You have probably heard that the low to moderate level aerobic exercises are the best fat burning exercises. Or maybe you read somewhere that the high intense level aerobics are the best at burning fat or that strength training is what you need for burning fat. In fact you have probably read or heard several different answers to what are the best fat burning exercises. With so many different beliefs and articles with different fat burning tips it’s hard to know who is right.
The fact is all are correct to some extent. Aerobic exercises are the most effective for burning calories and fat while strength training exercises are the most effective at increasing your basal metabolic rate (BMR). BMR is the rate at which you burn calories doing normal everyday activities, including sleeping, and is responsible for 60 to 70% of the total calories you burn in a day. The more calories you burn the more fat your body uses for fuel.
The Best Strength Training Exercises for Burning Fat
You can do strength training by weight lifting, performing resistance band exercises, dumbbell exercises or even body weight exercises. All of these forms of strength training will strengthen and tone your muscles. However, most experts agree that weight lifting provides the best method for strengthening your muscles. This is because you can easily alter the resistance in order to continually increase the challenge to your muscles.
This does not mean you must do weight lifting to effectively raise your BMR. The other methods of strength training will also accomplish this. The benefits of these other methods are they are less expensive and more convenient than weight lifting. If you decide to use resistance bands or dumbbell weights you will want to get more than one resistance or weight. This way you can use the higher resistance or the heavier weight to increase the challenge to your muscles while performing your strength training exercises.
The Best Aerobic Exercises for Burning Fat
While strength training is fairly straight forward and easy to understand how it helps burn fat, the question to which is the best aerobic fat burning exercise is a bit more difficult to answer and understand.
Many experts strongly believe that the low to moderate intensity level of aerobics is the most effective at burning fat. This belief is easy to understand. The low to moderate level aerobic exercises use about 60% of fat for fuel while the high intense aerobic level uses about only 35% of fat for fuel. So it’s easy to see why people automatically assume the low to moderate aerobic exercises are the best fat burning exercises.
However before you agree with these experts, keep in mind that the low to moderate intense exercises also burn fewer calories overall as compared to the high impact aerobics. To best determine which level of aerobics is best for burning fat I will use an example.
For the example I will use a 35 year old woman weighing 160 pounds. When determining calories burned during exercise, the person’s age is not relevant. However, their weight and the specific exercise or activity is needed to calculate the calories burned during exercise.
If this woman walked briskly at 3 mph, which is considered a moderate level, she would have burned approximately 144 calories. If 60% of this was fat, then she would have burned about 86 fat calories. However, if this same woman jogged at 5 mph, which is considered a high intense level, she would have burned a total of 307 calories of which 107 fat calories would have been burned, or 35% of total calories.
So you can see that she had not only a higher calorie burn but also more fat calories burned at this higher intensity level. However not everyone can keep up this level of intensity for the full duration. So if this woman only jogged for 20 minutes instead of 30 minutes she would have only burned 72 fat calories or 35% of the total 205 calories burned.
It is this last scenario that is the reason many say that the low to moderate aerobic exercises are the best fat burning exercises. However to state it correctly they should say the longer duration low to moderate exercises are the most effective at burning fat.
But if you are able to exercise at a high intense level for a duration that will give you the higher calorie and fat burn, then it is the high intense level aerobic exercises that are the best fat burning exercises.
Basically you need to determine what the best level is for you. This is what will determine the best fat burning exercise that is right for you.
