To keep you alive and safe, your body stores calories in the form of fat. There are numerous gimmicks that claim to increase fat burning, such as working out in the fat-burning zone, spot reduction, and foods or supplements that allegedly cause you to burn more fat.

If you want to lose fat in your body, understand how to burn fat through various sorts of exercise rather than relying on a quick fix that is unlikely to work. Here’s what you should know.

How to Burn Fat

• Exercise consistently.
• Do a variety of high, medium, and low-intensity
• cardiovascular exercises.
• Lift tough weights.
• Try circuit training.
• Include complex exercises.
• Monitor your stress levels.
• Get sufficient sleep.
• Increase your overall daily energy expenditure.
• Consume the appropriate number of calories for your goal.

Basics of Burning Fat

If you’re attempting to lose fat, understanding how your body uses calories for fuel might help you approach weight management. Your energy comes from fat, carbs, and protein. Which one your body uses for energy depends on the type of activity you’re performing.

Most people prefer to use fat for energy. It may appear that the more fat you can consume for fuel, the less fat you will have in your body. However, using more fat does not necessarily result in shedding more fat. Understanding the best technique to burn fat begins with some fundamental knowledge about how your body obtains energy.1

The body mostly uses fat and carbohydrates as fuel. The percentage of fuels used will vary based on your activities. A tiny quantity of protein is consumed during activity, but the majority is used to repair muscles afterward.

High-intensity sports, such as fast-paced running, force the body to rely on carbohydrates for energy. The metabolic pathways available for breaking down carbohydrates for energy are more efficient than those for breaking down fats. For extended, steady exertion, fat provides more energy than carbohydrates.

This is a pretty simplistic look at energy with a strong takeaway message. Burning more calories is more important than consuming fat for energy. The harder you labor, the more calories you burn in total.

Weight loss is unaffected by the type of fuel used. What matters is the number of calories you burn.

Consider this: while you sit or sleep, your fat-burning metabolism is at its peak. But you probably don’t see sitting and sleeping more as a technique to lose body fat. The important line is that simply because you consume more fat for energy does not imply that you are burning more calories.

Myth regarding the Fat Burning Zone

Exercise at lower intensities will burn more fat for energy.2 This basic notion is what sparked the hypothesis of the fat burning zone, which holds that working in a specific heart rate zone (about 55% to 65% of your maximal heart rate) allows your body to burn more fat.

This assumption has been so embedded in our exercise experience that it is now promoted in books, charts, websites, publications, and even cardio machines at the gym. The problem is that it’s misleading.

Working at lower intensities can be beneficial, but it will not necessarily burn more fat from your body. High-intensity exercise is one technique to enhance your calorie burn.

This does not imply that you should skip low-intensity exercise if you wish to burn more fat. There are certain specific things you can do to burn more fat, beginning with how frequently and for how long you exercise.

Burn Fat with a Mix of Cardio.

You may be unsure about how hard to work during cardio. You may even believe that intense exercise is the only way to go. After all, you can burn more calories and spend less time doing so.

However, variation can help you stimulate all of your energy systems, prevent you from overuse problems, and make your workouts more enjoyable. You may create a cardio program that incorporates a range of workouts at varying intensities.

High-intensity cardio

For our purposes, high-intensity cardio ranges from 80% to 90% of your maximal heart rate. If you’re not utilizing heart rate zones, aim for a six or eight on a 10-point perceived effort scale. This translates to exercise at a level that seems difficult and leaves you too exhausted to speak in entire words.

However, you are not going all out in the sense of sprinting as fast as possible. There is no doubt that high-intensity training can help you lose weight while also improving your endurance and aerobic ability.

Short workouts dispersed throughout the day provide the same benefit as continuous training. For example, a 150-pound person would burn approximately 341 calories after jogging at 6 mph for 30 minutes.3 If this individual walked at 3.5 mph for the same amount of time, they would burn 136 calories.

However, the quantity of calories you can burn does not tell the whole story. Excessive high-intensity workouts per week can put you at risk in a variety of ways.

Potential Risks

Excessive high-intensity exercise puts you at risk for:

• Burnout
• Growing to despise exercise.
• Inconsistent workouts.
• Overtraining
• Overuse injuries.

If you have little exercise experience, you may lack the conditioning or motivation to engage in intense and hard workouts. Before training, see your healthcare professional if you have any medical conditions or injuries.

If you undertake many days of cardio per week, you should definitely limit your high-intensity workouts to one or two.4 Other workouts can be used to target certain fitness areas (such as endurance) while also allowing your body to heal. Here are some ideas for how to include high-intensity workouts.

One strategy to include high-intensity workouts is to exercise at a rapid tempo. You can utilize any activity or machine for a 20-minute fast-paced workout, but the goal is to stay in the high-intensity work zone the entire time. Twenty minutes is usually the appropriate time, and most individuals would prefer not to go any longer.

Tabata training is another type of high-intensity interval training in which you work hard for 20 seconds, then rest for 10 seconds before repeating for 4 minutes. This workout should leave you breathless and unable to talk.

