subject: The Best Way In The World To Reduce Body Fat [print this page] The best way to reduce body fat is to lift weights. What? What about running and sit ups? Well running is good but lifting weights is better and have you ever had any luck with sit ups? Let us talk.
Sit ups and other ab specific exercises are great for building the abdominal muscles however they are very poor at burning enough calories to see those abs. This is because you cannot spot reduce fat and, even if you could, it takes 3,500 calories to burn a single pound of fat. The average person only burns 2,000 calories in a 24 hour period so, I hope you are starting to see how hopeless it is to reduce your body fat by doing sit ups.
Next let us look at running or any other cardio exercise for that matter. Again, a pound of fat takes 3,500 calories to burn. You can spend an hour on the treadmill or the Stairmaster and only burn 500 calories which means you have still got 3,000 to go.
Knowing this you can start to wonder how anyone can reduce their body fat at all. This is where weight lifting becomes very important because the more muscle a body carries the more fat it burns. This is because muscle weighs more than fat and the body is forced to work harder and burns more calories.
But, by doing compound exercises which work multiple muscle groups at the same time you can throw your body into a metabolic shock which causes your body to burn more calories for days after, even while you sleep.
When using a barbell these are exercises like the dead lift, the bench press, clean and jerk, dumb bell snatch and others. But, there is another device that is actually far better for reducing body fat than the barbell. This is the kettlebell, which is a cannonball shaped piece of equipment with a handle. Because of its shape it is ideal for swinging which brings an added cardiovascular element to weight lifting that barbells just do not have. Consequently, researchers have discovered that you can burn as many as 20 calories a minute using a KB and as much as 1% body fat in a week.
Now, if you couple this with an exercise format called the Tabata Protocol you will have the best way in the world to reduce body fat.
The Tabata protocol is named after Dr. Izumi Tabata who discovered that by doing 8 20 second periods of intense exercise interspaced by only 10 seconds of rest you can burn calories at a higher rate throughout the day than if you had exercised for an hour.
