How Strength Training Helps Burn Fat Faster

While you may have heard that the best way to burn fat is through short-interval aerobic exercise, you can also burn fat with certain types of strength training. This is because, the more muscle you have, the more fat you can burn though normal activities - meaning, you will be burning fat even when you're not working out! You can also combine aerobic exercise with strength training to get a double whammy effect against fat.

Here are several methods of strength training you can use to burn fat and lose weight:

Note: Don't worry about bulking up - if this is a concern for you. Strength training doesn’t necessarily have to bulk you up. It can actually tone your body and help build your muscles just enough to help hold your body in more perfect alignment. Doing so can help you appear thinner and reduce body fat at the same time.

1. Circuit Training

This is something you can find at different studios that involve doing each machine for a specific period of time - usually at a fast pace. It’s a good way to get both cardio in and strength training. Usually there is little or no rest in between each machine and exercises are done in between machines as well.

2. Isometric (Or "Slow-Burn") Weight Training

This is a type of resistance training where you use the weights by holding them at certain angles for 30 seconds to one minute instead of doing faster repetitions. This kind of strength training can also be done without weights. For instance, doing planks works well too. It increases strength and stamina.

3. High-Volume Training

This type of strength training involves working one muscle group per week, concentrating on cardiovascular the rest of the time. This gives the muscle groups ample time to recover allowing for the best and most efficient building of strength training without bulking up your muscles. You can build long, lean muscles with high volume training.

4. Core Exercises

Doing core strength training exercises such as Pilates and yoga will help your body become a fat burning furnace. Try hot yoga, or purchase a Pilates machine to use at home for no excuse workouts that build endurance while building strength. The better shape your core is in, the better your fitness level will be and the more fat you’ll burn.

5. Resistance Training for Building Strength

Using your own body, bands or other methods to provide resistance during exercise will build your strength and muscles which will also burn more fat off your body. The great thing about resistance training is that you can combine it with cardio for increased results. Use bodyweight training, or choose simple tools such as resistance bands, or more advanced workout equipment like the resistance exercise chair.

6. Mixed Exercise: Cardio Plus Strength Training Combined

Many exercise gurus have put out videos and programs that combine cardio with resistance training that work extra well. You can typically work out for half the time by combining the two together in creative ways and burn more calories. You can seriously blast fat away with these programs - and many of them are a lot of fun!

Try this one, for example: Shaun T's FOCUS T25 Base Kit - DVD Workout

7. Cardio Then Strength Training

You can also burn fat by doing the exercises separately. The strength training builds muscle, which burns more fat, and the cardio burns fat. You can do the cardio and the strength training together or separately. Studies show that it doesn’t really matter, other than the fact that when you do it together you can do it in half the time.

Burning fat through strength training is a two-pronged effort. You’ll need to combine strength training with some sort of cardiovascular exercise for it to be the most effective and to avoid having bulky muscles. But, for long-term fitness goals, this is your fat burning answer.

Cardio Myths & Fat Loss

Are you a cardio junkie? Everyone seems to think that "cardio" is the best way to get in shape and lose body fat.  I'm going to show you in this article why I disagree!

It is quite common to hear fitness pros, doctors, and other health professionals prescribe low to moderate intensity aerobic training (cardio) to people who are trying to prevent heart disease or lose weight. Most often, the recommendations go something like this:

"Perform 30-60 minutes of steady pace cardio 3-5 times/week maintaining your heart rate at a moderate level"

Exercise work zones (Fox and Haskell formula between 20 and 70-year-old): red zone (VO2Max), anaerobic, aerobic, weight control and warming up. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Before you just give in to this popular belief and become the “hamster on the wheel” doing endless hours of boring cardio exercise, I’d like you to consider some recent scientific research that indicates that steady pace endurance cardio work may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

First, realize that our bodies are designed to perform physical activity in bursts of exertion followed by recovery, or stop-and-go movement instead of steady state movement. Recent research is suggesting that "physical variability" is one of THE most important aspects to consider in your training.

This tendency can be seen throughout nature as most animals tend to demonstrate "stop-and-go" motion instead of steady state motion. In fact, humans are the only creatures in nature that attempt to do “endurance” type physical activities such as running long distances at the exact same speed the whole time.

Most competitive sports (with the exception of endurance running or cycling) are also based on stop-and-go movement or short bursts of exertion followed by recovery.

To examine an example of the different effects of endurance or steady state training versus stop-and-go training, consider the physiques of marathoners versus sprinters. Most sprinters carry a physique that is very lean, muscular, and powerful looking, while the typical dedicated marathoner is more often emaciated and sickly looking. Now which would you rather resemble?

Another factor to keep in mind regarding the benefits of physical variability is the internal effect of various forms of exercise on our body. Scientists have known that excessive steady state endurance exercise (different for everyone, but sometimes defined as greater than 60 minutes per session most days of the week) increases free radical production in the body, can degenerate joints, reduces immune function, causes muscle wasting, and can cause a pro-inflammatory response in the body that can potentially lead to chronic diseases.

Highly variable cyclic training

On the other hand, highly variable cyclic training has been linked to increased antioxidant production in the body and an anti-inflammatory response, a more efficient nitric oxide response (which can encourage a healthy cardiovascular system), and an increased metabolic rate response (which can assist with weight loss). Furthermore, steady state endurance training only trains the heart at one specific heart rate range and doesn’t train it to respond to various every day stressors.

On the other hand, highly variable cyclic training teaches the heart to respond to and recover from a variety of demands making it less likely to fail when you need it.  Think about it this way... Exercise that trains your heart to rapidly increase and rapidly decrease will make your heart more capable of handling everyday stress. Stress can cause your blood pressure and heart rate to increase rapidly. Steady state jogging and other endurance training does not train your heart to be able to handle rapid changes in heart rate or blood pressure.

