Exercising is vital for health. Many people are realizing the growing importance of regular physical activity in their lives. Health experts recommend exercising at least 3 times per week at an intense level or moderately for 30 mins every day. Usually most people will do some moderate cardio workout and some light weight training just to keep fit. For overweight and obese people, following this kind of training routine won’t yield promising results as far as losing those unwanted pounds faster and the question How Can I Lose Weight will always come up. If you want to burn fat quicker, you’ll need to change your workout strategy and increase your training intensity as well.

Weight lifting is mostly for building lean muscle as well as toning your muscles but if you do it intensively, you’ll spend much more energy and you’ll sweat like you never did before. And guess what? You’ll burn more fat and calories. I never really did any cardio workout at the gym but my routine consists of doing intense weight lifting 3-4 times per week. I can tell you that it did have a positive impact on belly fat. Fat is located in your whole body and if you perspire a lot, your levels of fat will drop proportionately throughout your entire body. Getting started with some body weight exercises like push ups, pull ups, dips, squats, lunges can help you build much needed strength you’ll need when venturing into weight lifting. It will definitely give you an edge. Heck this is how I got started before lifting weights. Once you feel more comfortable in doing some intense weight lifting, consider these 3 tips to burn more fat:

(1) Focus More On Compound Exercises

This is my favorite. A compound exercise is an exercise which targets several muscle groups in one single movement. For instance, push ups and pull ups are compound exercises. They solicit different muscle groups during the pushing or pulling movement for instance, the former will target the chest muscles, triceps and shoulders and the latter, the back muscles, biceps and forearms. In weight lifting, compound exercises include bench press, barbell rows, deadlifts, squats, military press amongst others. These are terrific exercises whereby you can have a full body workout just by performing these 5 exercises. And if done on an intense level, you’ll be losing body fat at an accelerated rate. Compare doing barbell curls to doing a deadlift and see the difference in the amount of sweat you’ll release. A compound exercise like deadlift or squats can exhaust your entire body. One major benefit of compound exercise is your metabolism will increase faster and as a result, the fat burning furnace will be more active.

(2) Do More Repeats Per Set

If you want to burn more fat, opt for at least 8 repeats per set up to 12 and use moderate to heavy weights. The amount of sets can be in the 3-4 range per exercise. More repeats would mean you focus less on too much muscle mass and more on definition as you experience the burning sensation of lactic acid in your muscles. If you were to perform 6 repeats on heavy weights, you’ll be after more mass and less definition. By building leaner muscles, your metabolism becomes elevated as well and you burn more fat even when you’re inactive.

(3) Do Supersets

Supersets are a series of exercises done without rest in between and usually targeting opposite muscle groups. For example, after doing a barbell curl, you proceed immediately to a triceps extension or after a bench press, you’ll perform a barbell row. This type of training is grueling as you don’t take any rest in between but there are numerous benefits like burning more calories as you spend more energy.

Even though a cardio workout is the best to burning fat, coupling that with an intense weight lifting session 3 times per week will speed up your results guaranteed. The more lean muscles you carry, the higher your metabolism and the likelihood of melting body fat increases tenfold.