6 Best Exercises That Burn More Fat than Running

Exercises that burn more fat than running. (Photo via Meghan Holmes/ Unsplash)
Exercises that burn more fat than running (Photo via Unsplash/Meghan Holmes)

There are exercises that burn more fat than running. If you’re aware of these exercises, you don't necessarily need to run to trigger your weight loss.

However, before you understand the workouts that burn more fat, let's understand how weight loss happens: To lose weight, you need to be in a calorie deficit. That means the amount of calories you consume in a day needs to be lower than what the body burns to maintain its current physique.

The body will burn the stored calories to make up for any deficit, which in turn results in weight loss. If you’re not in a calorie deficit, no amount of exercise or running will help you lose weight.


Exercises That Burn More Fat Than Running

You need to know that every exercise can burn calories. The number of calories burned during the exercise depends on how intensely the exercise is done. On that note, here's a look at six non-running exercises to burn fat:

1) Kettlebell Swing

The kettle swing is the most common kettlebell exercise. It works as a full body exercise, especially for the lower back and legs.

Ideally, you should start this exercise with a moderate weight since both your hands assist you with the exercise. As you become stronger, you can move to heavier weights.

You can find a guide for kettlebell exercises here.

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2) Jump Rope

Jump ropes are a great alternative to running. While running has its benefits, jump ropes can provide similar benefits.

Like running, jump ropes help with improving stamina, muscle endurance, strengthening joints, and allows you to become fitter. Interestingly, you can do entire routines with jump ropes, such as combining skips and jumps or using them along with other exercises.

It’s beneficial to use jump ropes as a non-running exercise to lose weight.

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3) Burpee

Burpees are full body movements that engage almost every muscle group. Moreover, they've been proven to be rather useful for cardio workouts as well.

Whenever you’re doing burpees, you enable the body to burn more calories to generate the excess energy required for the exercise. It’s not necessary for you to do full burpees all the time.

A beginner variation of burpees is half burpees, which eliminates the push-up at the end. You can use that as a stepping stone for the exercise before moving to the advanced version.

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4) Cycling

Cycling has always been one of the exercises that burn more fat than running, and if not more, definitely as much.

Moreover, cycling is an excellent way to improve leg strength, especially the quads and calves. More often than not, cyclists have enormous calves due to the constant pressure on the muscle group.

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5) HIIT Training

HIIT training stands for high intensity interval training. In this form of training, you use 100% effort to do an exercise, and either rest for 20 seconds or use 20% effort to do the same exercise.

An example of this is sprints.

You can sprint using 100% effort for 30 seconds followed by a light jog for 20 seconds. While this is a running variation of HIIT training, you can use HIIT for any type of exercise.

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6) Resistance Training

Resistance training is undoubtedly one of the best exercises that burn more fat than running.

It uses a combination of free weights and machines to work on each muscle group. During the process of resistance training, the body needs to generate energy constantly. That means it hs to constantly burn calories to keep generating fuel, making this exercise a great way to burn fat.

If you had to choose only one from the list of exercises that burn more fat other than running, it must be resistance training.


Bottom Line

Of course, there are exercises that burn more fat than running. However, if you believe running is unhelpful, you will be incorrect.

Running helps quite a bit with fat loss and muscle endurance, but not everyone wants to run every day. Keeping that in mind, it’s good to know about alternatives that could help you burn as many or even more calories than running.

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