We all want to burn more fat for weight loss, body shaping, health and wellbeing or for sporting purposes. Trim that butt, waste that cellulite, smooth those love handles, bust that belly; it’s all part of the trim and slim exercise and diet activity many of us indulge in. Weight training builds muscle, increasing your metabolic rate so you burn fat faster.
New research on weight loss and exercise from Australian researchers at the University of New South Wales suggests interval training, alternating sprints and rest, and weight training is a breakthrough method of burning fat and slimming down. Weight training is increasingly recommended as a fat-busting tool because metabolic studies show extra muscle burns more energy than body fat at rest, so if you develop more muscle and have a higher muscle to fat ratio than before, you will burn extra energy and more stored fat as a result.
The body normally burns a mix of carbohydrate, as glucose and fat for fuel. How much of either depends on your physical activity? What you have eaten recently? When you use more energy you take in from your food and drink. The body burns stored fat and carbohydrates, and then protein to fuel your everyday activities even if you are not exercising.
Fat and glucose are the bodies two main energy sources. Fat - you know well. Glucose - comes mainly from carbohydrate foods like rice and bread and potatoes. Protein - is supplied mainly by meat and beans and dairy products.
The best strategies for Fat Burning:
- Increase muscle with weight training - Extra muscle helps to burn more energy at rest, even if only a little. This is called the resting metabolic rate of muscle or RMR. Extra muscle will also burn more fat in active phase, the active metabolic rate if you like, or the AMR, so having more muscle will definitely help burn more energy and fat.
- Lift heavier weights – The weights workout should be vigorous, with the number of repetitions kept at the low to medium end of the scale between 8 and 12 RM. The RM is the repetition maximum, which means the most weight you can lift for this number of reps before fatigue. The 8-12 is within a range that should provide strength and bigger muscle growth, which is called hypertrophy.
- Do aerobic exercise - Considering how much energy you would use in an hour of either type of exercise, weights or cardio? You must do some consistent aerobic or cardio work to burn fat.
- Try high-intensity cardio- High-intensity exercise, even if only in short bursts, may rev up the metabolism and get that fat mobilized. Do some high intensity as well, but don’t overdo it. Burning the fat is a long-term project and you don’t want to get ‘burned out’. A group exercise program such as a step or x trainer class might match this requirement. In fact, I highly recommend group cycle spin classes where you are encouraged to go fast, yet with the option to slow down if you need to.
- Combining weights and cardio in a circuit interval session may be the best approach of all. The circuit class we have is based on the idea of mixing high and low-intensity weights and cardio in a circuit.
To check out when our weight training, aerobic and circuit classes are on, have a look at …..