Video:How to Burn Fat While Lifting Weights

Transcript:How to Burn Fat While Lifting Weights

Hello, my name is Antonio Sini with Nimble Fitness here in New York City with About.com, and today we're going to show you how to burn fat while lifting weights.

Use Active Rest to Burn Fat While Lifting Weights

The key to burning fat while lifting weights is to keep your body moving, keep your calories burning throughout the entire exercise routine. So if you're going to be lifting weights, you want to make sure that in between your compound exercises, that you're doing something else, almost like what we call and "Active Rest."

You want to keep the pace of the exercise fairly quick, so you want your reps (repetitions) to be high, and you want your rest in between reps to be short. So rather than doing five, six, seven or eight reps of a heavy exercise, waiting a minute or two before you do another set, what you want to do is 15-20 reps at a lighter weight, wait 5-10 seconds, and do another set with the same weight for another 15-20 seconds.

Try Circuit Training to Burn Fat While Lifting Weights

Circuit training is a great way to burn calories while lifting weights. As Victor is demonstrating, he is doing curls, which is a pulling exercise and he is going to follow that with shoulder presses, which is a pushing exercise. Then he is going to take the weights and bring them down into squats, working his lower body.

Again, there is no rest. He is keeping his feet shoulder width apart, toes pointed slightly out. And then he is going to go into lunging curls. Stepping back for a real lunge, so we're working the lower ad the upper body at the same time. This is circuit training.

Keep Weights Low and Reps High to Burn Fat While Lifting Weights

Another great way to burn calories while doing exercise is to keep the weights low and the reps high. You want to maintain good form. Keep a nice, steady pace and then take what we call an active rest, where you are not going to sit still, but you're going to do a separate exercise unrelated to the one you just did.

So you're resting from one exercise but you are still doing another exercise. This is what we call an active rest. Again, no rest in between from one movement to the next, 15-20 reps. He is keeping that to be perfect.

These are just the basics on how to burn fat while lifting weights. To learn more, visit About.com