Do your resistance
exercises first and burn more fat.
If your exercise goal is to lose
weight or change your body composition, we would like to offer some simple
advice on how to increase the fat you burn during your normal workouts. When you begin to exercise your body
will use stored glycogen as the preferred energy source. With this in mind, we
recommend performing resistance training prior to your aerobic workout which is
not the norm for most people. As a rule, people tend to do their aerobic exercises first,
and then move to resistance exercises.
During the time you are performing
resistance exercises, you are in the
anaerobic stage, meaning oxygen is not the involved in the process. Once you have used a significant
portion of your stored glycogen, your body will begin to use oxygen to help burn
glucose and fat, commonly referred to as the aerobic stage of exercise. When
most of the available glucose has been utilized, your body then becomes a fat
burning machine. If you have lots of this stored energy it may take 15 – 20
minutes before your body starts to predominately burn fat. This means you may
only get 10 good fat burning minutes out of a 30 minute aerobic routine.
On the other hand if you chose to
perform your resistance exercises first, which is predominately anaerobic, you
will burn up much of the stored glycogen and glucose. This can result in your
body becoming a fat burning machine in as little as 5 minutes into an aerobic
exercise, adding 15 minutes of fat burning into the same workout time!
You will
find that making this simple adjustment to your routine can lead to improved
results, and bring you ever closer to reaching your fitness goals. Best of luck!
