All types of exercise provide benefits, but if you exercise to burn fat, you might want to focus on the kind of exercise that burns the most fat most quickly. Cardio exercise offers exceptional fat loss returns for your efforts, but strength training and stretching have advantages as well.
Strength Training
Strength training requires that you repeatedly exert specific muscles in your upper and lower body. You do brief bursts of intense exercise, doing multiple repetitions within different muscle groups. Strength training is useful for athletes who want to up their game, but it is also useful for burning fat. You burn carb and fat calories while you do strength training, reports University of New Mexico exercise researcher Len Kravitz, Ph.D. And as you tone your body and develop more lean muscle mass, you increase your metabolism so you burn more calories while you exercise and while you are at rest. The metabolism boost is small, about seven calories per day per pound of muscle, but your leaner, stronger body also allows you to increase the intensity and calorie burn of your workout. Just as important, strength training helps prevent the muscle wasting that occurs with aging, according to American College of Sports Medicine. A 175-pound person burns about 250 calories doing a light to moderate weightlifting workout and 500 calories doing a vigorous workout, estimates BodyBuilding.com.
Stretching
Stretching exercise burns calories, but also extends range of motion, prevents delayed onset muscle soreness and decreases the risk of activity based injuries. You can expect to burn some calories while doing your stretches, though fewer than you burn in strength training or cardio. A 175-pound person burns more than 200 calories per hour doing yoga stretching, estimates BodyBuilding.com.
Cardio
Cardio exercise, such as swimming, walking, jogging, running and biking, requires you to repeatedly use large muscles in your lower body. Larger muscles require more energy to operate, so you burn more calories than you do when you do strength training in your upper body. When you first start cardio exercise, you exert your gluteal, hamstring, calf and quadriceps muscles. As those work, they quickly deplete fuel and oxygen stored in your muscles and circulating in your blood. You breathe more deeply to take in more oxygen, and your heart beats more quickly to deliver that oxygen, along with fuel obtained from stores throughout your body, to your muscles. Mitochondria, the power plants of your muscle cells, use the oxygen, carbohydrates and fats to produce energy for your muscles. As you persist in your exercise, your heart and the diaphragm muscles that work your lungs also burn fuel as they continuously deliver raw material to your body to power the cardio exercise. Because cardio involves your heart and lungs in addition to your largest muscles, it burns more calories than stretching or strength training. A 175-pound person exercising at a moderately intense level for an hour burns about 275 to 417 calories walking, 583 calories biking and 833 calories running, estimates BodyBuilding.com.
Maximizing Cardio Burn
You obtain the greatest benefits from cardio by exercising at least 30 minutes most days of the week, reports MayoClinic.com. Any cardio effort burns calories, but you maximize fat burn by exercising at least at a moderate-intensity, for example by walking at least 3 mph, running 6 mph or biking 12 to 14 mph. If you intensify the workout, you burn even more overall fat calories within the same time period, says exercise researcher Kravitz. Although low intensity cardio of longer duration burns relatively more fat than carbs, the increased burn of a more intense workout burns more carb and fat calories overall.
References
- American College of Sports Medicine: Guidelines for Healthy Adults Under Age 65
- Body Building.com: How Many Calories Are You Burning?
- Iron Magazine.com: What Happens to Body Fat When You Burn It?; Tom Venuto
- MayoClinic.com: Aerobic Exercise: Top 10 Reasons to Get Physical
- University of New Mexico; Calorie Burning: It's Time to Think "Outside the Box"; Len Kravitz,
- University of New Mexico; Yes! You do Burn Fat During Resistance Exercise; Lawrence Herrera & Len Kravitz, Ph.D.
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