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Aerobics Routines to Lose Belly Fat

Sep 13, 2011 | By Cat North
Aerobics Routines to Lose Belly Fat
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While a combination of a healthy diet and regular aerobic exercise can help you lose weight and stay fit, certain aerobics routines tend to burn more belly fat than others. Some aerobics routines specifically involve core work that can help tone your abdominal muscles, but the most effective aerobics routines for losing belly fat typically include interval training exercises. Interval training not only helps burn overall fat more efficiently but also helps eliminate abdominal fat.

Interval Training

While most forms of aerobic activity, including jogging, cycling, dancing and swimming, can help you burn calories and stay in shape, it takes longer to burn fat when such cardio activity is performed at a constant pace. This is called continuous training, and although this type of training is an important part of a complete aerobics fitness program, it’s essential to include interval training in your weekly cardio routines, especially if you want to burn fat. Interval training involves alternating between short periods of high-intensity exercise and longer periods of rest, or low-intensity exercise, during aerobics routines. For instance, you can alternate between walking on a treadmill at 3.5 mph for five minutes and jogging 4.2 mph for one minute for interval-training sessions. Repeatedly alternating between high-intensity and low-intensity segments during aerobics routines can help you burn more calories and belly fat.

Interval Training and Belly Fat

Interval training can especially help you lose belly fat, including the deeper layers, called intra-abdominal fat, that are more difficult to get rid of -- this is the fat stored underneath the abdominal muscles. Intra-abdominal fat is harder to burn with continuous training because of the steady rate of aerobic activity involved. Intra-abdominal fat also takes longer to get rid of because of its location and type. Interval training, however, continually fires up fat-burning mechanisms in the body to better target deeper abdominal fat.

Sports and Aerobic Exercise

Playing and training for sports, such as tennis, basketball and football, can help you burn belly fat. These are aerobic activities that naturally involve interval exercise routines because of the constant starting and stopping motions involved and the frequent switches between high-intensity and low-intensity activity required. This is why interval training is often a recommended training method for athletes involved in a variety of sports. Cycling, jogging, hiking or swimming and other types of sports require you to engage your core muscles during performance, which aids weight loss by helping to tone abdominal muscles.

Dance and Dance Aerobics

Dance and dance aerobics, such as belly dancing and Zumba, can naturally help you burn belly fat because many of the routines naturally incorporate interval and core work. Such dance-based aerobics routines rely on abdominal muscles for most of the choreography involved. For instance, the Latin routines performed in Zumba require core movement to successfully execute the various sequences of steps. Interval work is also involved because most of the dance routines are a combination of high-intensity and low-intensity sequences based on song speed and matching choreography.

References

Article reviewed by Contributing Writer Last updated on: Sep 13, 2011

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