After the Easter break many people are looking for effective ways to burn fat. If you have been diligently maintaining your routine and staying away from those chocolate eggs and still have stubborn fat and cellulite lingering around, here’s something you should know. If you are doing countless reps of isolated moves (like bicep curls, leg lifts, and tricep kickbacks etc.) in an attempt to “spot treat” specific areas of your body, It is very unlikely you will get you the results you are after.
You see, even though your body tends to deposit more fat in certain areas as opposed to others, burning it off doesn’t work the same way. For example, if you tend to carry more weight in your hips and thighs, doing isolated exercises like leg lifts or inner and outer thigh machines won’t help those areas slim down.
To transform your body from head to toe, you have got to work out using full-body exercises.
Let me explain this in a little more detail. Full-body exercises demand that more muscles be used at the same time. This places significant metabolic stress (the good kind of stress) on your body, which responds by producing a flood of fat-burning hormones.
The problem with Isolation
Isolated exercises on the other hand, although they have their purposes, simply don’t recruit as many muscle fibres to make this process possible. This is why you might find that your problem areas never seem to get any smaller. Isolated exercises simply can’t accomplish the same level of general transformation results (no matter how many of them you do) because they only work one or two muscle groups at a time. Think about it - your body works as a whole - not in isolation.
When is the last time you took part in any activity that required you to use only one or two muscles at a time? Why would you train any differently? Not to mention that plenty of full-body exercises are also functional, meaning they mimic the way your body naturally moves. So it is no surprise that when you workout using these exercises, daily activities become even easier and your overall fitness level vastly improves.
Full body workouts to try
Discuss an exercise plan that uses your whole body if possible with a decent trainer. If you are training for a particular sport, try to mimic total body movements you need for your sport, ideally exercises using all 3 planes of human motion by the body (frontal which is movement side to side, sagittal which is forward/backward and transverse is rotational movement) in one exercise which in turn will help gait. An exercise such as backward and forward lunge whilst holding a weight or medicine ball in your hands making rotational up and down movements would be a lovely exercise in all 3 planes of motion.
If this sounds too complicated stick to movements which involve the use of all of your lower body muscles (including calves, quads,hamstrings) your glutes along with your upper body muscles (shoulders, arms, chest, and upper back) and your core stabiliser muscles. Sprinting as an exercise would cut it nicely too.
Full-body exercises are the biggest metabolic boosters and by implementing them into your workouts, alongside strength exercises, cardio and a proper nutritional plan, you will finally be able to fulfill your fat-burning potential as well as improving your overall fitness.
As always, please let me know if you need any further guidance.