Belly fat affects your health as well as your appearance. If you eat more calories than you expend, you store the excess calories either as subcutaneous fat under your skin or as visceral fat inside your abdomen. Of these, visceral belly fat is more harmful, increasing your risk of heart disease, Type II diabetes, stroke, sleep apnea and certain types of cancers. Unfortunately, where your body stores fat isn't under your control, but due to age, gender and genetic makeup. Doing nothing but abdominal exercises won't spot-reduce belly fat. To get rid of belly fat, eat a healthy, well-balanced diet and combine cardio with strength training.

Fat Loss Guidelines

Exercise helps you lose belly fat in two ways. First, because muscles are more metabolically active than fat, as you increase muscle mass through strength training, you boost your metabolism, making it easier to lose weight. Second, while doing cardio workouts, you burn calories faster than at rest, melting off excess body fat. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that to maintain a healthy body weight you should combine a minimum of two strength-training sessions and 150 minutes of cardiovascular exercise per week. To burn fat, increase either the amount of lifting or cardio, depending on which you enjoy doing more and which best suits your lifestyle.

Cardio

Cardio or aerobic exercise can burn from 200 to more than 1,000 calories an hour depending on intensity. Losing a pound of belly fat requires burning 3,500 calories, so to work off a pound takes from 18 hours of low-intensity to slightly more than three hours of high-intensity cardio. Although higher-intensity cardio burns more calories per hour than lower-intensity cardio, if you can't sustain high-intensity exercise, such as running 8 miles per hour, for extended periods, either work out for longer at a lower intensity or incorporate short intervals of higher intensity into a moderate-intensity workout.

Lifting

Lifting burns fewer calories per hour than cardio, especially if you rest between lifts. However, it benefits you in the long term by increasing your amount of metabolically active muscle. Also, because muscles are firmer and more compact than fat, lifting improves the appearance of your belly even if you don't lose fat. Doing just abdominal exercises won't help you lose belly fat, though. To change your body composition for fat loss, you must work all of the major muscle groups in your body.

Circuit Training

Circuit training combines cardio and lifting into a single workout to give you the best of both worlds. A circuit-training session begins with a 10-minute cardio warm-up to raise your heart rate. Next, you do a circuit of eight to 12 lifts, working all muscles in both pushing and pulling positions. Rather than resting between lifts, you alternate upper-body, lower-body and core exercises so you can move directly from one station to the next keeping your heart rate elevated to get a cardio workout as you lift.

SHARE