13 Ways to Burn More Calories and Lose Weight

Tabata Training

This form of exercise is short on time and tough on fat! Doing as little as 4 minutes (or one “Tabata”) can increase your aerobic capacity, anaerobic capacity, VO2 max, resting metabolic rate, and can help you burn more fat (and make you look leaner) than a traditional 60-minute aerobic workout. The short, high intensity moves make this workout kick your metabolism into high gear.

Run in the Sand

Change up your normal walking, jogging and running routine by exchanging the pavement for the sand. The sand acts as added resistance, working muscles harder, creating better lung power and can burn from 20% to 50% more calories.

Focus on Compound Workouts

Compound moves stimulate more muscle building hormones. To build and create a lean, toned body you need to stimulate your androgen hormones that are growth hormones and testosterone. Growth hormone release peaks around midnight when your body regenerates overnight. Stimulating it via exercise will give it a welcome boost, but you need to get at least eight hours good sleep a night to maximize its and the other androgen’s potential for improved fitness and health.

Jump Rope Between Sets

Jumping rope is one of the best cardiovascular exercises there is. It keeps our heart rate elevated while working the whole body. Instead of sitting around between sets, skip rope for 60 seconds. This is called “active recovery” and can increase caloric expenditure while preventing muscle breakdown.

Do Circuit Training

Doing one exercise after another keeps your heart rate at an efficient fat-burning level. The idea is not speed, but exercising continuously. The fact that there is no rest in-between sets while working multiple muscle groups per workout, gives you more bang for your buck in the fat burning department. This form of training can be done at a gym, in your home and even outdoors.

Use Kettlebells

Kettlebell training offers you the ability to burn fat with high-intensity workouts while sculpting your body from head to toe. Using kettle bells in your fitness routine can challenge your body and build strength, stamina, endurance and flexibility unlike other pieces of equipment. The functional movements that you perform with a kettle bell resemble movements that you perform every day. Kettle bells workouts are effective at increasing strength by using full-body functional movements that incorporate several muscle groups for each exercise, building lean muscle mass and increasing metabolism in return.

Choose Sprints

Sprinting causes significant caloric expenditure, yields positively for excess post exercise oxygen consumption and provides some enhancement to the cardiovascular system. Sprinting also assists in the development in a stronger lower body and core by adapting to the performance needed for speed.

Wear a Weighted Vest

By adding additional weight to the body, weighted vests lend themselves to a variety of workouts. For muscle-building body-weight exercises, weighted vests create challenging resistance. This resistance and weight also increase the challenge of some cardiovascular exercises, such as running, helping tone muscles and get the heart pumping. This in turn burns more calories and helps aid in building lean muscle mass and strength. Weight vests can be worn for multiple forms of exercises from pull ups, squats and even sprinting.

Bike to Work

If you live a reasonable distance from your work, burn extra calories by riding your bike vs taking your car. This is an example of burning calories at a time where calories might be reserved. Riding your bike for 30 minutes can burn 159 calories at 5.5 mph. Now, times that by two (to and from work) equals 318. Multiply that by five days per week and you get a whopping 1,590 calories! This means by just doing this you can burn about a ½ a pound of fat per week.

Do Jumping Jacks on Breaks

The average commercial break lasts 2 to 3 minutes. Take that time to do some jumping jacks. The calories burned per 1 min of jumping jacks are about 7.8. Multiply that by three and you get 23.4 calories burned in that commercial break. Swap the snack you may eat during your favorite TV program with jumping jacks and watch the calories go right out the window.

Use Supersets and Giant Sets

Not only are supersets time efficient, it helps build muscle and burn fats by the increase lactic acid production, which helps boost growth hormone (GH) levels in the body. The body responds to the reduced pH (increased acidity) in the body from the production of lactic acid by secreting GH. GH is a powerful fat loss and muscle building hormone. Giant sets are great for bringing up your lagging muscles. Giant sets “shock” muscles into growing by forcing more blood into a specific muscle group which helps deliver amino acids. This helps with the healing process of ripped muscle tears resulting in muscle growth.

The added intensity of giant sets will also boost your metabolism and fat loss while recruiting more muscle fibers per work out due to such overload. Bodyweight workout: Other exercises that utilize machines tend to isolate a muscle group working more on bulking the muscle, while bodyweight workouts forces us to use our whole body to stabilize. This burns more calories and builds over-all strength faster than traditional weightlifting.

Opt for HIIT

High Intensity Interval Training causes metabolic adaptations that enable you to use more fat as fuel under a variety of conditions. This will improve your athletic endurance as well as your fat-burning potential. HIIT also limits muscle loss that can occur with weight loss, in comparison to traditional steady-state cardio exercise of longer duration. Another benefit from these interval training workouts is, it increases the amount of calories you burn during your exercise session and afterward because it increases the length of time it takes your body to recover from each exercise session. With HIIT you burn a lot of calories in a short period of time.

Run Stairs

Running stairs provides a quick, gym free, fat burning workout. The calories burned when running stairs helps create a deficiency helping boost fat loss and boosting metabolism. Running/sprinting upstairs can be done as a single workout or in between sets to further increase calories expenditure. A fantastic lower body workout that sculpts and tones the whole lower body can easily include the upper body by carrying dumbbells.