Cardio Boxing Group Fitness Class (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The important aspect of variable cyclic training that makes it superior over steady state cardio exercise is the recovery period in between bursts of exertion. That recovery period is crucially important for the body to elicit a healthy response to an exercise stimulus. Another benefit of variable cyclic training is that it is much more interesting and has lower drop-out rates than long boring steady state cardio programs.

To summarize, some of the potential benefits of variable cyclic training compared to steady state endurance training are as follows: improved cardiovascular health, increased anti-oxidant protection, improved immune function, reduced risk for joint wear and tear, increased muscularity (versus decreased muscularity with endurance training), increased residual metabolic rate following exercise, and an increased capacity for the heart to handle life’s every day stressors.

Sports Workouts and Sprinting

There are many ways you can reap the benefits of stop-and-go or variable intensity physical training. Most competitive sports such as football, basketball, volleyball, racquetball, tennis, hockey, baseball, etc. are naturally comprised of highly variable stop-and-go motion which trains the heart through a MUCH wider heart rate range compared to just steady walking or jogging.

Doing swimming workouts in a variable intensity fashion may also be more beneficial than just swimming for a long duration at the same speed.  Same goes for bicycling -- that is why mountain biking, which involves extreme ups and downs at various intensity levels may also be more beneficial than just a long flat steady pace bike ride.

One of the absolute most effective forms of variable intensity training to really reduce body fat and bring out serious muscular definition is performing wind sprints.  Wind sprints can be done by sprinting at near max speed for 10-30 seconds, and then taking 60 seconds to walk for recovery before your next sprint. 6-12 total sprint intervals is usually a very challenging workout for most people.

In addition, weight training naturally incorporates short bursts of exertion followed by recovery periods. High intensity interval training (varying between high and low intensity intervals on any piece of cardio equipment) is yet another training method that utilizes exertion and recovery periods. For example, an interval training session on the treadmill could look something like this:

Warm-up for 3-4 minutes at a fast walk or light jog
Interval 1 - run at 8.0 mi/hr for 1 minute
Interval 2 - walk at 4.0 mi/hr for 1.5 minutes
Interval 3 - run at 10.0 mi/hr for 1 minute
Interval 4 - walk at 4.0 mi/hr for 1.5 minutes

Repeat those 4 intervals 4 times for a very intense 20-minute workout.

Also, don't overlook other great ways to incorporate variable intensity cardio training by using a jump rope, a rowing machine, stairs running, or even outdoor hill sprints.

The take-away message from this article is to try to train your body at highly variable intensity rates for the majority of your workouts to get the most beneficial response in terms of heart health, fat loss, and muscle maintenance.

Article By Mike Geary – Certified Personal Trainer, Certified Nutrition Specialist
Author of best-seller:  The Truth about Six Pack Abs

Interval Cardio Exercise Great for Weight Loss

Everyone has wondered at some point in time which form of cardio exercise is best for losing weight.  To put it in simple terms, both low and high intensity exercises will help you to burn off body fat.  The question here is which is the most effective and the healthiest overall for your body. 

Scientists first discovered that during intensive exercises, your body burns glycogen, which is a form of stored carbohydrates that are stored in your liver and muscles for energy.  Whereas, during low intensity exercises, your body will burn a lot of fat.

Aerobic exercises (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

But if you're thinking based on this that low intensity, long-duration exercise is the way to go, you would be wrong. Just look around at the huge numbers of obese people in our country, and you'll see that this type of exercise isn't really working the way we think it should. And those who try it often get so bored so quickly, that they stop once they reach a plateau in their weight loss and end up right back where they started.

Here's the thing. The scientists were right when they said the human body burns more body fat during low intensity exercises like walking or swimming.  But during a high intensity exercise such as running, the body will burn a lot more calories.  Even if some of the calories burnt are from glycogen, there are still many fat calories burned as well.

To put the icing on the cake, when your store of glycogen gets low, the carbohydrates from your food you eat will later get converted into glycogen to fill up the store and won't be converted to body fat when they are left unused for energy.

Put simply, high intensity cardio exercise will juice up your metabolism even after you have completed your workout.  What this means, is that your body will continue to burn body fat hours after you have left the gym.  This effect is nearly non-existent in low intensity cardio or aerobic workouts. 

Accumulatively, your body will burn up more and more calories during and after you have finished a high intensity cardio exercise that it will with low intensity.

Now obviously, doing an hour-long high intensity workout is just not feasible - your body couldn't take it, and it's not designed for that sort of thing anyway. The answer is to intersperse your lower intensity exercise with bursts of high intensity activity. This way you get the best of both worlds! And best of all, this sort of thing basically "supercharges" your weight loss. You can actually lose more weight in a 20-minute workout of this type, than you would in an hour of walking, biking, or even slow jogging.

 (Photo credit: The Survival Woman)

You can inject high intensity exercises into your cardio workout by introducing some interval training. You can walk for 5 minutes or so, then break into some slow jogging for another 3-5 minutes or so.  Then, once warmed up, walk briskly again until you have caught your breath and then sprint for a minute before you walk again.  From this point, simply alternate your running and walking for about 15 minutes until you are finished.

One of the best things about this type of cardio is the more you do it, the more energy you'll have.  Cardio will help you to burn calories, and it's also useful for keeping your energy levels high. Dr. Al Sears explains this phenomenon well in his book, Pace: The 12-Minute Fitness Revolution.

If you've never tried this type of cardio before, you should give it a shot.  You'll find it the best way to boost your energy and get in great shape.  If you are just starting out, you'll want to go slow and gradually increase your bursts of intensity as your body gets used to it, so you can avoid injuries which may throw your fitness goals off track.


Lose Weight Fast with Interval Cardio: