Fat Burning Workouts for Men

This article is aimed at supplying men with all the information they need to burn fat successfully. You will notice that it varies from the traditional fat burning techniques of sitting on a treadmill for hours on end and will give you far better results!

Men and women both have as I’m sure you’re aware quite different body compositions, men are able to survive at a much lower body fat percentage than women, with women needing more fat to survive.

The essential body fat for men is around 2% with many bodybuilders achieving 3-4% when in contest shape. The essential body fat for women is around 8% which is substantially higher. At this point abs are still very visible because women carry more fat on the breasts and organs which are essential for survival.

To visualize body fat percentages here is a picture of a standard guy with 20% body fat,

and here is a picture of someone with 6-7%body fat.

To get to a low bodyfat percentage you need to be doing fat burning workouts for men which retain muscle while burn fat.

Traditional vs Non-traditional fat burning workouts for men

The traditional way to lose fat is to do lots of endurance exercise, something that has your heart rate at a moderate rate e.g. 130bpm for a long period of time, circa 2 hours. You may well of noticed many endurance athletes have low body fat but to me also look a little emaciated. The Non-traditional way to reduce your bodyfat is to train in a high intensity for short periods of time in interval training. I’ve written a post on HIIT before so check it out before continuing.

So why don’t long session cardio exercises work to lose weight?

Well they do but they don’t so your physique and favors and they take longer than High intensity interval techniques. Tradtional cardio is just running or walking which only really works your legs. HIIT incorporates, exercises such as rowing, press ups and moderate weight training in order to get the best results.

An Example of the best Fat Burning Workouts for Men

• Time: 35 Minutes
• Exercise 1 – 10 minutes on the spinning bike, every 30 seconds maximum intensity at higher resistance then bring it down for 30 seconds and repeat doing a total of 10 high intensity intervals.
• Rest 4 minutes
• Exercise 2 – (10 ice climers, 10 pressups, 10 squat jumps, 10 sit ups) x 3 circa 10 minutes
• Rest 1 minute
• Exercise 3 – 8 minutes – Incline running machine ~10degrees and then intervals every 30seconds to maximum intensity
• Rest 2 minutes
• Exercise 4 – 5 minutes 5 sets of 30 second all out intensity on the rowing machine.

As you can see there is a lot of variation in the workouts. This comes in very handy if you hate the repetitiveness of going to the gym to lose weight. I for one could not stand going to the gym 4-5 days a week to run on the running machine/cycle on a bike or use the cross trainer for an hour a day. HIIT workouts are faster paced and active and allow you to get more out of your day and I assure you will give you better results!

The traditional method – Sustained Cardio

Now long cardio sessions still work to lose weight but you have to be careful how you structure your workout and the nutrition surrounding it. We don’t want to be too catabolic when working out as we want to retain as much muscle as possible. It’s fair to say you should eat a high protein, moderate fat and low carb meal 1 and a half hours before going to the gym. I do suggest increasing meal frequency in order to lose weight. There has been little documented proof this has an affect but from my own personal experience it does by itself encourage weight loss so if possible make sure you implement a high frequency meal plan.

The best cardio to be doing is either running or swimming and ideally doing a mixture of both. Swimming is great because it’s low impact so you can do it day after day without having too much pressure on the joints which is what many people suffer from when they run too much.

I suggest taking this type of cardio outside and finding a route that has lots of hills. This bring into some increased heart rate training which uses a little bit of HIIT principles and one of the best fat burning workouts for men.

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