So you want to flatten your stomach and are willing to give exercise a try. If you have a heartbeat and a television, you're probably familiar with treadmills, stationary bicycles, elliptical runners, and ab exercises. In short, you probably have an image of exercise that is advertised as being beneficial for losing belly fat.
Because you already have this perception, it is critical that we address it: the types of exercise you have used or are considering using are probably not the best methods for achieving a flat stomach. Thus, the purpose of this article is to compare the fat-burning benefits of low- and high-intensity exercise and to highlight the most effective exercises for belly fat, most notably sprinting.
Exercises for the Abdomen
I've got to get this one over with. Crunches, air biking, side crunches, and sit-ups are all excellent abdominal exercises if you want to gain stomach muscle. While these exercises do burn some calories, the rate of calories burned per hour is comparable to that of a leisurely (low-intensity) bike ride.
Ab exercises can actually increase the size of your stomach by strengthening the muscle that lies beneath the fat. You will eventually want to build abdominal muscles, but if you do so before they are visible, your efforts will directly contradict your goal of a flat stomach. As a result, while this type of exercise is recommended in small doses for overall health and posture stability, it is not among the best exercises for belly fat.
Cardiovascular Exercise at a Low Intensity (Aerobic)
Without a doubt, your heart requires exercise. Which one does not? Thus, how does cardiovascular exercise impact your fat-loss goals? Perhaps the most pervasive myth surrounding cardio and fat loss is that there is such a thing as a "fat-burning zone" and that this zone is optimal for fat loss.
Indeed, just as there is a zone for protein and a zone for sugar, there is a heart-rate zone where the body's primary expenditure is from fat. However, there are numerous reasons to reject the notion that exercising in the fat-burning zone is the optimal way to lose belly fat.
To begin, consider the individuals who exercise within this zone. Are they svelte? This widely circulated myth does not appear to have benefited those who believe it very much. Rather than that, it keeps them in the gym for hours each day in the hope that the time they spend exercising will eventually pay off.
Second, there is no physiological benefit to fat burning while exercising. Please bear with me. Your body is a self-adapting system. In the face of any adversity, your body will adapt in order to deal with that same type of adversity in the future. Exercise is a form of adversity. Indeed, that is precisely why we exercise. We want to subject our bodies to adverse conditions in order to force them to adapt. In the case of someone attempting to reduce their body fat mass ratio, the adverse condition we are putting the body under is consuming fewer calories than it expends.
This forces the body to self-feed, in a sense
However, simply altering your eating habits is insufficient. If the type of exercise you perform promotes fat retention while discouraging muscle retention, your body will respond by shedding muscle and storing fat. Indeed, if you force your body to feed on itself, it would much rather retain fat than muscle, as muscle requires constant energy expenditure to maintain.
The most effective way to exercise without seeing results is to perform only low-intensity exercise in the fat-burning zone. Why is this the case? Because you are not exerting much effort with your muscles, your body will deplete them to the bare minimum. To maintain muscle mass, it is critical to engage in high-intensity exercise that signals your body to conserve those muscles.
Cardiovascular Exercise at a High Intensity (Anaerobic)
Your body, after all, was not built to run marathons. As impressive as marathon running is, it is a relatively recent phenomenon. When you consider what it took to survive before Man developed the ability to live a sedentary lifestyle, there is no reason to run extremely long distances at a steady pace. Indeed, the majority of human survival actions involve bursts of intense exercise. Thus, adhering to this evolutionary mould makes sense in order to maximise the human model of fitness.
While maintaining good health requires some level of intensity in your exercise, it does not have to be lethal. Alternating between jogging and sprinting is probably the simplest way to incorporate high-intensity exercise. This provides your body with a variety of exercise conditions, which necessitates a high level of muscle retention. Your body will have to adapt to more varied exercise conditions, which almost always means sacrificing fat mass.
However, high-intensity exercise does not have to involve running. Alternatively, you could cycle as hard as possible in between sets of lifting. Alternatively, you could simply alternate between high- and low-intensity cycling. As long as you incorporate high-intensity exercise into your workout, you will promote sugar retention in your muscles and fat loss in your fat cells, while also decreasing the amount of time you spend exercising. Therefore, my friends, dash, and dash quickly!
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