As a certified personal trainer (CPT), I work with many clients who want to shift their body composition by losing fat and building muscle.
But, when it comes to fat-burning workouts and weight loss, not all types of exercises are created equal.
The best workouts to burn fat are high-intensity, full-body workouts, but all exercises can help you lose fat. Let’s explore how to burn fat with exercise!
How Does Exercise Burn Fat?
Before delving into which workouts burn the most fat, it’s helpful to address what “fat burning” means.
When most people say they want to lose weight, they actually mean that they want to lose body fat, and often specifically belly fat.
“Weight” refers to lean mass as well, which includes muscle, bone, organs, etc., so fat-burning workouts are designed to help you lose body fat.
Importantly, aerobic exercise and weight training can help you lose body fat in several ways.
- When you are physically active, your body burns stored fat for fuel to supply energy to the muscles to contract.
- Following a consistent workout routine can help you lose fat tissue if you’re in a caloric deficit.
- Certain workouts increase your metabolic rate and affect your hormones, which can help you burn more calories, even at rest.
Let’s look at each of these in more detail.
Workouts Burn Fat for Fuel
The first way that exercise burns fat, is that with any type of physical activity, the muscles have to create energy to perform work, so you oxidize, or burn, stored fuel for energy.
This stored fuel comes from a combination of stored carbohydrates (glycogen in muscles and the liver), stored fat (triglycerides in adipose, or fat, tissue), and stored protein in muscle tissue.
At pretty much any given exercise intensity, you’re burning some of every type of fuel, although carbohydrates and fat are the primary fuel sources for the muscles during exercise.
The relative percentage of each fuel source your body oxidizes for energy depends on the intensity and duration of the workout.
Interestingly, when you work out more vigorously, although you burn a greater number of calories overall, the relative percentage of these calories from fat decreases.
Although somewhat of a gross simplification, at lower intensities, fat is the primary fuel. That’s why exercise machines that have a pre-programmed workout in the “fat-burning zone” have you moving at a lower intensity for a steady-state effort.
As the exercise intensity increases, the relative percentage of carbohydrates increases significantly.
For example, if you think about heart rate zones, workouts done in zone 1 or zone 2 are predominantly fueled by burning fat, whereas more intense workouts in zones 3, 4, or 5, are primarily fueled by oxidizing carbohydrates, or glycogen, for energy.
Therefore, when you do a hard workout (such as sprinting, high-intensity interval training, or resistance training with heavy weights), a greater percentage of the calories you are burning are coming from stored carbohydrates rather than fat.
However, as mentioned, while stored fat will be serving as a smaller percentage of the calories burned, the total number of calories burned when you exercise at a vigorous intensity will be higher.
In this way, you still might burn more calories from fat during an intense workout.
Which Workouts Burn the Most Calories From Fat?
Consider the following scenario when determining which workouts burn the most fat:
If you ride a stationary bike at a low intensity (heart rate in zone 2) for 30 minutes, you might burn 200 calories, of which 60% come from fat and 40% come from carbohydrates.
In this fictitious scenario, you would therefore burn 120 calories from fat and 80 from carbohydrates.
Note that protein usually provides less than 10% of the total energy needed for exercise except in extreme situations such as starvation, ketosis, or very long and intense workouts.
Then, imagine you do a hard workout on a spin bike with mostly zone 3 and zone 4, sort of a “tempo run” but on a bike. You again bike for 30 minutes, but this time, because you are cycling much harder and your heart rate was higher, you burned 400 calories.
Because the intensity was higher, carbohydrates supplied 60% of the energy, and fat contributed 40%.
This means that you burned 240 calories from carbohydrates and 160 calories from fat.
Therefore, even though fat comprised a lower percentage of fuel you burned, you still burned more calories from fat than you did during the low-intensity “fat-burning zone” workout.
For this reason, it can be confusing when people talk about which workouts burn the most fat.
