Fat burning exercises, or exercises that burn fat while you do them tend to be a low intensity long duration cardio type exercises. I recommend you not do these because they do not promote building muscle or burning fat after the exercise is over.
Standard cardio exercises like walking, only burn fat calories while doing the exercise. 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 example you could sprint for 1 minute and then walk for 3 minutes and repeat this 4 minute interval 5 times for 20 minutes.
This has the advantage of building muscle, increasing endurance and burning carbohydrates. Your body will respond by using it’s fat stores to replace the burned fuel 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.
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. Get this. 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. 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.
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.
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. 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 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.
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.
