to as a 'spare tire' or 'love handles'.

Sadly, it didn't. Visceral fat is deep inside your abdomen, around and behind your major organs. You can't touch it, and it's rarely responsible for a flabby belly. If you really want a sexy stomach, you need to concentrate on another kind of fat - subcutaneous fat.

Subcutaneous fat is found just under the skin. This is what you should be targeting if you want a flat tummy, not your visceral fat stores. You'll also be happy to know that women generally have more subcutaneous fat, while men generally have more visceral deposits.

Compound or Isolated Exercises?

Some fitness gurus think you should do tons of compound exercises that exercise all of your abdominal muscles at once. This may not be the best method.

By isolating your movement and focusing on a specific muscle instead, you can work on trouble areas and get specific results. This may be to sculpt your look, catch up a muscle that hasn't progressed as far as other muscles, prevent injury, or help heal a damaged muscle.

And when you are doing compound exercises, make sure you're doing the right ones. Don't just do a specific number of crunches or sit-ups in different configurations. Do some medicine ball throws, deadlifts, squats, and other spine stabilizing movements.

Nutrition and Getting the Flat Tummy of Your Dreams

We all know that what we eat plays a big part in our fitness and how we look.

But what about when we eat?

Our bodies handle foods differently, at different times. When you're exercising regularly, there are prime times for losing or gaining fat just as there are for losing or gaining muscle. If you eat the wrong food at the wrong time, you may be undoing all your good work at the gym.

For example, the best time to eat most non-fruit and vegetable carbohydrates is during and after exercise.

Now It's Your Turn

Remember how I said all you need is a bit of discipline and the right information? Well, you now have the information. All you need now is the discipline. And you've got that covered, right?