scientifically speaking, specific exercises will not reduce fat in one area. While I must admit it seems like spot reduction works at times, pretty much all science says it doesn't. This means no amount of any exercise will get rid of love handles.
The good news to that is it is unnecessary to do a million crunches. The bad news is that fat needs to be burned off in general to get at the fat in one area. Simply keeping an accurate food diary and accurate training diary, and figuring out your resting metabolic rate (RMR) should give you everything you need to lose or gain weight.
While I admit it is a bit difficult to figure accurate RMR and a bit difficult to get an accurate understanding of how many calories are burned by exercises kept in your training diary, you can get ballpark figures easily with a bit of math and fine tune them from there. This approach when done accurately is 100% effective, the problem is in the accuracy. Some people take 300 calories an hour to walk you may take only 250, meaning all estimates are not accurate until completely personalized by you (and your metabolism changes too).
As far as losing specific fat, the ease of loss is largely a factor of genetics and hormones. For example, If I have a 7,000 calorie deficit in one week, then that is 2lbs of fat lost, however I can lose many pounds of fat before I make any real impression in my belly fat. Likewise this is why some rather thin women have double chins, they could burn that fat, but they may have to go into a rather low fat range to do so.
Sorry for rambling, Fitness used to be a bit of a passion of mine, and now that I am a bit more comfortable with myself, it is becoming more important to me again. If you are looking to burn lots of calories in a short time, without damaging your knees too bad, may I suggest one of my other passions: Cycling