Theoretically, as just discussed, lower-intensity exercise burns a higher percentage of fat, but higher-intensity workouts may still burn more calories from fat as well as total calories.
The higher the total number of calories you burn—regardless of the substrate they come from (carbohydrates or fat), the more weight, or body fat, you will lose.
This points to the second way that exercise burns body fat, referenced above. Let’s discuss this further.
Exercise Burns Calories
Body fat is essentially stored energy.
Every pound of body fat provides approximately 3,500 calories of energy, meaning that when you consume more 3,500 calories than you expend, you’ll gain one pound of body fat.
Similarly, you’ll lose fat at the rate of one pound per 3,500-calorie deficit you create.
All forms of exercise burn calories, so your workouts can generate a caloric deficit and help you lower your body fat percentage.
Whether you choose to walk, swim, do a strength workout with dumbbells and barbells, take a yoga class, or do jumping jacks and kettlebell swings, you’ll expend a certain amount of calories based on the intensity of the workout, the muscles involved, your body weight and composition, and the duration of the workout.
Exercises performed at high intensities and that involve your entire body or large muscle groups will burn more calories than low-intensity exercises or those working isolated muscles.
Therefore, you’ll burn more calories doing a vigorous rowing machine workout over an easy recumbent bike workout.
And, you’ll burn more calories doing a full-body workout with weights rather than isolated exercises like crunches or plank position holds, or targeting just the upper body muscles or lower body muscles in isolation.
Exercise Increases Your Metabolism
Lastly, exercise increases your metabolic rate.
While you always burn calories during the workout, you can also continue to burn more calories than your baseline rate for several hours after the workout, depending on the workout you did.
Referred to as excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC), this revving of the metabolism occurs because your body is trying to repair and restore everything back to baseline.
Furthermore, over time, a consistent exercise program can increase your overall metabolic rate as long as you’re building muscle.
This is because muscle is much more metabolically active than fat.
So, gaining muscle mass helps you burn more calories throughout the day, which can create that deficit you need to lose fat.
Now, let’s take a look at the best exercises and workouts to burn the most fat.
Which Workouts Burn The Most Fat? Fat-Burning Exercises Compared
The best fat-burning workouts either torch a significant number of calories during the exercise, boost your metabolic rate afterward, or help you become a fat-burning machine by putting on lean body mass.
Here are the best workouts to burn the most fat.
#1: High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)
High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) workouts, which involve repeated bouts of very vigorous exercise followed by easy recovery periods are one of the best workouts to burn fat.
Research1Su, L., Fu, J., Sun, S., Zhao, G., Cheng, W., Dou, C., & Quan, M. (2019). Effects of HIIT and MICT on cardiovascular risk factors in adults with overweight and/or obesity: A meta-analysis. PLOS ONE, 14(1), e0210644. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0210644 indicates that HIIT workouts burn as many calories as a moderate-intensity, steady-state workout in one-third to one-half the time.
Moreover, the high intensity of HIIT significantly increases the EPOC (after burn), revving your metabolism for up to 24 hours after exercise.
Great fat-burning HIIT exercises include plyometrics, running, cycling sprints, sprinting stairs, jumping rope, kettlebell swings, lunges, squats, burpees, and other full-body bodyweight calisthenics such as mountain climbers and jumping jacks.
#2: Strength Training
Depending on the exercises you choose and the weights you lift, strength training workouts can burn a decent number of calories.
Full-body exercises and compound exercises like squats, deadlifts, lunges, and power cleans, especially with heavy weights, expend a lot of energy.
Engaging large muscle groups, such as the quads, glutes, and hamstrings will help you increase the intensity of the exercise, burn more calories, and most importantly, lift more weight.
To this last point, the real fat-burning benefit of strength training workouts is the metabolic benefits you get from building lean muscle mass.
To best support muscle growth (hypertrophy), use heavy weights for fewer reps.
