Hello Health Champions. When it comes to burning belly fat with exercise there's
probably more misinformation out there than any other topic I've ever seen. So
today I want to go over how it really works so that you can understand it and
get the results that you want. Coming right up!
Hey I'm Dr. Ekberg. I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if
you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works
make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don't miss
anything there are probably millions of videos and articles and lists online
that tell you that you can lose belly fat and get from here to here on one
minute a day for a week and the problem is that 99% of those videos and lists
they're lying there incorrect and most of them talk about doing some silly
crunch or some abdominal workout right it just doesn't work like that about 1%
of those videos and lists and article talk about aerobic exercise and that 1%
is the correct one but today we want to go over and understand why does it work
that way and how do we optimize that the belly fat is really two types of fat
first we have the subcutaneous that's the one that you can grab subcutaneous
simply means under the skin so if the white line here represents the skin the
next thing in would be subcutaneous fat and then you have your muscle the rectus
abdominis which is the 6-pack in people who have trained it a lot and who don't
have any subcutaneous fat to speak of to cover it up and then the next layer in
is the visceral fat and the subcutaneous is what you can grab but the visceral
fat is what gives you the big midsection and the visceral sitting next to the
organs visceral means organs that's the dangerous kind and it's dangerous
because of the way it got there it's not the fat itself that's dangerous but the
hormones that gave rise to it visceral fat is very specific it's very clear why
it got there there are two hormones called insulin and cortisol insulin
results from eating frequent meals and high carbs and cortisol is a stress
hormone that drives up blood sugar and further increases insulin and once we
have visceral fat or organ fat the first organ to get affected usually is the
liver and the vast majority of people with a big midsection is gonna have a
fatty liver if they don't drink it's going to be non-alcoholic fatty liver
disease if they drink it could be a combination of alcoholic and
non-alcoholic and if you have visceral fat there is no amount of crunches in
the world that's going to solve that problem the only thing that's going to
take care of it is to reduce the insulin resistance and in order to do that we
have to reverse the thing that brought it on in the first place
and because insulin and cortisol is the cause we have to have a dietary
intervention if it was sugar and carbs and frequent meals that caused it we
have to undo that we have to eat fewer meals and less carbs and less sugar and
it's not that exercise has no impact on insulin resistance because it does but
it might be like 5% versus 95% so we can still exercise and
get some benefits if we do it the right way one more thing before we get to the
five top exercises we have to understand aerobic versus an anaerobic exercise
because that's the whole difference between burning fat or burning glucose
between increasing or decreasing insulin resistance aerobic means with air with
oxygen when we're going at a gentle pace we can breathe fast enough the lungs can
provide enough oxygen that the mitochondria can burn fat almost
exclusively they're always going to burn a little bit of a mix with fat and
glucose but if your fat adapted and you truly
aerobic you're gonna be in the 90% range of fat-burning and when we stay in that
mode when we can burn fat with oxygen and provide enough fuel without eating
any additional carbohydrate or without making any additional cortisol now we
can use up the fat stores and we're not going to trigger any insulin so this
type of exercise is actually reducing insulin resistance and that's what we
want one rule of thumb is that your heart rate is going to be about 120 or
less when you're doing aerobic exercise the other way you can tell is that
you're not huffing and puffing that you're breathing comfortably that you
could speak almost a complete sentence while you're doing it
another way you know is that you can keep it up for a good while because
you're not straining and exhausting the body 30 to 90 minutes or even longer is
not a problem and once you're done with it and you can sit down for a few
minutes then you're as fresh as when you started anaerobic on the other hand is a
completely different animal and it means without oxygen now we switch to from
burning fat - burning primarily glucose and the reason is that when we don't
have oxygen now we're entered an emergency mode the oxygen and the fat
isn't enough to fuel the body so now we have to find another source of fuel
which is glucose which we can we can split glucose we can use glycolysis and
we can generate some energy in the absence of oxygen but now we're burning
through the glucose pretty quick so the body is going to try to compensate and
replenish the glucose with gluconeogenesis and there's a hormone
called cortisol that it uses to do that and now with cortisol involved raising
blood sugar we're actually going to start increasing in
resistance so this exercise is accomplishing what we want in burning
belly fat this one now becomes counterproductive ballpark your heart
rates going to be about 120 to 160 and most people are probably gonna keep it
up for about fifteen to thirty minutes maybe forty five if you're strong-willed
but point is you can't keep it up as long as you can the aerobic and
afterwards you're going to be exhausted and you're gonna need some time for
recovery if you want to burn belly fat through exercise the number one thing to
do is walking or something like it's something of a similar intensity and
again it meets all the criteria for aerobic exercise that we just talked
about number two if you have some home equipment like a treadmill or an
