There are two places in your body where you will burn energy. First one is around your intestines, and it is the energy you get from the food you eat.
The other place you will get energy is from everywhere else in your body, wherever there is fat. When there are calories that you consume but do not burn, the body sends those to fat cells where they are then stored as fat.
The problem with trying to burn fat is that you have to burn the calories you get from food before you can start burning the calories that are stored in fat, which makes losing weight much more difficult than gaining weight. To get that fat burn, you need to be burning calories continuously for more than 30 minutes.
That means if you are doing some light aerobic exercise like yoga or jogging, you have to do it for at least half an hour; otherwise you are not going to touch any of those calories that are stored as fat. However, there is a faster way to burn fat, but it is also much harder.
It is called HIIT (high intensity interval training) it is the most effective way to build muscle and lose weight. Instead of running at 60 percent max speed for 30 minutes, you run at 100 percent max speed for eight minutes.
To really make it work you do the exercise in intervals, so instead of running non-stop as fast as you can for eight minutes, which you probably can’t do that anyway, you break it down into two minute intervals. In between each run take a minute break.
What this does is it tears the muscle apart, which is what you want, and while it repairs itself it burns calories doing it. The reason running is so effective is because the leg muscles are so large, the more muscles you exercise the more calories you will burn.
So if you are too sore to run again the day after your HIIT then you should try doing some calisthenics to keep up caloric burn. If you are trying to lose weight by exercising, then you need to make sure you are either working for more than thirty minutes or that you are making yourself sore.
Sometimes after an intense workout you may not feel sore; that is because even though you tore your muscle adequately there wasn’t a lot of lactic acid in your muscles. Lactic acid is what actually makes that painful sore feeling, so you can’t always judge an exercise by soreness.
About the author: Jessica Staheli is a health and fitness nut. She loves to write about being healthy and getting in shape because she believes that taking care of your body is important. Having fitness equipment in your home is a great way to remind yourself to exercise, and she recommends treadmillreviews.com for help with choosing a treadmill. You can follow her at Google+.