Q: Hey I am 20 years old and about 6' 5' or so...i weigh 180..im not FAT but do have fat...and i have man boobs...i run 2.5 miles 6 times a week and after my run, I workout for about an hour working my chest, abs and arms...I have been doing this for about a month now and can see some results..but still have man boobs...Am I on the right path..i REALLY want them GONE!

A: You are doing some things right and some things wrong. At 6 feet 5 inches and 180 pounds, you're definitely NOT overweight and are actually close to being underweight. So you should not be trying to lose weight/burn calories at this point unless it stimulates your muscle growth. This means that you should cut down your cardio to no more than 3-5 miles per week for general health (right now you're running 15 miles per week).

You are on the right track as far as weight training for your chest, but your training program could use some help. 6 hours per week training just arms, abs, and biceps is way too much training for way too few muscles. Those muscles altogether are only 25% or so of all your muscle mass. If you want to maximize fat burning you want as many of your muscles to be exercised as possible, so they burn calories during recovery and burn off those man boobs. So you should be working your legs and back (which together are more than 50% of all your muscle mass), as well as shoulders and triceps (though both of them get worked somewhat in chest workouts). Also by never giving your chest, bicep, abs muscles time to recover between workouts, you are stunting their progress. So instead of 6 times/week working chest, biceps, and abs, you should work out 3-5 times/week covering all your muscle groups including legs and back in the course of one week. Read this, pick out any of the split training programs given in there and follow it instead of your current routine.

Beginner trainees are often reluctant to work legs because it can be painful and because they don't particularly care about their leg development. The truth is that working legs with heavy exercises such as squats and lunges and working lower back/legs with deadlifts is the single best natural metabolism booster, fat burner, and muscle builder available to you (aside from the diet). Most powerlifters and bodybuilders live by the motto: 'You must squat.' It's not 'You must bench press' and it's not 'You must bicep curl'. Squats and deadlifts is what makes impressive physiques. So do yourself a huge favor and do not ignore these exercises (unless you have medical reasons to do so, such as lower back or knee problems of course), even if all you really care for is good chest development. As strange as it sounds, squats and deadlifts will help you lose man boobs just as much or more as doing the bench press.

The last thing is your diet. Read this to learn about nutrition. Then you'll have to decide what should be your primary goal as far as diet: lose weight or maintain weight or gain weight? I would not try to lose weight if I were you because you are just 180 despite being very tall, so that option is out. Maintaining weight is a safe option, combined with proper weight training -- as a beginner you can let weight training take care of your extra fat and just eat enough to maintain weight. Just eat clean, eat small meals, and eat often -- easy way of doing so is breaking up each of your current meals into two and eating them a couple of hours apart. Gaining weight is an interesting possibility -- at your age and physique you can gain quality muscle weight very easily. Extra muscle will mask your existing fat deposits well and they won't stand out so much. But you will also likely gain some new fat in the process too. The amount of new fat will depend on how clean your diet and how good is your training. But it should be minimal as long as you don't gain weight too fast (2 pounds per month is a good pace).

So decide whether you want to go with safe option of just maintaining your weight with a clean diet or with the more aggressive option of actually gaining some weight to build your muscle mass. The downside to the second option is some added extra fat which may or may not bother you. If you're OK with the tradeoff of a little fat (temporary -- you can burn it off later) in order to build lots of muscle, I recommend the agressive option. If you know that new fat will bother you too much, then just eat enough to maintain your existing weight, but make sure you eat good foods: veggies, whole grains, meats, fish, poultry, eggs, etc. Cut out heavily processed foods, junk foods, sweets, pizza, white bread and pasta, etc.

So to summarize:

• Cut down your cardio to 5 miles or less per week
• Read the weightlifting article and choose one of the three split training programs in the article to follow
• Read the nutrition article to learn how to clean up and structure your diet
• Decide whether you want to stay at your present weight or try to slowly put on weight to build more muscle mass which will in turn mask your man boobs and will make them easier to lose completely in the future

And come back and ask me any questions as needed. Good luck!