How do You Burn Fat

'How do you burn fat?; the answer lies in knowing the science behind it.'

A new year resolution that almost everyone makes is to lose a bit of fat, get lean and mean. However, a few weeks into the year and you tend to lose that inspiration. For as long as you can remember, 'how do you burn fat?' is the question that you have been asking. You have been wanting to get rid of those love handles, get those six packs abs, a firm butt and toned muscles. Somehow, you couldn’t keep that promise to yourself. But this time around, you are pretty serious.

So where do you start? Well, here are a few things that you should know before you begin. In this article, we will have a look at how to burn fat. I will also touch upon what types of exercise you need to concentrate on to effectively lose fat.

So How Do You Burn Fat?
Physiology of Fat Burning

Human body requires energy to perform various functions like muscle movement, respiration, digestion, excretion and so on. This energy comes from the food that we consume. Various components of food, viz., carbohydrates, proteins and fats are broken down during the process of digestion. The energy released during this breakdown of foodstuff is then utilised to perform functions.

Food also contains other nutrients like vitamins and minerals which aid the process of digestion. These vitamins and minerals, in addition, perform a variety of other important physiological functions.

Energy requirement of a fit, health adult weighing 70 Kg is 2200 Kcal per day. This figure however is a rough estimate and varies drastically depending on factors like genetics, individual basal metabolic rates, the type of food consumed, the level of physical activity, indulgence in exercise, regularity of exercise as well as type of exercise.

A simple answer to 'how do you burn fat' is to burn more calories than you consume. However, this is easier said than done. Both cardiovascular work (aerobics) and resistance training will cause energy expenditure. Aerobic exercise (depending on oxygen for energy generation) effectively burns fat if done at the proper intensity and duration. This is so because fats are used as fuel by the body only in the presence of oxygen.

Resistance training also helps in weight loss by increasing muscle mass and therefore, the basal metabolic rate. Starvation, practised esp. by health conscious women, results in use of carbohydrates and proteins for energy while fat is left untouched. This is the so called ‘famine effect’. So, although, you might weigh less on the scales, you have effectively lost muscles while fats are still intact. You should, thus, try to avoid drastically cutting down on consumption of calories.

What Type of Training to Concentrate on
For Effective Fat Loss

Aerobic Training:

Is the best strategy if you are looking to lose fat. Aerobic activity can include a variety of activities like brisk walking, jogging, cycling, treadmill, skipping, etc. A gradual build up of intensity as well as duration is recommended for beginners.

Another important thing to remember is that during a low or moderate activity,for the initial 10-15 minutes, simple carbohydrates (glucose in muscles) are burned as fuel. After about 20 min, the body starts burning fat for energy generation. Thus, no matter what type or intensity of aerobic activity you choose, make sure that it lasts for more than 20 min.

A moderate intensity aerobic activity performed for 30 minutes, 5 days a week or high intensity aerobic activity for 20-25 minutes, 3 days a week or a combination of moderate and high intensity sessions throughout the week will help you lose fat. Here, moderate intensity means 40 – 60% of VO2 max (65 – 80% maximal heart rate*) and high intensity means > 60% of VO2 max (80 – 85% maximal heart rate). Thus, a total of 150 minutes of moderate level activity or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity activity in a week is sure to cause weight loss.

Another simple method to remember when you are looking to lose fat is to burn 1000 Kcal through aerobic activity per week. Some people recommend burning 500 Kcal through aerobic activity and reducing calorie intake by 500 Kcal as an effective way of losing fat.

Another good way of losing fat is to perform low or moderate intensity aerobic activity after a session of weight training. The basis for this is that your body has already used up carbohydrates for the weight training session, thus allowing your body to directly dig into fat stores for energy.

Weight Training:

Has a lot of advantages including increased muscle strength, power,neuromuscular co-ordination, and improved bone density, etc. However, it also helps you in keeping fat down in an indirect way. Since muscles are the most metabolically active of all tissues, they consume most amount of calories. So, the more the muscles, the more energy you spend even while resting.

You should design training spilts so that you cover the whole body in a week. Ideally, two to three sessions of resistance training per week should suffice. Concentrating on compound exercises (involving two or more joints) and lower body workouts are effective ways of bumping up your metabolism.

Circuit Training:

This may be an answer to your querry of 'how do you burn fat?', especially if you cannot perform high intensity aerobic activity. It involves a number of resistance training exercises, done one after the other with a brief rest between each set. The idea is to train for both muscular endurance and fat loss.

You can design a circuit according to your needs. However, there are certain things that you need to keep in mind before doing so:

• All major muscle groups should be covered in each circuit, i.e. upper body, lower body, core and trunk. Thus, you need to have a circuit of 6 or 8 exercises.
  
• Each exercise should last between 20 - 30 seconds.
  
• The rest interval between sets should be 20 – 30 seconds.
  
• The whole circuit should be repeated two to three times in a session.

Gradually as you progress, you can increase the intensity of the circuit by increasing repetitions or resistance or by reducing rest interval between exercises. The number of circuit training sessions per week can also be increased. However, a word of caution here: always allow at least 48 hours between successive sessions of circuit training.

Conclusion:

If you type in a query 'how do you burn fat' in a search engine, You can easily get confused by the wealth of information available. A lot of website would give you valuable information but the most important thing to remember is that there is no alternative to aerobic training.

All the other methods of training will only supplement the fat loss achieved by aerobic training. Also, implementing a healthy diet is an equally important aspect.

* Maximal Heart Rate = 220 - your age
Eg., if you are 30 year old
individual, your maximal heart rate would be 220 -30...i.e. 190.
and 85% of your maximal heart rate would be 161.