Furthermore, interval training is an excellent technique to include high-intensity training without doing so consistently. Alternate a challenging phase (e.g., 30-60 seconds of fast running) with a recovery segment (e.g., 1–2 minutes of walking). Repeat this series for the duration of the workout, which is usually between 20 and 30 minutes.

Moderately Intense Cardio

There are various definitions of moderate-intensity exercise, but it commonly ranges from 70% to 80% of your maximal heart rate. That corresponds to a level four to six on a 10-point perceived effort scale. You’re breathing faster than normal, but you can hold a conversation without problem.5

Instead than attempting to fit exercise into your schedule, plan your day around it. Making your training a priority boosts your chances of reaching your objective. The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) frequently includes this degree of intensity in its exercise recommendations. The fat-burning zone is typically located at the lower end of this spectrum.

Moderate-intensity workouts also have numerous benefits. For example, even moderate exercise can enhance your health while lowering your risk of heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure. In addition, it takes time to develop the endurance and strength required to perform difficult activities. Moderate workouts allow you to work at a more comfortable pace, which means you’ll be more consistent with your routine.

A number of exercises can also help you achieve moderate heart rate zones. Even raking leaves or shoveling snow can fall into this category if done vigorously enough.

Example of Moderate Intensity Workouts

For weight management, the majority of your cardio workouts should be moderate in intensity. Examples include:

• A 30-45-minute cardio machine workout.
• A quick walk.
• Biking at a medium pace

Low-intensity activity

Low-intensity exercise is less than 60% to 70% of your maximum heart rate, or a level three to five on a 10-point perceived exertion scale. This level of intensity is without a doubt one of the most comfortable zones of training, keeping you at a speed that is neither strenuous nor difficult.

This fact, along with the belief that it burns more fat, makes low-intensity exercise appealing. However, as we’ve discovered, working at a variety of intensities is beneficial for weight loss.2 However, this does not imply that low-intensity exercise serves no purpose.

It consists of long, slow activities that you feel you could do all day. Even better, it contains activities you already enjoy, such as walking, gardening, biking, or easy stretching.

Low-intensity exercise can be done throughout the day by doing an extra lap while shopping, using the stairs, parking farther away from the entrance, and performing more physical duties around the house. Pilates and yoga are low-intensity exercises that help you strengthen your core strength, flexibility, and balance. They can be part of a well-rounded routine.

The importance of consistent exercise

It may seem obvious that regular exercise can help you burn weight. However, it is not only about the calories you expend. It’s also about the adaptations your body undergoes when you workout regularly. Many of these adaptations result in the ability to burn more fat without even trying.

Benefits

Here are some advantages of regular exercise.

• Become more efficient: Your body improves its ability to distribute and collect oxygen. Simply explained, this allows your cells to burn fat more efficiently.
• Improve circulation: This permits fatty acids to travel more efficiently through the bloodstream and into the muscle. This means that fat is more readily available to feed the body.
• Increase the quantity and size of mitochondria: These are the cellular power plants that supply energy to each cell in your body.

Lift weights to burn fat.

Lifting weights and other resistance workouts can help you gain muscle and burn fat.6 While many people focus on cardio for weight loss, there’s no denying that strength training is an essential component of any weight loss regimen. Here are some advantages of weight training.

Burn calories.

If you lift weights at a higher intensity, you will burn more calories after your workout. This means that you burn calories during your workouts, but your body continues to burn calories afterward when it returns to its resting state.

Keep Metabolism Going

A diet-only strategy to weight loss may reduce a person’s resting metabolic rate by up to 20% every day. Lifting weights and retaining muscle mass helps to keep your metabolism going, even if you’re lowering calories.

Preserve muscle mass

If you restrict your calorie intake, you risk losing muscle mass. Muscle is metabolically active, thus losing it means losing the extra calories that muscles burn.

To begin, choose a simple total-body workout and repeat it twice a week, with at least one day in between. As you gain strength, you can perform additional exercises, increase the intensity, or add more days of strength training. It may take several weeks, but you will notice and feel a difference in your body.

Strategies for burning fat while strength exercise.

• Circuit training is an excellent technique to burn calories since it combines high-intensity cardio with strength training activities. You keep your heart rate up by moving from one exercise to the next with little or no break, focusing on both cardio and strength in the same workout.
• Lift hefty weights: If you’re a beginner, gradually increase the weight you lift. When your body is ready for more, lifting large weights encourages it to adapt by creating more lean muscle tissue to withstand the additional strain.
• Use complex movements. Movements that utilize more than one muscle group (such as squats, lunges, deadlifts, and triceps dips) allow you to lift more weight and burn more calories while exercising your body in a useful manner.
  If you prefer a more structured program, consider a four-week slow build program that contains a mix of cardio and strength workouts that allow you to gradually raise your intensity.

Bottom Line

It takes effort to burn more fat. The good news is that it doesn’t take much activity to get your body into fat-burning gear.

Try to incorporate some form of action every day, even if it’s just a little walk. Then, gradually expand on that. Soon, you’ll be burning more fat. It can also be advantageous to collaborate with a qualified nutritionist or professional personal trainer to create a more tailored program.