Which Exercise Burns the Most Fat ?
When it comes to dieting and exercise, there is no big secret. If you burn more than you take in, you’ll lose weight. You can, however, do much to improve your chances and to speed up the loss by choosing exercise routines that burn the most fat for every minute invested exercising.
Cardio
Cardio is the most popular type of exercise used for fat burning. While you may envision hours of running on a treadmill in order to achieve any results, the truth is that pretty much any type of exercise can help you burn fat if you do it at the right intensity.
From swimming to playing football to jogging and even dancing, the important thing is to keep the intensity high and your heart pumping for at least 30 minutes in order to see any results.
Some activities are better than others because they build intensity faster and they allow your heart no rest in between exercises. Boxing, skipping rope and stair climbing are good examples of this.
Contrary to what most people believe, you don’t need 30 contiguous minutes of exercise in order to lose weight. Experts agree that exercising in bouts of 10 minutes seems to be equally effective.
Weight Training
Aside from providing a good overall workout, weight training has the added benefit of increasing your muscle mass, which in turn translates to more fat burning. That’s why, as a general rule, men tend to lose weight faster than women; their muscle mass is greater, so even simple everyday activities like walking result in higher calorie burn.
For maximum results, try alternating days of cardio and weight training activities and always give at least a day of rest to your muscles.
Interval Circuit
Interval training is the practice of mixing high-intensity exercises with some lighter paced ones, so you keep your heart rate going up and down, thus burning more fat in the process.
Some people prefer to alternate days of different intensity, but true interval training consists of a circuit of high-power exercises (such as 5-10 minutes of jumping rope) followed by a series of sets of weight training or abs workout, and then repeat.
Reaching Your Fat Burning Zone
The most important thing when training for fat burning is to get your heart rate high enough that it gets your body to burn fat. Train too slow and you’ll be just losing water weight; train too hard and you’ll be doing wonders for your cardiovascular health, but little for your waist.
There’s a simple mathematical formula to determine what your fat burning zone is.
Simply subtract your age from 220 (for example, if you’re 30, it would be 220-30=190). Your fat burning zone is between 65 and 75 percent of that number (in this case, 123-142 beats per minute).