3 Smart Ways to Burn More Calories During Your Workout
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It might seem like you’re fighting a losing battle. No matter how much you increase your workout efforts, those few extra pounds remain stubbornly glued to your waist and thighs. Athletic zeal is certainly a good thing, but there might be more sensible ways to burn more calories during your workout.
One of the most important rules that you have to adhere to burn more calories is to prioritize intensity over effort. Making your difficulty curve steeper is all fine and dandy, but it might not bring you the desired results in the given time.
What does intensity entail? Firstly, intensify your cardio. This should be fairly easy with activities such as running, biking or walking. By simply increasing speed for as long as you can hold it, you’ll be rendering your cardio more intense.
In other words, you shouldn’t merely be content with pushing yourself a bit further every day when it comes to distance. Adjusting your body to an arbitrary speed-ceiling is a guaranteed way to burn fewer calories in the long run. You can use fitness apps to track your speed and calories burned.
Furthermore, add some curveballs to your cardio sessions. For example, you can visit the nearest hiking trail and fight the uphill battle with your legs as you do your best to re-adapt your speed and your direction.
Hiking might be exactly what the doctor recommended, so keep away from that same old track. Make your legs work for that protein-rich dinner by forcing them to multitask. You can easily feel how a particular muscle mass is engaged and when. Change your stride and inclination to engage as many leg muscles as possible. You can do this on an elliptical as well.
If you’re an avid cyclist, be mindful of your upstroke. Focus on that pulling and pushing motion as you pedal and you should be able to engage your hip flexors, which are typically neglected.
Sweating is your body’s most efficient method of speeding up the metabolism and burning fat repositories. That’s why the combination of regular exercise and heat therapy has scientifically-proven benefits on your cardiovascular health.
However, inducing consistent and ample perspiration may prove to be a bigger challenge than what you might initially expect – especially if you’re already an experienced gym-goer. Additionally, you’re probably too busy to spend extended sessions in a sauna. This is where vests and suits designed for sweating come into play.
These accessories are crafted to fit you like a glove, so you can easily wear them under your exercising outfit or even under your everyday clothes.
Many people who don sauna suits opt for both choices as they can extend their perspiration to longer periods, which in turn helps them burn more calories. Of course, this activity has to be combined with exercises that will keep the metabolism running smoothly.
It goes without saying that you’ll need to hydrate plentifully during this process. You won’t find the exact scientific consensus on how much water you should drink daily, but it is somewhat accepted that 8 glasses a day, or more if need be, should do the trick.
Let’s go back to the topic of intensity for a second. If you want to make your workout sessions more intense, shorten your rest intervals and introduce brand new exercise sets. You’ll be able to do this for two reasons.
First, by shortening your rests, you’ll garner more time on the tail end of your workout routine. This is what gives you the chance to bring new exercises into the fold.
Second, new exercises are bound to ‘shock’ your system into burning more calories. Combine this with a shuffled set throughout the routine, and you’ll turn into an unstoppable fat-burning machine.
Therefore, skip the breaks and immediately start working on another muscle group as you push onwards. Using rests to participate in other exercises for completely different muscle groups is also known as ‘supersets’. Make the workout as diversified as possible (in terms of targeting various muscle groups) and you will get the results that you desperately need.
Lastly, make sure to monitor your heart rate no matter what. The higher it gets – the more calories you will burn. Remember, difficulty is not the leading measurement to gauge ‘burnt calories per minute’. When it comes to any kind of exercise, efficiency always trumps difficulty.
Go for a diverse mixture of cardio and strength exercises and rely on versatility and intensity to burn your fat quicker than you can build it.
