My Fitness Edge

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.

The advantages are; shorter workout time, burn more calories (in the form of carbohydrates), build muscle, increase endurance and burn fat calories for the next 24 – 48 hours. Your body will respond by using it’s fat stores to replace the burned fuel for the next day or so. When you increase your muscle you will also burn more calories at rest.

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.

When it comes to weight lifting exercises, the king of fat burning exercises has to be clean & jerks. If you’re on a time crunch and you have to get a workout done fast, just do 3 sets of these. Check this out. You’re lifting a barbell about 7 or 8 feet, depending on your height. Any other lift you’re only moving the weight a couple of feet, if that. You get a pushing and a pulling routing all in one exercise.

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.

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. The only equipment that you have to have for body weight exercises is your body, so you don’t even need to belong to a gym. 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.

Run 10 miles an hour for 3 minutes or maybe crank out 3 sets of reps for 60 seconds each of clean & jerks and see how you feel. If your lucky you might have burned 50 calories with all that work. Think twice before downing that pizza.