3 Easy Ways to Boost Your Metabolism

If you're like most people you don't have a lot of time to workout. Maybe you're looking to lose a few inches or pounds and what you're doing doesn't seem to be working. It's time to stop trading hours in the gym for a poor result. Let me explain how you can get a better return on your time investment in the gym.

If you want to burn more fat you need to work smarter not harder. Here's what I mean, the more you get your metabolism elevated, the more fat you'll end up burning. Here's three easy ways to boost your metabolism and burn more fat.


1. Increase the intensity of your workout

Don't worry too much about how many calories you burn during the exercise. After all what's more important is how many calories you burn overall, this also includes after the workout is done. Several studies have shown that shorter high intensity workouts keeps your metabolism fired up for hours after the workout is over, something you don't get with long slow cardio workouts.







As strength coach Alywn Cosgrove puts it, "Caring about how much fat is burned during exercise is equivalent to worrying about how much muscle is built during exercise."


During weight training you don't build any muscle, you actually break it down. The recovery process afterwords is where muscle is built. The workout only stimulates what happens after, which is what we are interested in. I just want the end result, which is the fastest way to fat loss.



2. Do Strength Training

Another study showed how strength training keeps the metabolism elevated way after the workout is over. The group did circuit training for 31 minutes using compound movements (exercises that work multiple muscles - not one at a time) and free weight exercises. The findings showed that for 38 hours after the workout was over they were still burning fat! Imagine that, if you worked out at 9 am on Monday you'd still be burning fat at 11pm on Tuesday night from that workout!



3. Eating more frequent meals

A Japanese research team looked at the effects of meal frequency on body composition over a two week period. They took two groups and gave them the same amount of total calories. The first group ate these calories split between two larger meals and the second split their calories into six smaller meals. They found the group who ate only twice per day lost significantly more lean body mass than the group who ate six meals per day.




Losing lean body mass slows your metabolism, so to keep it revved up try to eat something every 3 hours while keeping your total calories in check.

So to recap...
stop doing long slow cardio (unless you're an endurance athelete) and add high intensity work in it's place, do circuit style strength training with free weights, and eat something every three hours to burn more fat.