What are the Best Fat Burning Exercises for You?

Do you want to burn fat and lose weight? Then you will need to know what the best fat burning exercises are for you. All exercises will aid in burning and losing excess body fat. But if you are looking for maximum fat burning then you need to understand how each type of exercise aids in burning body fat.

Many experts will tell you the low to moderate aerobic exercises are best for burning fat. Others will tell you it is the high impact aerobics that are most effective at getting rid of your body fat. And of course we cannot forget about the experts that say strength training is the ultimate exercise for burning fat.

With so many different experts with different opinions it’s difficult to determine what your ultimate fat burning exercises are. As I stated earlier, all exercises are effective at helping you burn fat. Aerobic exercises are the best for burning calories and fat while performing the exercise and strength training exercises are best for continuous calorie and fat burn.

Strength Training

Strength training exercises are those exercises that challenge your muscles through resistance. The higher the resistance the more challenge the exercise will be. Although strength training itself is not a high calorie or fat burning exercise, it does help tone and strengthen your muscles and increases your lean muscle mass. The more lean muscle mass you have the more calories you burn due to an increased metabolic rate.

When you increase your muscle mass you increase your basal metabolic rate (BMR). This is the rate at which you burn calories during the day performing everyday non exercise activities including sleeping. Your BMR is responsible for 60% to 70% of the total calories you burn in a day.

There are many types of strength training exercises. These include weight lifting, resistance band exercises, dumbbell exercises and bodyweight exercises. Most experts agree that weight lifting is the most effective at building lean muscles. This is because you can easily adjust the weight and therefore continuously increase the challenge to your muscles. However not everyone has access to weight lifting equipment nor do they necessarily need to perform weight lifting to increase their muscle mass.

Resistance band exercises and dumbbell exercises are a great alternative to weight lifting. Both offer means of increasing or decreasing the resistance to provide more or less challenge to your muscles. They are a fairly inexpensive alternative to weight lifting and are small and easy to storage. Resistance bands are also light weight and can go with you even while on the road.

You can also do body weight exercises. With bodyweight exercises you are simply using your own body weight and gravity to provide the resistance. There are many types of strength training exercises you can do by simply using your own body.

The bottom line is that any strength training exercise that helps you build lean muscles will help you burn fat.

Aerobic Exercises

Aerobics are a bit more challenging to determine the best fat burning exercises that are right for you. Aerobics are those types of exercises that get your heart pumping and will give you the higher overall calorie and fat burn while doing the exercise.

Many experts will tell you the low to moderate intense aerobic workouts are the most effective for burning fat. This is widely believed because your body uses approximately 60% of fat for fuel during a low to moderate aerobic workout. However, the low to moderate level aerobics also burn fewer calories overall as compared to high impact aerobics.

While high impact aerobics give you a higher calorie burn it is also only using approximately 35% of fat for fuel during the exercise routine. So you can see why there is much debate and conflicting answers to the best fat burning aerobic exercises. Basically it all boils down to intensity level and duration that will determine total calories burned and ultimately determine how many fat calories are burned.

To really understand how low to moderate aerobics versus high impact aerobics effect the total calories and total fat calories burned let’s take a look at an example. In these examples we will use a man weighing 180 pounds. Only gender and weight are needed to calculate total calories burned during exercises.

If this man did a low to moderate impact aerobic workout for 30 minutes, let’s say a brisk walk at 4 mph, he would have burned a total of 216 calories. If 60% of this was from fat then the total fat burned would be 130 fat calories.

Now if this man did a high impact aerobic workout like running at 6 mph for 30 minutes, his total calorie burn would be 432 calories and at 35% of this from fat, he would have burned 151 fat calories. So you can see the higher impact aerobics gave him both a higher total calorie burn as well as a higher fat calorie burn.

The trick to finding your best fat burning exercises is all about finding the intensity level that is right for you and the duration for which you can last for the that level. For instance, if you are just starting out a low to moderate aerobic exercise may be the most effective for fat burn as a start. Then as you become more comfortable and able, kick it up a notch for a higher calorie and fat burn.

The fat burning exercises that are right for you will depend on what level of aerobic intensity you are at as well as how much resistance you are using for your strength training exercises. The key is to incorporate both aerobics and strength training to your weekly exercise routine and to constantly increase the challenge of the exercise.