The best Exercise to Burn Belly Fat – Body Fat

Strength training, which involves using your body weight, weights, bands, kettlebells, or tubing challenge your body to work harder than it does in everyday life.  Endurance activities like running and biking also challenge your body.  The difference is how long and how much these activities boost your metabolism.  This is biggest factor in impacting your overall ability to lose body fat and/or decrease your weight.


What are the components of metabolism?
1 - Resting metabolic rate, or RMR. This is the energy or calories needed to keep us living and breathing. Your RMR makes up about 60 to 80 percent of our total metabolic rate.
2 - Thermic Effect of Activity, or TEA. The more active you are, the more your total metabolic rate will be increased. TEA includes all activity from mowing your lawn, playing sports, attending exercise classes, etc.  TEA includes all activities that we engage in every day to live our lives, not just structured exercise.
3 - Thermic Effect of Feeding, or TEF. This is the amount of energy expended to eat and digest 
food and convert nutrients to energy.


Metabolism is known as Total Energy Expenditure (TEE) = RMR + TEA + TEF.  Each component is different for each person, resulting in unique metabolic rates.


Why is Strength Training so Important for losing body fat and weight?


Strength training increases the  TEE by elevating the amount of calories expended in activity (TEA). The harder you strength train, the greater the amount of calories you burn through exercise.


Strength training also increases the amount of calories expended in your RMR by increasing the amount of lean muscle mass you carry.  The more lean muscle mass you have, the  more energy is required to maintain it.  Both strength training and endurance exercise will increase your energy expenditure at the time of activity and for a few hours after.


Strength training is unique in that if the energy expended afterwards, known as EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption) can be elevated for 24-36 hours. Some people call this the “Afterburn” effect of serious strength training or metabolic training.


Strength training will boost your metabolism, but it has to be more challenging than activities you do every day. You can’t expect 3lb dumbbells to make much difference to your metabolic rate ( and I know most of you have pocketbooks that weight more than that!)


Strength training requires “strength” and requires a challenge to build muscle, lose fat, and look better in your clothes.  That is what we are looking for, right?