The Best Exercise Strategies to Burn Fat

For years we´ve been told that the best kind of exercise to burn fat and lose weight is about 35 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise (like running, cycling, or swimming), done about 5 times per week. In fact, many fitness professionals still recommend this strategy.

New research results now indicate this isn´t the best way to burn fat. While it´s true that this type of exercise can help you to burn a few calories during the workout, there are far better ways to fire up the metabolism to a much higher level. This causes you to burn a lot more calories, both during and after the work out, and has a greater and more lasting effect on your physique.

A great way to ramp up the metabolism in this way is by increasing the intensity of the workout, while at the same time reducing its duration. In other words, you challenge your body with a short burst of very intense exercise, instead of settling into a long, slow workout. The key to this is the body´s Resting Metabolism Rate (RMR) – the rate at which your body burns calories while it´s resting. Most calories are burned in the muscles, even at rest. When a muscle is challenged to perform a very intense workout, it´s RMR goes up dramatically, and it continues to burn a lot of energy even after the workout.

One of the best ways to generate this type of effect is through strength training (also known as resistance training). If you do strength training with free weights, your muscles have to overcome the opposing force of gravity in order to contract, and thereby move the weights. This causes the muscle to burn a lot of energy, both during the workout, and during the regeneration process afterwards. And the beauty of this is that the regeneration process leads to growth of lean muscle mass, which enables you to burn even more energy in future workouts. As your muscles grow stronger, they become trusted allies in the quest to burn calories and shed weight.

Another advantage of this workout strategy is that the workouts are short, and therefore easier to fit into a busy lifestyle. Very intense workouts done 2 or 3 times a week are sufficient to create a strong fat burning effect, and when combined with the proper nutrition plan will undoubtedly help you to generate a lean and healthy body.