Abdominal exercises do not produce the greatest effect when it comes to burning belly fat. Instead, prolonged and consistent cardio is your best bet. This can be explained by the simple fact that vigorous aerobic exercise raises your metabolic rate, allowing your body to expend more energy throughout the day – which helps you lose weight.
On the other hand, while abdominal exercises do not burn as much fat, they do tone up the muscles – various twists and turns help target the abdomen and sides, while squats and lunges strengthen the muscles of the glutes and thighs.
How to Burn Belly Fat?
When performing any exercise (both strength and cardio), fat is spent evenly throughout the body – it is impossible to remove fat from the abdomen or sides without general weight loss. In addition, in many cases, we are talking about the presence of internal fat, which requires cardio to burn.
First of all, the right workout for fat burning is based on consistency – if you want to get rid of your belly, you need to get into the habit of playing sports or exercising 2-4 times a week for at least 30-45 minutes. Plus, be mindful of the number of steps taken during the day. Moving around also helps in the fight against excess weight.
Most of the recommendations for exactly how many steps you need to take in a day suggest 10,000 – which is about 4-5 mi. It is believed that this is the minimum number of steps necessary to maintain basic health levels.
A similar level of physical activity is required to activate the musculoskeletal system and the cardiovascular system. On the other hand, the number of steps per day always depends on the age and on the general physical condition of a particular person.
Standards for the number of steps per day:
less than 5000 – a sedentary lifestyle
5000-7500 – low level of daily activity
7500-10000 – average activity level
10000-12500 – active lifestyle
over 12,500 – an extremely active lifestyle
It is also important to mention that fat burning workouts work exclusively in combination with nutrition – it is easier to control the intake of calories from food than trying to burn these calories with exercise. It is also important to know that fast carbohydrates provoke the growth of belly fat – they will have to be abandoned.
Burning fat - theory
Exercising is not about wasting calories or burning fat instantly. They represent a mechanism for restructuring metabolism – both to optimize the production of fat-burning hormones, and to normalize the levels of insulin and cortisol, which are responsible for gaining fat in the abdominal area and the sides.
Exercise choices are far less important than consistency, duration, and intensity of fat-burning training. First, you need to stabilize nutrition, then introduce the habit of cardio, and only then move on to exercises for the abdominal muscles.
It is also important to remember that body fat is not the same. Visceral fat builds up inside the abdominal cavity, pushing the abdomen forward – while subcutaneous fat is located above the muscles. Ultimately, the weight loss strategy will differ depending on how much fat a person has.
Fat Burning Exercises
Burpee is the leader in calorie expenditure and the premier exercise for burning fat. It combines elements of squats, planks, push-ups, and upward jumps. When performing burpees, all muscle groups of the body are involved in the work, and muscles of the abdomen, legs and chest receive the maximum load. Burpees also develop endurance, strength and coordination.
The burpee exercise is a technique for checking the physical condition of a person, proposed in the 1930’s. The technique of the exercise consisted of alternating four positions.
The benefits include improved ability to synchronize movements. Burpees strengthen the cardiovascular system, increase the supply of oxygen to the organs, and also improve muscle tone and the ability to maintain correct posture.
Burpee is an effective strength training exercise with body weight and does not require training equipment. In addition, with the right technique, all large muscles of the body are included in the work.
Also, the fight against fat in the lower abdomen is achieved faster with strengthening of the core. While abdominal exercises do not burn a significant amount of energy, they develop core muscles. Ultimately, it is beneficial for both speeding up metabolism and improving overall body tone.
How to strengthen your abdominal muscles correctly?
To strengthen the core correctly, you need both regular dynamic exercises (crunches, a bicycle) and static ones, a plank. Such an approach to training will not only develop the strength of the muscles but also form a dense muscle ring that encircles the body.
However, exercising the abs always starts with getting rid of belly fat through diet and regular fat burning workouts. This is followed by strengthening the muscular frame and working out the transverse abdominal muscles with the help of static exercises, and only at the end – performing dynamic abdominal exercises.
Fat Burning Workouts
Below is a list of effective workout strategies for burning belly fat. Once again, we note that we are talking specifically about training strategies, and not about the choice of individual exercises – neither twisting, nor the bar, nor any other exercises can purposefully drive away excess fat from the abdomen.
- Circuit training
Circuit training is a set of 4-8 exercises for the entire muscle groups of the body, performed in several cycles. In total, for such a workout, from 3 to 10 exercise cycles are performed, and a break of 1-3 minutes is done exclusively between blocks (“cycles”). The exercises themselves follow one after the other, with minimal interruption.
Circuit training is an effective way to burn more calories in less time. The advantage of this training is that it does not require special equipment, which means it can be performed both in the gym and at home.
According to research, circuit training speeds up the body’s metabolism, activating fat burning. In addition, since it involves performing multi-joint exercises, it helps to strengthen the muscles of the core and abs, as well as to target fat burning.
Studies have shown that circuit training alters metabolism, helping to store energy for physical activity in the muscles, rather than sending excess carbohydrates consumed into subcutaneous fat. In addition, more calories are burned during the workout itself than with regular cardio.
- Interval running
Interval training involves alternating between high, medium, and moderate intensity levels – to maximize fat burning. Such a workout lasts only 15-20 minutes – and the effect achieved is comparable to an hour of cardio in the usual mode.
- Cardio on an empty stomach
One of the professional ways to accelerate fat burning is to train early in the morning on an empty stomach – in this case, the level of glucose and insulin in the blood is at the minimum levels, which allows you to maximize the burning of belly fat.
Most often, immediately after waking up, the glycogen stores in the body are minimal – which helps weight loss workouts. At the same time, any breakfast (even a protein isolate that does not contain carbohydrates) will make the body first of all burn the calories of this breakfast, and not fat reserves at all.
The main rules of morning workouts for weight loss are an empty stomach and a maximally moderate pace of load lasting at least 30-40 minutes.
Fat Burning Nutrition
Controlling the glycemic index of foods and the abundance of fiber in the diet is the first and most important step in burning belly fat and further maintaining a stable body weight. No matter how active your fat burning workouts are, excessive nutrition will negate their effectiveness.
The professional nutritional tools include the carbohydrate-free keto diet; however, to burn fat, not muscle, you need to alternate between low-carbohydrate weeks and skipping carbohydrates. Otherwise, the body will go into a catabolic regime.
A simple diet for weight loss
To burn belly fat, it is not recommended to sharply limit the calorie intake of the diet, while simultaneously increasing the activity of fat burning exercises. A rigid diet and a significant lack of calories will increase the levels of the hunger hormone leptin and the stress hormone cortisol, provoking the accumulation of excess weight on the stomach.
Also, a simple method for burning belly fat is the 16/8 fasting, which consists of periodically abstaining from food for 16 hours, followed by 8 hours when you can eat. According to the rules of the diet, it is necessary to give up late dinner and early breakfast – in this case, most of the fasting period will be sleeping, and meals are distributed throughout the day.
If you want to burn belly fat, remember that fat burning training is not just a mechanism to get rid of excess calories, but a way to restructure your metabolism. In addition, there are no exercises that help to target fat burning from the abdomen and sides – they can only improve muscle tone.
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