What Are The Best Fat Burning Exercises

Are you looking for the best fat burning exercises? If you are like many people, you have searched the web and found different answers to this question. Many sites and experts have varying answers to what are the best fat burning exercises. Although there is a lot of commonality amongst these answers, the differences can make it confusing to choose your exercise routine.

Before you can select the best fat burning exercises, you will want to understand what types of exercises there are. You have probably heard the term aerobic exercises and anaerobic exercises, but do you know what the difference is?

Aerobic versus Anaerobic

There are two basic types of exercises; aerobic and anaerobic. Aerobic means with oxygen while anaerobic means without oxygen. While doing aerobic exercises, your muscles need oxygen to perform efficiently and fat needs oxygen to burn. Aerobic exercises are those workouts that get your heart pumping within your target heart rate zone and require oxygen. Anaerobic exercises are those that require more effort and more oxygen than the body can supply. So the muscles switch to using carbohydrates as the primary source of fuel, reducing the amount of fat burned during the exercise routine. Anaerobic exercises are those that use little or no oxygen such as weight lifting and high intense sprints or running.

This is where some of the confusion comes from. Most people assume running is an aerobic exercise, and if done at a certain intensity level it will still require oxygen, therefore remaining an aerobic exercise. But as the intensity level increases, and the body cannot supply sufficient oxygen, it will switch to using a higher percent of carbs and a lower percent of fat for fuel.

Exercise to Burn Fat

While doing aerobic exercises, your body uses a higher percent of fat for fuel. Approximately 60% of the total calories burned during a low to moderate aerobic exercise are from fat. As the intensity level increases, the body switches from using fat as the primary source of fuel to using readily available carbohydrates. At a high intense aerobic workout, you will use only approximately 35% of fat for fuel. At an extreme or vigorous workout level, or an anaerobic exercise, the percent of fat may only be 5% of total calories burned during exercise as your muscles do not require oxygen.

Based on this most people assume that the low to moderate intense level gives you the most fat calories burned, however, it is all relative to the total calories burned during exercise. The low intense level aerobic exercises, while burning a higher percent of fat, will actually produce the lowest number of total calories burned. While the higher intense aerobic workouts give a lower percent of fat burn, it also gives you the higher calories burned.

Calories Burned During Exercise

Keeping your exercise routine at an aerobic level will give you the most benefit to burning fat. Now the task is to determine at what intensity level to keep your aerobic exercise at. Before selecting your intensity level, let's address the issue of how calories burned during exercise changes based on activity and/or intensity. For instance, if a man weighing 175 pounds walked at a speed of 3 mph for 30 minutes, a low to medium level, he would burn a total of 158 calories. With the fat burn being approximately 60% of total calories, this would equate to 95 fat calories burned. However, if this same man jogged at 5 mph for 30 minutes he would burn a total of 336 calories. Since this would still be considered an aerobic exercise, just at a higher intensity level, he would still be burning about 35% of fat. So, by increasing his aerobic routine to a high level he would have burned approximately 118 fat calories.

So you can see that doing his exercise routine as an aerobic exercise, he is performing fat burning exercises. You can also see that he burns more fat calories at a higher aerobic intensity level, but regardless of which level, he is burning fat.

Strength Training

Strength training is considered an anaerobic exercise regardless of how heavy the resistance or how many repetitions. Strength training is all about challenging the muscles through resistance in order to tone and strengthen. Strength training is not considered a fat burning exercise while performing the exercise. However, it will bring you fat burning benefits. This is done by increasing your lean muscle mass and the more lean muscles you have, the higher your basal metabolic rate.

With a higher BMR you will be burning more calories overall while at total rest. This is because muscles are more metabolically demanding. So, by increasing your BMR, you are helping to increase your overall calorie burn. And since your body needs fuel to sustain your lean muscles, it will use a portion of your fat as fuel.

The most effective way to ensure you are getting the most out of your fat burning exercises, you will want to perform both aerobic exercises and strength training. Experiment with the different levels of intensity and mix it up with aerobic and strength training.

Here's more information on fat burning exercises.

About the Author: Julie is the creator and author of exercise4weightloss.com where you can find helpful tips and information on exercise and weight loss.