Aerobic exercise is often considered the ultimate in fat burning exercise. The muscles of the body heat up during aerobic exercise and quickly use up all energy stores in the body.

Once the body burns the stored energy, the fat burning begins. But, what if you could speed up the process and get fatter burning out of your workout?

Many people believe that the Target Heart Range is the only thing that matters when working out aerobically. As long as the heart stay s within that range, calorie being burned. While this is true, to an extent, there is a way to increase the amount of fat burning during your workout.

Warming the Leg Muscles Efficiently

The first 10 to 15 minutes of an aerobic workout is spent warming up the muscles of the legs. These muscles are the largest in the body and thus are often the focus of aerobic workouts.

The trouble with this warming period is that the muscles do not begin to burn fat at an ultimate capacity until they are warmed up. Those first 10 to 15 minutes on the treadmill or elliptical are lost to the warm-up. However, there is something you can do to warm-up the muscles more quickly without wasting that precious cardiovascular energy.

Before that next aerobic workout, try warming up the larger muscles of the legs with weights or calisthenics. Each of these choices in anaerobic, meaning they are not taxing on the lungs. The muscles will be warm from the start of the aerobic exercise and thus the exercise will be a fat burning monster from the first steps.

Exercises for Warming the Quads

In order to effectively warm up those leg muscles you can try one of two exercise techniques. The first requires a weight bench with a leg extension. Using a light weight that you can lift 10 to 15 times in a row, warm-up the legs with sets of 5 repetitions.

An alternative for those with no weights at home would be to perform standing squats in repetitions of 5 for 10 to 15 minutes before hitting the cardio.

If you think about the muscle warming idea in a real life situation, during a 30 minute workout you are only spending one half the time actually burning fat.

The other half of the time, you are warming up the muscles to burn off those carbohydrate and energy stores. A simple addition of 10 to 15 minutes of quadriceps warm-up lifting will increase the amount of calories burned by 100%.

Burning fat is all about using more energy than you consume during the day. If your workout currently burns 150 calories in the 30 minutes you walk on the treadmill, the potential of burning twice as many calories and losing twice as much weight is simple and easy to do.