Exercises for burning fat

Fat burning exercises, or exercises that burn fat while you do them tend to be a low intensity long duration cardio type exercises. I believe that you are better off doing higher intensity exercises for shorter periods that emphasize building muscle, in order to get the post workout fat burn for the next 24 hours.

Long duration low effort cardio exercises, burn fat calories while doing them and not much else afterwards. The better fat burning exercises to do would be interval training, where you have short bursts of moderate to maximum effort followed by longer active rest periods. For instance you could sprint for 1 minute and then walk for 3 minutes and repeat this 4 minute interval 5 times for 20 minutes.

Among other advantages, you will shorten your workout time and increase the calories that you burn both during the workout and after the workout. You get to use fat calories to replace the carbs you burned during the workout, for the next day or so. By increasing your muscle mass you can burn more calories while your sitting around.

If you want to look like a sprinter then train like one. If you want that marathoner look then go for the long duration low intensity cardio.

You can’t beat the clean & jerk, for recruiting a maximum amount of muscles, to burn fat, in the weight room. If you’re on a time crunch and you have to get a workout done fast, just do 3 sets of these. Get this. Your moving a weight from the floor to overhead, 7 or 8 feet. Other lifts you’re moving the weight one third or half that distance. Plus you are using about every push and pull muscle in your body.

Try 3 sets of a weight you can do about 10 reps with, or go for time and try three 60 second rounds and see how many reps you can get in each round. Either way this is one killer workout.

If you don’t know what a clean & jerk is then imagine combining a deadlift, upright row and a squat press together, in that order, all in one movement. There is a technique to doing olympic clean & jerks, and I’ll leave that to those guys. I tend to do them in a way that they can be done for reps, so an olympic lifter might not like my form, but I’m not doing it for competition either.

The big compound exercises that work the whole body burn fat the best. Clean & Jerks, squats, deadlifts, and to a lesser degree, pullups, dips and benches. For instructions on these exercises, and others, check out, the No Nonsense Muscle Building program by Vince Delmonte.

I think that body weight exercises are your best bang for the buck, and the best program for them is Turbulence Training. You will learn bodyweight exercises that you can do at home. Craig Ballantyne will set you up with workout routines that focus mainly, but not entirely, on bodyweight exercises to get you moving, and burning calories and building muscle, without having to join a gym or buying a lot of equipment. Turbulence Training will show you that bodyweight exercises are the best fat burning exercises.

If you’re not eating a healthy diet with a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, lean protein and healthy fats, none of your exercise will ever show on your body. You can put down a thousand calories in a few minutes, but you’ll never burn them off that fast. Don’t try to out train a bad diet, you’ll lose every time.

Try out those clean and jerks for 3 sets of 10 and see how you feel and know that all that work might have burned 50 – 100 calories. You’ll think twice about what you shove down your gullet.