Would you like to know the secret to destroying stubborn fat?

First, a little backstory. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Arguing over whether exercise or diet is more important for weight loss is almost as big an enigma.

My mother has been heard to say that she could never be as thin as I am because she cannot run a marathon. Well, I don’t like arguing with my mother, but her lack of running doesn’t prevent her from being thin. As a sports dietitian with a master’s degree in nutrition, I know that the key to ensuring my client’s weight loss is to stimulate her metabolism. In fact, I called the program I created “Metabolic Boost.”

So yeah, I mean what you eat and when you eat it. However, nutrition is not the only factor in weight loss. While nutrition plays a bigger role than most of us would like to admit, exercise will dramatically accelerate weight loss. The correct exercise, that is. Not those hours on tape.

In this article, I’ll explain how fat burning workouts work and then show you where you can find specific fat burning workouts to follow at your gym or at home.

How These Workouts Burn Stubborn Fat

Unfortunately, your body is designed to store fat. In hunter / gatherer days, our ancestors didn’t have a constant supply of self-service McDonalds. His next meal was never assured. When there is food, they eat in abundance. Anything that the body did not use immediately was stored as fat. And that was a good thing.

But now we have too much of a good thing and we need to cut back. When you reduce your calorie intake, your body compensates for it by decreasing the production of hormones related to thyroid function and metabolic rate. Your body produces more of an enzyme called lipoprotein lipase that conserves energy by storing calories as fat. If you reduce your calorie intake too much, you actually encourage your body to store food as fat instead of using it for functions like hair and nail growth.

This does not happen immediately; In the short term, you lose weight when you cut calories. But eventually you get to that plateau. Fat is golden for your body. Fat is the key to survival. Your body is not going to let go very easily. It should make holding onto that fat more painful than letting go. And that’s where our fat burning workouts come in.

What these workouts do is convince your body to shed fat by overcoming your body’s lipolytic resistance (in layman’s terms, fat storage mode). Studies have shown that the more intense the workout, the more likely the body’s physiological response is to override its lipolytic resistance and shed fat.

Your body’s lipolytic resistance has to do with how different hormones bind to alpha or beta receptors. Fat cells have adrenergic receptors B1 (beta 1) and A2 (alpha 2). In simple terms, B1 receptors release fat – they activate lipase, which causes the fat cell to break down from a triglyceride to a free fatty acid (which can then be used for energy).

Norepinephrine is a stress hormone and is used to “activate” B1 receptors. For example, when you perform high intensity exercise (a stress on the body), norerenaline is released and searches for B1 receptors to break down fat.

Don’t be fooled by what you’ve heard about “fat burning zones.” To burn stubborn fat, you need to engage in high intensity exercise, trudging on the treadmill is not a stressor.

So if high intensity exercise is the answer, does that mean that all my exercise should consist of max sprints?

Well, no, it is not that simple. Mainly because you can’t run long enough to trigger the response, you want to kick the fat onto the sidewalk. That’s where interval training comes in. An interval training means that you can switch between high intensity exercise and lower intensity exercise several times DURING EACH training session. Switching between high and low intensity creates that magic bullet.

Here are two reasons why you want to do interval training:

1. High intensity exercise doesn’t burn fat for fuel, it burns carbohydrates. (That’s the basis of the “fat burning zone” myth). To overcome this, use interval workouts. The high intensity section stresses the body to trigger the release of the fat hormone, and the lower intensity section allows you to get enough rest to tackle the next high intensity rep.
2. If you run as fast as you can, maybe you can run for 5 minutes. It’s 5 minutes of high intensity workouts. If you do 2 minute intervals vigorously, then 3 minutes calmly, you will complete more than 5 minutes of vigorous exercise in each session.

There you go. A scientific explanation of why that stubborn fat is on the prowl and an exercise to get rid of stubborn fat.