Fat Burning Exercise

A Woman Is on a Cadio Machine for Fat Burning Workout

Cardio Workout Is Essential for Fat Burning

What is the most essential fact of fat burning exercise? Simple, move the body! Every time you move your body, you use the energy stored in the body. Some comes from sugar stored in the body, and other from fat stored in the body. After 30 min or so of constant body movement, more energy is taken out from stored fat. It is nice if you can plan to do a long cardio workout a couple times a week if you want to burn more body fat.

There are two approaches to fat burning workout. One is low intensity but a long workout. As mentioned before, if you workout long enough, most of the calories burned are extracted from the body fat. Another one is high intensity shorter workout. While working out, this may not burn much calories from body fat, but it keeps burning body fat long after you stop working out. If you like to know more about target heart rates to determine the low and high intensity workout, please check out the article below.

For a beginner, the low intensity, but long workout is easier, if you have time. Fast walking is a good example for this category. If you walk at a fast pace for one hour or more, it burn your body fat without stressing your body too much. However, in a long run, you want to involve some high intensity workouts as it is a more efficient way to burn total calories and calories from the body fat. Most recent studies in the exercise world found that high intensity workout is far more efficient than the low intensity workout.

It is great if you can keep high intensity workout for a long time, but probably it is not an ideal workout for the most of us. There is compromise, however; an interval training. A typical interval training goes like this. Warming up the body for 5 min at a low intensity level, then for 30 seconds to 1 minute, bring up the intensity really high so that your heart rate reaches the high intensity level, then bring down the intensity for lower than low intensity level for 1 to 3 minutes so that your heart rate comes down to low intensity level. Then repeat the cycle for a certain time period and then cool down with lower than low intensity level so that your heart rate goes back down to the normal rate.

Probably you should ask a trainer to set up the correct interval training, but if you are working out for a while, probably you can set up the program yourself. If you have an access to a health club, many cardio machines have a program set for interval trainings. Although many are not set optimally, you can still get great benefits out of it without much of thinking.

One caution; if you are doing the interval training with running, you really need to pay attention to your joints. High intensity means high impact. One possible way is running up the hill, instead of run faster on a flat ground. Running up the hill and walk down (yes, walking not running; running down the hill has very high impact on your knee joints). You can do the similar setting on a tread mill. You can increase an incline to 3-5 degree angle (and slow down the running speed).