Can Cardio Burn Belly Fat?
What is belly fat? Most people recognize it immediately. It’s often called a Buddha belly, a spare tire, or a muffin top. Its scientific name is visceral fat. It’s the hardest fat to eliminate. It’s also the most dangerous type of fat. It crowds the organs and affects your health. No matter what exercise you do, you can’t remove fat in just one place. It comes off the body in equal amounts. Some types of cardio are beneficial, but not necessarily the best exercise to reduce it.
The biggest dangers of belly fat are the health problems it can cause.
When you have belly fat, you’ve increased your potential for insulin resistance and inflammation by secreting a protein. Insulin resistance is a precursor to prediabetes and diabetes. Visceral fat can also increase your blood pressure and the potential for heart attack, stroke, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease. It can affect your posture by putting more weight in the front and overloading the discs to cause back problems.
High intensity interval training—HIIT—can help you lose belly fat.
Exercise will help burn fat from the entire body. Finding the exercises that burn it the most will also help burn belly fat. HIIT isn’t a specific exercise but a way of doing exercises. You alternate between high intensity and a recovery pace. You can use any type of exercise. That includes running, walking, weightlifting, and calisthenics.
Muscle-building workouts can help reduce visceral fat.
Muscle tissue requires more calories for maintenance than fat tissue does. So, the more you have, the higher your metabolism. While cardio burns a high amount of calories, it uses both fat and lean muscle tissue to extract those calories, potentially reducing the amount of muscle tissue you have so you burn fewer calories. Doing weight training and bodyweight exercises builds muscle and burns fat. Building muscle tissue and doing strength training helps tighten the muscles to make you appear slimmer and helps eliminate belly fat.
- You need more than exercise to eliminate belly fat. You need to eat the right type of food. Chips, food with trans fats, highly processed food, and those high in sugar increase belly fat. Whole foods like fruits, vegetables, and lean meat help prevent it.
- Daily exercise can help eliminate belly fat. The exercise should blend strength, endurance, balance, and flexibility training. If you include walking, make it brisk walking to maximize the benefits. Include fun things like biking or dancing.
- Hormone changes can cause the body to accumulate visceral fat. A healthy diet and regular exercise can help offset that change and balance hormones. Cortisol, a stress hormone, also contributes to belly fat.
- Cutting out sugar and replacing it with sugar substitutes may not be effective for belly fat. One study showed that people who drank diet cola developed more visceral fat than those who didn’t.
For more information, contact us today at Rising Fitness Gym
Everyone has probably felt the 3 pm slump and looked for food that could supply more energy to get them through to the end of the day. You feel like your body’s energy is nothing more than a puddle beneath your feet. Often people reach for a sugary treat at this time, which is the worst possible choice. It does boost energy for a short time but then drops it even further into the abyss. Some foods help boost your energy and keep you going longer. Eating those foods during meals and as snacks can help solve the problem.
Walk into any health food store in Texas, and you’ll find a variety of protein supplements. Some show bulging muscles on the front of the can, while others are more subtle in their advertising. Are they beneficial? Should everyone take them? One point is that supplements, protein or otherwise, should never replace healthy eating. Protein supplements won’t replace a balanced diet. Using them to replace a healthy diet can and does negatively affect overall health. Supplements can benefit some people but can hurt the health of others.
People in Houston, TX, are learning that eating healthy can be quick, easy, and less expensive than fast food when you learn to meal plan. It helps people stick with healthy eating, and it’s faster than waiting in the drive-through line at the local Burger Quickie. Meal planning is a process. You create menus and a grocery list one day, shop another day, and cook a week’s worth of food on the weekend or your day off work.
Starting the day with a big breakfast was often vital for early farmers who did hard manual labor. It is also vital for most workers who expend high amounts of energy doing their daily work. If you work in an office or a sedentary job, a big breakfast may offer benefits even though you don’t expend the high energy of a pioneer farmer or lift heavy loads that cause you to burn hundreds of calories.
What is BMI? BMI stands for body mass index and is a ratio of height to weight based on sex and sometimes age. It’s just one quick measure of your overall health. BMI is a chart with your height at the side, weight in the middle, and the corresponding BMI at the top of the chart. The BMI formula is (weight in pounds x 703) / (height in inches x height in inches). Putting the information on a chart cuts through calculation time and makes it easy for doctors to take a quick assessment. It’s not a stand-alone test and requires other information.
Many people come to Rising Fitness in Houston, TX, because they love the help of a personal trainer and the equipment available. Some people want to exercise between gym sessions and choose running, walking, and calisthenics. One often-forgotten cardio workout is the jump rope. Jump ropes are inexpensive. You can even do it with the kids. There are several types of jump ropes, including speed and weighted ones, but jump ropes don’t have to be fancy or expensive. You can use a jump rope found in the toy department.
Endurance exercises are also called cardio workouts. The very term cardio indicates it is about exercising the heart. While all cardio workouts will do that, some are better than others. For example, running in place will work the heart, but lifting your knees higher while you do that will increase the effort. You can even turn strength-building workouts into cardiovascular ones. That causes the body to burn fat and build muscle as it works your heart.
Whether you’re eating a meal after your workout or just having a post-workout snack, the food you eat directly affects your recovery. It can make a difference in how fast you build muscle tissue, too. Refueling your muscles and providing adequate building blocks to build muscles require a specific combination of macronutrients. It takes a combination of protein and carbohydrates. The carbs refuel the lost glycogen from the muscle and the protein helps build muscle tissue and shortens recovery time.
If you’re like most people, you have to budget your time to fit everything into your day. Fitting your workout into your schedule without stealing it from another priority can be almost impossible. It takes time to get dressed for your workout, workout, shower, and change. When you finish, it’s eaten up an entire hour. Your health is a top priority, so it’s worth the time, but that takes away from something else. Is there a way you can do both without compromising either?