Pushups burn calories like every strenuous exercise. Burning these calories while reducing your caloric intake, will reduce your overall body fat content. However, pushups are more suited to building lean upper body muscle than they are to burning fat. It is also impossible to target fat loss on your body through exercise.
Understanding Weight Loss
When you eat, your body uses the caloric energy found in food to fuel your muscles' movement and vital body functions, like your heartbeat. If you eat more food than your body currently needs for fuel, it stores this extra fuel in the form of fat. Continue to eat more than you need, and this fat accumulates on your body. Losing this fat is a matter of reversing the process by eating less food than you need for immediate energy and forcing your body to draw upon its reserves for necessary fuel.
Pushup Benefits
As a body-weight exercise, pushups use your own body's weight as resistance against your muscles. Your upper body including shoulder, chest and upper arm muscles benefit the most from pushups, with your back and core being used secondarily to stabilize your body. Performing pushups will burn approximately 10 calories per minute of continuous exercising for a person weighing 150 lbs. Though this has the potential to eliminate fat, there are exercises far more suited to burning calories.
Exercises to Lose Weight
While pushups will burn approximately 10 calories per minute of exercise for a 150-lb. person, running at a moderate pace of eight minutes per mile will burn 15 calories per minute. Running, and other forms of cardiovascular exercise like rowing, swimming or biking, burn calories at a greater rate than strictly muscle-toning exercises like pushups. While cardio exercise isn't preferred by everyone, in most cases cardio exercises are much easier to sustain over the long periods of time than muscle-dependent exercises like pushups. Your arms are likely to get pretty tired after 10 minutes of pushups, though you can likely run, bike or swim much longer than 10 minutes, even if at a reduced pace.
Body Fat Spot Reduction Fallacy
While it's perfectly possible to tone specific muscles through specific exercises, these exercises only work out muscles and have no relation or direct effect on the fat surrounding those muscles. Fat loss on your body is directed by your genes, with no particular way to perform spot reduction. In order to lose upper body fat, you would have to pursue an overall plan of weight loss through reducing caloric intake, eating more healthily and increasing the amount of exercise you perform.
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