For instance, those looking to lose weight are encouraged to try exercises that burn more fat. While results may vary among individuals, the best way to burn fat is with an all-around workout routine that includes both cardio and weight training. If you are looking for the workouts that will burn the most calories, pair your strength workouts with some HIIT work and a total-body circuit. If you combine strength training with a nutritious diet, which does not contain any excess calories, you will build muscle and lose fat.
Strength training does not burn off huge amounts of calories, but it does help you build muscle and boost your metabolism. Weight training helps build strength and encourages muscle growth, which may increase your resting metabolic rate (RMR), or the number of calories your body burns while you are resting (12). Exercises that increase a persons heart rate and utilize as many muscle groups as possible burn more calories, thereby helping the individual shed pounds and body fat (10).
Adding more muscle through lifting weights and doing other endurance exercises may also help with fat burning, particularly if one is on a diet. If you are lifting heavy at high intensity, you may actually increase your afterburn, or calories burned, after completing a workout.
So, you are burning lots of calories while working out, and continue burning fat while resting. If you ramp up your speed or add resistance bands, chances are that you will burn even more calories. The more activity you do, the more calories you burn, and the easier it is to generate the caloric deficit needed for weight loss.
After all, you are burning more calories, and better yet, you will not need to put in nearly as much time doing intense workouts. With this, in order to make your workout routine as efficient as you would like to be in terms of burning calories, you should look at making your workouts longer and harder, and ultimately, you will enjoy the best of both worlds. If you are crunched for time, but also seriously interested in losing weight, getting leaner, or losing body fat, you want to get the most bang for your buck when you work out.
If you are doing several days of cardio per week, which is recommended for weight loss, you will likely only want to have one or two of your workouts be in the higher intensity range. Exercise is beneficial to you for many reasons, not just for weight loss, which is why Mathews says you should strive for around three to five hours a week in the gym.
Unlike with weightlifting, where your body continues burning calories in a recovery phase 48 hours after you finish a workout, with cardio, there is not much of an after-effect. In addition, a number of studies show that the body continues burning calories many hours after your weight-training session, as opposed to aerobic training (15, 16, 17). You will continue burning calories after leaving the gym because of what is called the afterburn effect, or EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption), the University of New Mexico explained.
Over time, you will not just burn less calories when running compared with before, you will also burn less calories overall, as your muscles mass decreases. If you are a runner, a mile at your current weight burns fewer calories than when you were obese and had horrible running form.
You might burn off some stored fat in a leisurely Sunday run, as opposed to fast-paced, heart-rate-pumped HIIT, but you are burning fat in the hours following the faster-paced workout. Simply put, burning fat leads to weight loss, as you will have less fat stubbornly sticking to your body.
Fat loss does not only occur through HIIT or LISS; resistance training plays a critical role in revving your fat burn, too. Do not be too wedded to the long-term hold-out view, however, because fat burn happens even with HIIT workouts, mostly due to what happens after your workout is over.
The long-held idea is that, by exercising with less than maximal effort, you are encouraging your body to burn calories from fat as energy, according to the American Council on Exercise (ACE). The most effective way to boost your energy expenditure in order to promote fat loss is through resistance training.
You can effectively achieve a fat-burning max workout by rotating HIIT cardio and resistance training all within one session. Essentially, you should not pick one over the other; actually, LISS, HIIT, and resistance should all factor into your fat-burning weekly training plan. With a well-balanced training schedule and nutritious, whole-food diet, you will effectively burn fat and build lean muscle.
The more weight you lift, provided that you are following a progressive overload program (working toward heavier weights over time), you will build up your muscle mass, which, in turn, can increase your metabolism, meaning that you become a more efficient fat-burning, caloric-burning machine. You are keeping your heart rate elevated as you go from exercise to exercise with little or no rest, focusing on cardio as well as strength during your training session. Because you need more energy to perform small spurts, you essentially burn more calories in less time than you would in a stationary, rhythmic cardio routine.
Strength training can help you burn between 90 to 133 calories in 30 minutes, depending on your bodyweight, according to the Harvard Health Publishing. According to Harvard Health, an estimated 155-pound (70 kg) individual burns about 112 calories during a 30-minute session with weights (5).
There is a really broad range of good exercises for weight loss, which are all excellent for including in a circuit workout, but if you want to keep things simple and effective, you are going to want to know exactly which exercises will burn the most calories quickest. While adapting to burn more calories than you consume is a core tenet for most approaches to weight loss, losing weight and losing fat may be a trickier endeavor for some individuals who have specific metabolic conditions or other factors that may hinder typical progress. Worse, cardio may potentially make you gain fat instead, unless you offset that shift in your body mass and overall caloric expenditure with your diet.
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