How to Reduce Body Fat Through Exercise

@breepeace (3014)
Canada
May 3, 2007 12:41pm CST
Exercise and nutrition both play a very important role in the amount of fat stored in your body. Not all exercising will reduce your body fat equally. The type, duration and intensity of your routine will determine how effectively you lower your body fat percentage. Instructions Step One The most important rule you have to remember when trying to lower your body fat percentage, is that you don't choose where the fat comes off from, your genetics do. If you're trying to get a killer set of abs, doing sit ups and crunches when you have a high body fat content isn't going to burn the fat that is covering your abs. To get rid of excess body fat, you need to participate in activities that burn a lot of calories. Running, biking, swimming and most sports will do this very well. In addition to cardio, you also need to have a good strength training routine. Muscle burns more calories than fat so one of your top priorities needs to be building more muscle mass. Step Two A common misconception is that to get rid of fat, you need to workout at a low intensity. While its true that activities at low intensities burn more fat, those at high intensities will burn more calories and at the end of the day, the amount of calories you burn is more important than the amount of fat you burn even if you're trying to get rid of fat. Step Three Running at a high intensity will burn more calories than walking at a slow intensity. Remember, to lose body fat, you need to burn more calories than you eat. Exercising harder will burn more calories and help you get to your goal quicker. If you burn 400 calories (of mostly fat) at a low intensity versus 500 calories (of mostly non-fat) at a higher intensity, what happens to that extra 100 calories at the end of the day? The answer is that it gets converted to fat. You are better off burning it by working at a high intensity.
1 response
@PsychoDude (2013)
• Netherlands
3 May 07
The average person when walking burns like 40~80 calories each 10 minutes, running at 12 miles this is around 220 calories. Now let's say you walk at a normal rate of around 3 miles an hour, you will burn about 60 calories per 10 minutes. Half an hour of running at full speed will make you lose 220*3 = 660 calories that way. The problem though is, who can run 30 minutes at 12 miles an hour? Myself I know I wouldn't be able to. I'd probably fall back to around 7 miles an hour doing just around 500 calories in the half hour then. Now if I go walk though in a pace of about 3~4 miles an hour, I can walk for 3 hours or more quite easily, so I would burn 18*60 calories being 1080 calories. By slowing things down you might not burn as many calories within the same time period, but you can definitely spread it out and actually achieve more on a day if you take your time. Especially for people with overweight running can be hard, whilst walking is a lot easier, so after about 5 minutes of running many would be worn out already whilst if they go walking they could go still for about an hour. Then there's be a massive difference of about 80 calories burned with the running for a short period of time vs nearly 400 calories burned by walking for an hour. High intensity training is only valuable if one has already got a great condition and simply is trying to keep up along with a high food intake. If you would in example consume 4500 kcal a day, mainly protein, to build up muscle mass in example you would need to burn about 2000kcal extra on a daily basis. In order to do this walking 6 hours would be taking too much time so running for an hour at around 7 mph would be more realistic.