Friday

What exercise is best to lose weight?


get asked all the time, “what’s the best exercise to lose belly fat?”, so I’ll answer it here because if one person is asking the question that means there’s a 100 more of you wondering the same thing and not wanting to speak up.
Here’s the thing: this is actually a trick question because there is NO ONE best exercise to lose belly fat! Because you can’t “spot reduce” any amount of fat on your body, which means you can’t just lose the fat around your belly and nowhere else.
So in order to lose belly fat you need to effectively lose fat over your whole body. And to do that you simply need to follow the steps I’ve laid out before here on this blog… but first…

You’re Probably Doing TOO MUCH When It Comes To Ab Exercises!

In an effort to lose belly fat, you might be doing a LOT of ab exercises. Hundreds of reps of crunches, situps, twisting situps, oblique work, leg raises, etc… and this could be hurting you in the long run…

You see, you’ll have a fairly strong set of abs that way, but most ab exercises done on the floor are not good for your overall posture. And this is more than a “look good sitting up” posture concern — it affects your health!
In modern times, most of us spend a lot of hours sitting at desks, hunched over keyboards and typing. This is a lot of “hunched” over upper back postures with a rounded back and contributes to shortened abs and shortened hip flexors too.
Add to that all the ab exercises you’re doing where you’re mainly doing trunk flexion exercises (crunches, situps, etc) and you’re contributing even more to short hip flexors, tight abs and a rounded lower back.
In the long run, this isn’t good for your lower back health and it’s the reason why a lot of people have lower back problems — even though they should have a strong core instead.
The main job of your abdominal muscles is to stabilize your trunk, your spine, and to keep you upright. So it’s important to train them with this in mind first — and then the flexion stuff as an after thought or not even at all.
Read my article called the Ab Workout Plan for more information.
Now that we’ve got your ab exercises fixed, let’s move on to losing that belly fat by losing fat all over:

Three Steps To Belly Fat Burning Success:

No matter what anyone tells you, you need to create a calorie deficit in your body (taking in less calories than you burn each day) to lose weight/fat. As Ricky Bobby would say, “That’s just science”. BUT, there are smart ways to go about creating this calorie deficit…
You could eat a LOT less and keep your same activity levels, or you could exercise or otherwise expand a LOT more activity… or the smart option… you could eat a little less AND expand a little more energy.
So here’s my advice:
  • Restrict calories – an easy way to do this without counting calories is to cut out carbs (or take them REALLY low) during the week. I’m not a “all carbs are evil!” type of guy, but if all you’re eating is meat, dairy and vegetables — you’ll see your calories drop really low right away. Also, start doing intermittent fasting, see how I put these two strategies together in The Perfect Muscle Building, Fat Burning Diet Plan.
  • Strength train – lean muscle burns fat and Strength Training tells your body to preserve your lean muscle when you’re restricting calories and to burn fat instead (yes, including belly fat).
  • Limited Cardio – don’t overdue this like most people. If you’re strength training 3x per week for 45 minutes you should be burning a lot of calories and doing a lot of good things for your metabolism as well. You can just add in a little interval training at the end of the strength workouts (on a 3x per week schedule) or do a little longer cardio on the 2-3 rest days per week (if you have a lot of body fat to burn) from strength training.
Following those three guidelines above are the answer to “What’s the best exercise to lose belly fat?” As you can see, it’s not as simple as some one “magic” exercise, but if you apply this advice it’ll get the job done.

1 Responses to “What exercise is best to lose weight?”

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