Whether your goal is to lose weight, or build lean muscle, losing body fat is the ultimate challenge that we face. Because if you want to lose well-defined abs and have lean legs, you’ll only start to see them after reducing the body fat level to a significantly low level! So how do we achieve this fast??? Well to answer these questions, I will touch on the main types of exercise and reveal the secret to losing that stubborn fat.
Cardio
Because cardio training is well known for losing calories, it is the most popular exercise ever. This is why most girls head to the treadmill and the elliptical at the gym! (I know some of us hate this long, boring cardio though) But under this category of cardio, there are primarily two types-- low intensity steady state cardio (LISS) and high impact cardio (HI). The first type which is LISS includes walking, swimming and bicycling for long distance at a steady pace. With this form of exercise where the heart beats at a lower rate, the majority of the fuel comes from fat. On the other hand, for high intensity cardio which requires intense bursts of energy like sprinting, running and jogging, it causes the body to take up the glycogen stores, rather than fat. So it is important that you are mainly doing low intensity cardio for LONG DISTANCE!!
Strength
I know most girls are scared of weight training because we think we might bulk up. BUT the truth is, it is hard for us to gain the manly muscles because of our genetic makeup and hormones. Notice that even weight builders have a hard time gaining the muscle bulk. The truth is, the quest to burn fat is not complete without strength training! Unlike cardio which only burns fat during the workout, your body enters the supreme fat-burning mode with the strength training, ALL DAY after the workout. This is because the body consumes oxygen at an elevated rate to achieve is pre-exercise state, known as Excess Post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC). This creates a massive calorie deficit so you don’t even have to worry about how many calories you have eaten!
High Intensity Interval Training
Among all the exercises, this is definitely the one that is the most fun and effective yet advanced. HIIT consists of a short periods of intense work followed by a limited recovery time-- usually 50 seconds of work and 10 seconds of rest. Just like strength, the body resets its metabolism in the post-workout, causing extreme calorie burn. What’s even better is that it burns calories almost twice the steady state cardio for the same amount of time. So the next time you hit the gym, think of doing some sprinting with jogging in between.
While HIIT is clearly the best form of exercise, it is the workout routine that matters. For beginners, LISS is recommended for exercising with some degree of strength incorporated whereas for an advanced, a workout plan that is geared to avoid the "plateau effect" should be created. ("The plateau effect" is where the results become less significant with time) To get around this, you could do variable degrees of training__ such as HIIT for 3 days with 1 day strength and 1 day cardio for a week. Also, your intensity must be fluctuated so body experiences “shocks” in which it would speed up the fat-burning process. Remember that healthy eating is part of meeting your fitness goals too. So the rule of thumb is: work out hard but also smart, and your body will be a fat burning furnace in no time.