According to the American Council on Exercise,2McCall, P. (2014, June 26). How to Select the Right Intensity and Repetitions for Your Clients. Www.acefitness.org. https://www.acefitness.org/resources/pros/expert-articles/4922/how-to-select-the-right-intensity-and-repetitions-for-your-clients/ aim for three sets of 6-12 reps per exercise with 67-85% of your one-repetition max (1RM) to build muscle.
#3: Plyometrics
Plyometric exercises involve explosive movements and rapid force development.
You can think of plyometrics as “jumping exercises.” Examples include squat jumps, jumping rope, jumping jacks, burpees, clapping push-ups, single-leg hops, and box jumps.
These exercises are not only cardiovascularly demanding, but they also involve large muscle groups and tremendous force production to launch your body off the ground and then absorb the impact.
As with HIIT workouts, plyometrics rev your metabolism for hours after the workout is over.
#4: Steady-State Cardio
Exercises like running, cycling, swimming, rowing machine, hiking, stair climbing, and elliptical trainer workouts definitely burn a lot of calories, especially if your workouts are long, and/or vigorous.
The afterburn will be less than a more vigorous workout, but regularly performing cardio workouts as part of your fitness and wellness routine can certainly contribute to generating the calorie deficit you need to burn stored fat.
When doing cardio, going up an incline or increasing the resistance level (on a cardio machine) will also increase your calorie burn.
The following table can be used as a guideline for approximately how many calories you burn by doing a certain activity for 30 minutes to help you determine which workouts burn the most fat.
The data comes from Harvard Health3Harvard Health Publishing. (2021, March 8). Calories burned in 30 minutes of leisure and routine activities. Harvard Health. https://www.health.harvard.edu/diet-and-weight-loss/calories-burned-in-30-minutes-for-people-of-three-different-weights and the Compendium of Physical Activities.42011 Compendium of Physical Activities. (n.d.). https://download.lww.com/wolterskluwer_vitalstream_com/PermaLink/MSS/A/MSS_43_8_2011_06_13_AINSWORTH_202093_SDC1.pdf
The more calories you burn in 30 minutes, the greater caloric deficit, and thus fat loss, you can expect.
| Exercise Activity | 125-pound (56.8 kg) person | 155-pound (70.5 kg) person | 185-pound (84.1 kg) person |
| Bicycling stationary, moderate | 210 | 252 | 294 |
| Rowing, stationary, moderate | 210 | 252 | 294 |
| Calisthenics: vigorous | 240 | 306 | 336 |
| Circuit Training: general | 240 | 306 | 336 |
| Running: 5 mph (12 min/mile) | 240 | 288 | 336 |
| Kettlebell training | 240 | 296 | 353 |
| Bicycling: 12-13.9 mph | 240 | 288 | 336 |
| Rowing, Stationary | 255 | 369 | 440 |
| Boxing sparring | 270 | 324 | 378 |
| Elliptical Trainer, moderate intensity | 270 | 324 | 378 |
| Ski Machine, moderate intensity | 285 | 342 | 399 |
| Aerobics, Step: high impact | 300 | 360 | 420 |
| Swimming laps, vigorous | 300 | 360 | 420 |
| Bicycling: 14-15.9 mph | 300 | 360 | 420 |
| Martial Arts: judo, karate, kickboxing | 300 | 360 | 420 |
| Bicycling, stationary, vigorous | 315 | 278 | 441 |
| Jumping Rope (Fast) | 340 | 421 | 503 |
| Running: 6 mph (10 min/mile) | 495 | 360 | 420 |
Now that you know which workouts burn the most fat, you can use this information to help you efficiently burn calories and optimize your metabolism for mobilizing stored fat.
Keep in mind that any type of exercise can support your weight loss goals, so pick an activity you enjoy, or be sure to include lots of variety for optimal results.
To contribute to your weight loss goals, a healthy, nutritious diet is key to success. Here we have some of the best diets for athletes.
