Some will tell you the low to moderate aerobic exercises are the best fat burning exercises while others believe it is the high impact aerobics that burn fat best. And then there are those who will tell you strength training is best for burning fat. So with all these experts giving different advice, how can you determine what's the best for you.

The truth is all these experts are correct. Both strength training and aerobics, at any level, will help you burn excess body fat. Aerobic exercises are the most effective at burning calories and fat while performing the exercise while strength training gives you the benefit of increasing your metabolism. With a higher basal metabolic rate, you will be burning more calories each day while doing every day activities including sleeping.

So if all these methods help shed fat, why is it important to know the best fat burning exercise? Well if you are trying to maximize your fat burn then you need to understand how each exercise will help so that you can pick the most effective workout routine.

Strength Training

Strength training exercises are those exercises that challenge your muscles through resistance. The higher the resistance the more challenge the exercise will be. Although strength training itself is not a high calorie or fat burning exercise, it does help tone and strengthen your muscles and increases your lean muscle mass. The more lean muscle mass you have the more calories you burn due to an increased metabolic rate.

Weight lifting offers the most versatility for adjusting the resistance. You can continually increase the weight and challenge to your muscles. However not everyone has access to weight lifting equipment nor do they necessarily need to perform weight lifting to increase their muscle mass.

Resistance band exercises and dumbbell exercises are a great alternative to weight lifting. With resistance bands, you can easily adjust the resistance to your muscles by shortening the band for higher resistance or loosening for lighter resistance. They are fairly inexpensive and easy to travel with so they make a great on the go exercise.

Dumbbell exercises also are fairly inexpensive and easy to store. You can buy several sizes so that you use heavier weights for higher resistance and lighter weights for less resistance. You can also do body weight exercises where you are just using your body and gravity to provide the resistance. The bottom line is that any strength training exercise that helps you build lean muscles will help you burn fat.

Aerobic Exercises

It is aerobic exercises where there is the most debate as to which exercise is best to burn fat; low to moderate intense level or high intense level aerobics. With the low to moderate intense aerobic workouts your body uses approximately 60% of fat for fuel. However, the low to moderate level aerobics also burn fewer calories overall as compared to high impact aerobics.

The high impact aerobics will give you a higher calorie burn overall but only use about 35% of fat for fuel. Hence the reason for the debate and confusion as to which is the best fat burning exercise routine.

To best understand the difference between the two types of aerobics, let's use an example. For instance, if a man weighing 175 pounds took a brisk walk at 4 mph for 30 minutes, a low to moderate level aerobic exercise, he would have burned approximately 158 calories. If 60% was fat, he would have burned about 95 fat calories.

Now if this same man jogged or ran for 30 minutes at 6 mph, a high impact aerobic exercise, he would have burned about 420 calories with 147 of these calories coming from fat; or 35% of total calories burned. So you can see he had the highest total calories and fat calories with the high impact aerobic workout.

Unfortunately not everyone is at a level in their exercise routines to be able to keep up this fast pace for this amount of time. So let's assume that this man ran for only 20 minutes instead of the full 30 minutes. In this case he would only burn 280 calories total and 98 fat calories. Even with the shorter duration of the high impact aerobics he was able to burn more calories as well as a few more fat calories.

Again this is a high impact level and if you are not in a position to run at this pace for even a few minutes, then your best fat burning exercise will be a low to moderate level aerobics. To increase both the total calories burned and the fat calories try increasing the duration of your low to moderate aerobic workout.

As you begin to adjust to your aerobic workouts, try increasing the speed as well. Mix up your aerobic exercises by doing low to moderate level with spurts of high impact aerobics. This high impact interval training exercise will give you the benefit of both low to moderate to high impact aerobics calories and fat burn. So make the most out of your fat burning exercises.