Posts Tagged ‘interval training’
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 intensity cardio exercises, burn fat calories while doing them and not much else afterwards. Try interval training instead, where you alternate short maximal bursts followed by active recovery periods of equal or longer duration. 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. Your body will respond by using it’s fat stores to replace the burned fuel for the next day or so. Like a V8 compared to a 4 banger you will burn more calories at rest with increased muscle mass.
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 only have time to do one exercise in the gym, this is it. Think about it. Your moving a weight from the floor to overhead, 7 or 8 feet. Any other lift you’re only moving the weight a couple of feet, if that. And you’re not just pushing the weight or pulling it, you’re doing both pushing and pulling.
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.
For those of you who don’t know what clean and jerks are, it’s sort of like a deadlift, an upright row and a squat press all rolled into one. 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.
To burn fat, stick with the big compound exercises that work the whole body. 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.
For a total body workout that requires a minimum of equipment and time and a maximum of full body muscle recruitment, I recommend, Turbulence Training. You will learn bodyweight exercises that you can do at home. Craig Ballantyne will set you up with workout plans 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 can be the best fat burning exercises.
And of course none of this will do you any good if you don’t eat a clean diet. You can’t out train a bad diet, but, a clean diet will make up for a poor training plan. It’s pretty easy to down that 1,000 calorie pizza in a few minutes. You will never burn it off that fast. You can do all the fat burning exercises you want, if your eating habits are bad, you will never get the ripped look you are after. You might get stronger though.
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.
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