If you’re aiming for quickish results, exercise that works out your muscles should be a priority.
It provides the best bang-for-buck that will not only fast-track you towards a healthy body but also give you the toned features that can give you the appearance of being slimmer.
This is because resistance training – using free-weights or resistance machines – fires up your internal furnace, which will continue to burn fat long after you’ve walked away from the gym and are lying on the couch. In fact, studies have found that after an intensive resistance workout, your fat-burn may continue for as much as 34 to 48 hours. Now that’s reward for effort.
Importantly, a resistance session doesn’t take that long either. You will have arrived and left the gym while the jogger is still plugging away on the treadmill.
“You may have been told that exercising at a comfortable pace is best for fat loss because you are working in the ‘fat-burning zone’,” says Julia Buckley, personal trainer and author of The Fat Burn Revolution. “This is just plain wrong. People who say this are confused by the fact that training at low intensities causes the body to use more fat than glycogen for fuel while you are exercising. But what they don’t realise is that high-intensity exercise causes more fat to be burned in total when you take account of afterburn. Plus, with this type of training, the next time you eat, the calories from your food will be used to replace the glycogen you used up rather than stored as fat.”