Fat Burner Exercise Rhythms

Exercising properly can take a lifetime to master – really. It’s easy to under or over do it, take too much rest or not enough. More over, it gets confusing as to which routines are the best to keep burning fat.

This article is about varying your exercise program to keep from burning out or injuring yourself.

It might seem, especially for beginners, that the best way to go is a steady increase the intensity of your exercise program. Not really, it turns out. By constantly increasing the miles you run or walk, the amount of weight you lift, etc. you may be cutting yourself short and possibly even ruining you body in the process. People who say “always give it 110%” are just nuts.

Your body needs rest – see our article on rest here – and the right amount of exercise combined with a healthy diet to burn fat. You also need to pay attention to which exercises you do, whether you are “adapting” to them or maybe working out too hard.

It’s the “right amount of exercise” that can be complicated and frustrating. Am I doing too much? Am I being lazy? It’s hard to tell and each person has different abilities in the exercise department making it useless to judge by looking at the fat burning programs of others.

First, let’s establish the exercise minimums: cardio 3 to 4 times for 30 to 45 minutes and 3 to 4 resistance workouts – weights, calisthenics or machines - of 20 to 45 minutes per week. Doing an extra day of cardio won’t hurt and even an extra day of weights is OK, but if you can’t make the three to four times per week because you feel too tired, maybe you need to change your workout.

Why? Because workout time is more important than workout intensity for burning fat. If you’re training to be a world class athlete, this is not true, but we’re trying to burn fat, not win gold medals.

At the same time, you also want to look better and continue to burn fat, so you need to do two things: vary your program and develop an intensity rhythm. Variation is simple – just do different exercises or do them using an alternate technique.

Exercise rhythm is the key to being able to continue burning fat and not feeling burned out. Basically it means having days of higher or lower intensity workouts depending on how your body feels. Since each person in different, you have to develop a program that’s right for you, but let’s look at an example.

For weight lifting, constantly stacking on the plates can stop you from advancing and eventually you will even be weaker. The key is working up to a new personal best, taking it down a notch and working back up to a new personal best. For optimum muscle growth, you need to stress your muscles more on each workout or they will not grow – at all. They will adapt and you will gain nothing except to maintain what you have. It’s the way you stress them that’s important.

Here's an example for an advanced chest routine:

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