How to Exercise to Burn Fat

Let’s talk about how to get your body burning more calories through daily exercise.

Remember: fat loss is all about getting into a caloric deficit. You need to get your body burning more energy than what you’re taking in through your food.

Exercise Should Supplement Your Nutrition

Before we talk about exercise, please take note that managing what you eat is the most important part of successful fat loss. Many people try to lose fat without changing how they eat and just try to exercise away their body fat. This approach may help you to lose a little bit of weight initially, but isn’t a good strategy for long term success. 

It can be exhausting and even dangerous to try and “work off” surplus calories that you eat every day. Also, exercising more may actually increase your appetite, which can cause you to eat more. For these reasons, I recommend that my fat loss clients mainly focus on making better food choices that keep you in a calorie deficit.

You should view exercise as supplementary to your nutrition plan–not a replacement for it.

So prioritize managing your food intake either by tracking what you eat in a food journal or tracking app, or by following a meal plan. At the same time, tweaking your exercise routine can help you burn additional calories to accelerate your fat loss.

How Exercise Burns Fat

Whenever we move, our bodies burn calories to power that movement. 

Everything that your body does burns calories for energy.

The majority of your daily calories are used in basic body functions (like breathing, digestion, and keeping your organs functioning). Basic functions burn an average of about 1550 calories for adult females and between 1600 and 1800 calories for adult males (this is called the Basal Metabolic Rate, or BMR).

Any activity beyond basic functioning–such as walking around, doing activities of daily life, and exercise–adds more calories to your body’s daily burn. Depending on your level of activity every day, you can get your body to burn a couple hundred more calories just by doing things like walking, taking the stairs, taking stretch breaks at work, or working out.

In general, the more you move, the more calories you burn. 

How to Exercise for Fat Loss

The total number of calories that you burn every day is called your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE). One way to help your body burn more fat is to increase your TDEE by adding more movement and activity into your everyday life. 

Increasing your daily calorie burn is a great way to deepen your calorie deficit without having to necessarily eat less food (however, as we saw above, exercise is not a good replacement for managing what you eat–it’s supplementary).

A great way to start burning more calories is to set a daily movement goal. I recommend trying to get up and moving for 30 minutes total each day. 

For this, you can go for a brisk walk, do a workout, tidy up your house or work space–anything that gets you up and moving around. 

You don’t have to do all 30 minutes at the same time–feel free to break the time up into several small chunks of activity.

Personally, I like to do several 10- to 20-minute walks with my dog each day. I also do resistance training workouts to challenge my muscles on several days each week.

Some activities burn more calories than others, depending on how fast you move, how many muscles you use, and how hard you push your muscles. For example, walking at 3.5 mph (17 min/mi) can burn as much as 159 calories in 30 minutes. 30 minutes of stair climbing can burn as many as 252 calories.

Check out the chart linked below to see a list of different activities and their average number of calories burned per 30 minutes:

You can get your body burning even more calories by doing a workout! For your workouts, you can do cardiovascular exercise or resistance training.

Cardio For Fat Loss

Cardiovascular exercise is any activity that gets your heart rate up into a moderate-intensity zone for an extended period of time. A good target for cardiovascular exercise is to do a total of 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity exercise. Moderate-intensity counts as your heart rate being between 65% and 70% of your maximum heart rate. 

Track your heart rate during exercise by either wearing a heart rate monitor or fitness tracking device, or you can also track your heart rate manually.

You can split up your cardio however you like (e.g., 5 days of 30-minute sessions, 7 days of 20-minute sessions, etc).

You can burn even more calories in less time by doing high-intensity cardio or vigorous exercise on a few days a week. High-intensity cardio is anything that gets your heart rate between 70% and 85% of your maximum heart rate.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you have to do some crazy high-intensity exercise every day to get a “good workout” or burn fat. Plenty of people are able to reach their fat loss goals by simply walking every day.

In fact, doing super hard workouts all the time can backfire on your fat loss progress by leading to burnout or injury. If, however, you like to do really high intensity workouts, go ahead and do them–but limit doing them to no more than 2-3 times per week. Otherwise, allow yourself to do more gentle exercise like going for a walk, light jog, swim, or bike ride. There’s no need to blast yourself during a workout to make progress.

Resistance Training for Fat Loss

Resistance training is another excellent way to increase your daily calorie burn by building muscle. Resistance training is a type of workout that focuses on building muscle and strength. It involves challenging the muscles to perform against some type of resistance (e.g., weights, bands, body weight, or machines). 

By doing resistance training, you can increase the amount of lean muscle tissue in your body. This, in turn, can boost your metabolism and help you avoid or break out of a fat loss plateau.

If you’re not already doing resistance training, add it into your schedule now between 1 and 3 days each week.

Check out my collection of resistance training workout programs available for download in my shop:

---

Downloadable Resistance Training Plans:

---

There are also a few downloadable plans available in the Workouts of the Month section of the Gains Club site:

---

Gains Club Workout Plans:

---

If you need help or suggestions, feel free to reach out in the comments below, in the Coaching Corner Discord server, or join me when I’m live on Twitch throughout the week.