elliptical or a stationary bike those are also great tools those are great
ways of exercising as long as you still keep it aerobic so the intensity needs
to be similar to walking or at least not where you start huffing and puffing
at least not for more than maybe a few seconds or a minute here and there
exercise number three crunches planks Pilates and core
strength now that's still a good exercise it's not going to help you
specifically with belly fat or insulin resistance but it's still a very good
thing to do because it's not going to hurt you to do some core strength while
you're already improving your insulin resistance and here's why core strength
can be so beneficial it has some obvious benefits from strengthening your back
reducing back pain being able to lift and bend better but really when you're
working the core and the spine the better your core is working the better
it is connected signal wise to the brain so the stronger your core is the
stronger your brain is basically and if you do some yoga and you get
flexible spine that's even better because now if you have range of motion
and control through that full range of motion now your brain is working really
well and why do we want a working brain in this regard because the strong brain
is better at inhibiting the stress and it's better at limiting the cortisol so
you can actually indirectly you could help your insulin resistance by building
a stronger brain but again this is not the primary way that you get a flat
belly exercise type number four is HIIT or high-intensity interval training and
this stands in stark contrast to aerobic exercise so why do we want to do it
because if we do something like burpees or bike or stairs running up and down
the stairs for a very brief period of time then we are gonna make cortisol we
are going to burn glucose but we do it so briefly we do it for only a few
minutes and then that cortisol spike is so short that it doesn't matter but on
the other hand we get some tremendous positive benefits in terms of human
growth hormone and BDNF brain-derived neurotrophic factor and these hormones
it will increase metabolism they'll increase fat burning for hours or even
days after the workout so you work out for five minutes and then you burn fat
for two days more so these two hormones are necessary and will improve your
brains ability to make new brain cells and make new connections and just like
we talked about with the core strength when you build your brain it can get
better at reducing the stress and because human growth hormone is
fat-burning it can also help improve your overall
metabolism exercise number five is weightlifting and weightlifting has a
lot in common with high-intensity interval training and if you do it like
high-intensity interval training you can actually sort of combine it with HIIT
you can turn weight lifting into HIIT if you stress your muscles if you push your
muscles to failure then your body says oh I better make more muscle tissue so I
can get better at coping with this tomorrow if you plan to do this again so
weight lifting will increase human growth hormone it will improve muscle
tone and muscle building in the process obviously and the more we use the body
and the muscles to signal the more muscle tone we have the more we're also
stimulating the brain so muscle tone equals brain tone and we again get the
benefits of stress reduction when we build more muscle we can also improve
the metabolism not just through the growth hormone but because muscle tissue
is more metabolically active and by making sure that we build some muscle
while we're losing fat we can make sure that we maintain a better ratio of lean
mass to fat mass the body fat percentage but the way you want to do it is you
want to have a pretty high intensity and fairly low reps it's okay to warm up of
course and do some warm-up reps on low weights but then for the workout you
want to increase the intensity and reduce the reps because that's how you
challenge the body to make growth hormone and build muscle the trap some
people fall into is they turn it into circuit training they go to the gym and
there's ten or twelve or fifteen machines and they do 20 30 reps and they
just go quickly from one to the other and now it just turns into another
anaerobic exercise you're not going heavy
enough to really challenge your body to build more muscle you're just sort of
exhausting yourself and creating some muscle lactic acid here's the truth
about burning belly fat with exercise number one crunches don't burn belly fat
just because you work out a certain muscle like the rectus abdominis doesn't
make the fat travel from the tissue next to it into the muscle to get burned it
doesn't work like that it follows the blood circulation and it's systemic
second truth is that to burn belly fat you have to reduce insulin resistance
truth number three is that all exercise is stress so the trick is to exercise in
such a way that you maximize the benefits and minimize the stress and the
way to do that is to do mostly aerobic so I put some numbers they're not exact
but they'll give you an idea of the proportion so 70 to 80 percent of the
exercise should be aerobic if you're trying to reduce insulin resistance and
lose some belly fat then you can do some core strength training maybe 10 to 20
percent and the purpose of that is to tone and stimulate the brain that's the
ultimate purpose of all exercise is to stimulate the brain number six you can
do some high-intensity interval training and some weights maybe accounting for 10
to 20 percent and the reason you want to do that is for hormonal benefits human
growth hormones and brain derived neurotrophic factor and also those
hormones will help improve your metabolism hopefully now you know enough
that next time you see one of those crazy thumbnails with a before and after
and an outrageous promise you don't have to waste your time even clicking on it
if you enjoyed this video make sure you check out that one thank you so much for
watching I'll see you in the next video