The greatest effect in burning belly fat is not achieved at all with abdominal exercises, but with regular body exercises or cardio workouts.
Basically, intense aerobic exercise increases your metabolic rate , allowing your body to expend more energy throughout the day, helping you lose weight. On the other hand, while weight training doesn’t burn a lot of fat, it does tone your muscles.
Twists, jumps and turns not only help to eliminate fat from the abdomen and sides, but also strengthen the muscles of the abdominal core. While squats and lunges strengthen the gluteal and thigh muscles. You can find a guide to fat burning workouts below.
How to burn belly fat?
When performing any exercise (both strength and cardio), fat is spent practically evenly throughout the body; so it is impossible to remove fat from the abdomen or sides without overall weight loss.
However, in many cases in the belly we are talking about the presence of internal or visceral fat, a type of fat that requires cardio to burn more effectively.
It is also important to mention that fat burning training works exclusively in combination with nutrition: it is easier to control calorie intake from food than to try to burn these calories with exercise.
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Exercises to burn fat
First of all, the correct training to burn fat is based on regularity: if you want to lose your tummy , you need to get into the habit of playing sports 2-4 times a week for at least 30-45 minutes.
When it comes to exercise, the burpee is the leader in calorie expenditure and an ideal exercise to burn fat. Combine elements of squats, planks, push-ups, and jump ups .
When performing burpees, all the muscle groups of the body are involved in the work and the muscles of the abdomen, legs and chest receive the maximum load.
If classic abdominal exercises don’t burn a significant amount of energy, burpees do. They also allow you to develop the abdominal muscles in a proportional way. Ultimately, this exercise is beneficial for both boosting metabolism and improving muscle tone.
Fat burning theory
The theory for burning fat is to first focus on nutrition, then get into the habit of cardio and only then proceed to exercises to work the abdominal muscles.
Exercise should not be viewed solely as a way to burn calories or as an instant fat loss method. Regarding the choice of the type of training or exercise, it plays an important role, but not as much as the regularity, duration and intensity of the training.
Training represents a mechanism to restructure the metabolism, both to optimize the production of fat-burning hormones and to normalize the levels of insulin and cortisol, which are elements that are strongly associated with weight gain.
It is also important to remember that body fat is burned even more when the starting amount is moderately. Ultimately, the weight loss strategy will be slightly different depending on how much fat a person has.
Fat burning workouts
Below is a list of effective workout strategies for burning belly fat. We note that we are talking specifically about training strategies, and not just the choice of individual exercises.
1. Circuit training
The circuit training is a set of 4-8 exercises for all muscle groups of the body, performed in several cycles. In total, for such training, 3 to 10 exercise cycles are performed, with a 1-3 minute break exclusively between blocks (“cycles”). The exercises themselves happen one after the other, with minimal interruption.
2. HIIT
High intensity interval training or HIIT involves alternating between high, medium and moderate intensity levels to maximize fat burning. Such a workout lasts only 15-20 minutes, and the effect achieved is comparable to an hour of cardio in the usual mode.
3. Tabata
Tabata is a high intensity interval training method developed by Japanese professor Izumi Tabata. The training plan involves exercising with your own weight (for example, running in place) in a 20 second work and 10 second rest mode; the cycle repeats 6 to 8 times.
4. Fasting cardio
One of the professional ways to accelerate fat burning is to train early in the morning on an empty stomach; In this case, the level of glucose and insulin in the blood is at its minimum levels, which allows you to maximize the burning of abdominal fat.
How to complement the exercises?
Controlling the glycemic index of foods and the abundance of fiber in the diet is the first and most important step to burn abdominal fat and maintain a stable body weight.
No matter how active your fat burning workouts are, excessive nutrition will negate their effectiveness. The most commonly used professional nutritional tools for burning fat are the ketogenic diet .
However, to burn fat, not muscle, you need to alternate between low carb weeks with a complete omission of carbs. Otherwise, the body will go into a catabolic regimen.
Nutrition and exercises to burn fat
To burn belly fat, it is not recommended to drastically limit your calorie intake and at the same time increase the activity of fat-burning exercises.
A strict diet and a significant lack of calories will increase the levels of the hunger hormone leptin and the stress hormone cortisol, causing the accumulation of excess weight in the stomach.
In addition, a simple method to burn belly fat is the 16/8 diet, which consists of periodically abstaining from eating for 16 hours, followed by 8 hours during which you can eat. According to the rules of the diet, it is necessary to refuse late dinner and early breakfast; in this case, most of the fasting period will fall on sleep and meals will be distributed throughout the day.
ABSTRACT
If you want to burn belly fat, remember that fat burning training is not just a mechanism to get rid of excess calories, but a way to restructure your metabolism. In addition, there are no exercises that allow to combat the burning of fat in the abdomen in a localized way, but they do help to tone the muscles in the area.
