“How to lose belly fat” is one of the most common questions out there. And that’s understandable. Belly fat is really easy to gain and notoriously hard to lose. It can seem as though no matter what exercises you try to lose belly fat and no matter how well you eat, the belly fat just won’t budge. And unfortunately, with exception to surgery, there is currently no proven method of being able to spot reduce fat from the belly. There is an exercise, however, that is incredibly underutilized yet powerfully effective when it comes to losing even the most stubborn belly fat. Today I’ll share what that is and how you can start using it right away to lose belly fat.
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Why is belly fat is so hard to lose in the first place? Well, it comes down to the fact that certain areas of your body are easier to lose fat than others, and is largely determined by genetics. Now having your genetics stacked against you may seem problematic if you’re looking to develop a slim or lean looking abdomen, but there is a solution. As long as you create a calorie deficit, you will continue to lose fat. Eventually, if maintained long enough, you will lose excess fat from all areas of your body, even if your genetics put your belly fat at the back of the line.
While diet should be your main way of creating a calorie deficit, adding additional exercises could help you to lose belly fat by keeping your metabolism high, even as you’re losing weight from dieting. That said, not all exercises are created equal. While things like running, rowing, cycling, or even HIIT workouts tend to burn calories very quickly, the truth is, the overwhelming majority of people can’t actually stick with traditional cardio long enough for fat loss to reach stubborn areas. And it’s not that these methods don’t work if you stick to it, because they do. The problem is simply that they’re brutal. They require a lot of willpower.
Now don’t get me wrong, these forms of cardio definitely do have their place and some people have no problem sticking to them. In fact, I still do these intense sessions once or twice a week for conditioning. But I no longer rely on them as my main form of cardio to lose fat and nor should most people. Because if you want to lose your stubborn belly fat, and more importantly keep it off once it’s gone, then you need something you can stick to for life. What’s the solution?
The best exercise to lose belly fat is walking. It’s the easiest to maintain, lowest stress, lowest fatigue, and most versatile form of cardio. According to research, intense forms of cardio like HIIT or running, while time efficient, didn’t provide any superior fat loss effect when compared to longer yet less intense forms of cardio such as walking. Which makes sense. It’s simply a numbers game. Your body doesn’t care whether the calories you burned were from some crazy intense fasted cardio session or from plain old walking. What matters most is what you can do consistently over time. And if you crunch the numbers, you’ll actually find that the calories burned from simply walking can very quickly add up to a meaningful amount.
So now that I’ve hopefully convinced you of the power of walking, let’s dive into the specifics of how to lose belly fat from walking. The first step is to determine an average of how many steps you’re currently taking. You can use the health app on your iPhone or use Google Fit if you’re on Android. After a week, see what your daily average comes up to. Some of you however might be surprised with how few steps you’re taking, but this is a good thing, as it means you have a big opportunity to bump that up.
Set a realistic goal and first aim to do an extra 2,000 steps a day. Given that the average individual takes about 1,200 steps during 10 minutes of walking, all you have to do is throw in two 10 minutes walks into your day to accomplish that. Once you’re consistent with that, try bumping it up by another 2,000 steps, and continue doing this with the goal of consistently getting at least 8,000 steps or even up to 15,000 steps, which seems to be the range that provides the greatest fat loss and health benefits.
Trust me, the little things add up. Apply these tips and you’ll be surprised with just how much they increase your step count and even more surprised by how much of a difference it makes towards your fat loss overtime. That said guys, I want to emphasize that walking or any form of cardio is only effective for fat loss if it’s used in combination with a diet. So use your diet as the primary way to create a calorie deficit and supplement it with walking to help speed up the process.
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One of the biggest differences between weight lifting vs cardio is that while lifting weights is great for building muscle, it’s not so great if you’re looking to burn calories. In this video, I’ll explain how that affects your ability to burn fat and build muscle, and then cover how to burn more calories by covering three tweaks that you can make during your lifting workouts. By the end, you’ll end up with a full body weight training workout that you can get started with right away to burn fat.
Exercise alone is not very effective at losing fat if your diet is not under control. But with a proper diet, adding the right type of exercise to it can significantly speed up your results. When comparing weight lifting vs cardio, while resistance training doesn’t burn many calories compared to cardio, it does have one important advantage over the latter. Doing cardio alone can lead to a small amount of muscle loss.
This is important to note because muscle is what will help keep your metabolism high as you lose weight and will ensure you end up looking lean and muscular rather than just “skinny” after a diet. This means that, if you’re looking to burn fat and build muscle in the most optimal manner possible, a combination of resistance training with cardio is best. I’ll show you exactly how to do this with three tweaks and then give you an example workout that puts it into practice.
When it comes to how to burn more calories through weight lifting, the first tweak is with how much weight you’ll be lifting and how many reps you’ll be doing in your sets for each exercise. More specifically, research suggests that you can nearly double the number of calories you burn in a set by lifting lighter weights for more reps. However, although we can burn slightly more calories the lighter in weight we go, note that for the best muscle building results while still burning significantly more calories, a good recommendation is to use a weight that’s between 40-60% of the maximum weight you could lift for that exercise. For most people, this means choosing a weight that you could do around 15-30 reps with. Just remember, you still need to push yourself hard enough for this to be effective.
Tweak 2 to burn fat with weight training involves using the most muscle mass as possible within your workouts. Illustrating this is a 2017 study tested a variety of resistance training exercises and compared the calories burned. They compared several “isolation exercises” that only worked one small muscle at a time, to “compound exercises” that work several different muscles simultaneously. They found that lat pulldowns, which work several back muscles as well as the biceps, burned almost 20% more calories than bicep curls. Squats, which work the whole lower body, burn almost 35% more calories than leg extensions. We’ll apply this by filling our workout with big exercises that will work every single muscle of our body
Finally, the most important thing you can do to burn more calories is improve your time efficiency. How? You can do so by making use of a circuit style of training. Using this method will enable us to add more exercises and sets into our workout without having to stay in the gym any longer than normal. But we will want to be careful with the exercise selection to ensure we don’t compromise our gains by overworking the same muscle groups with not enough rest. Alright now that we’ve got the science down, let’s apply it into a workout that can be done either at a gym or even at home with just dumbbells.
The workout includes 3 circuits that each have 4 exercises. Within each circuit you will progress from one exercise to the next resting for only 15-20 seconds. Pick a weight that you could do somewhere between 15-30 reps with if you pushed hard. If you reach above 30 reps, then you know it’s time to use a heavier weight. Finally, if you’re a beginner, perform each circuit 2-3 times, intermediate 3-4 times, and advanced 4-5 times.
Circuit 1:
DB Bench Press → DB Row → DB Shoulder Press → Reverse Crunch
Circuit 2: Lower Body:
Goblet Squat→ DB RDL → DB Calf Raise → Weighted Crunch
Circuit 3: Full Body:
Reverse Lunges → Push Up→ DB Facepulls → Plank
You’ll get the most benefit from this workout if you implement it no less than 2 but no more than 4 times a week. That said, I wouldn’t use this style of workout if your main goal is to build muscle and improve your strength.
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