Best VS Worst Fat Loss Exercises (Ranked By Science)

What are the best fat loss exercises? Worst exercises for fat loss? Today my friend Kevin and I are using the world’s most accurate calorie tracker to rank 50 different exercises. Cardio exercises, strength exercises, HIIT, low intensity cardio, and more! At the end, we’ll reveal the all-time highest calorie burner. We’ll also discover which exercises burn the most calories with minimal effort and which ones are high effort but don’t actually burn very many calories. Using these findings, I’ll create the perfect fat loss workout plan guaranteed to help you lose body fat.

Link to complete ranking of exercises:
https://builtwithscience.com/bws-fat-loss-exercises/

Click below for a step-by-step training plan that reveals all the best exercises you should do for each and every muscle group:
https://quiz.builtwithscience.com/

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We started out with what all the data told me was the best of fat loss exercises, high intensity training, beginning first with 60 seconds of sprinting. Then burpees and mountain climbers. With three exercises down, Sprints had taken an early lead, with burpees a close second. But so far all three challenges had put us through the ringer.

But what I’m hoping to find with this challenge are exercises for fat loss that can burn a high level of calories with a significantly lower perceived exertion. Fortunately we still had 47 exercises left to test. The data showed for each high intensity exercise we were absolutely burning through our calories even for just a 60 second workout, but so far every high calorie burning workout we tried also had an equally high perceived exertion. 

Which means we were gonna need to find a new approach for our fat loss plan: low-intensity training. First up, incline walking. Kevin was able to get through it without feeling like he was going to collapse, which meant the switch to low intensity fat loss exercises was definitely the right direction. 

But is low-intensity as effective as a fat loss workout? After speaking with Dr. Eric Helms, my takeaway was that high-intensity and low-intensity fat loss exercises are equally as effective so it depends on what you’re comfortable with and would be consistent with.

We even moved into strength training to find out if this was a better calorie burning option than cardio. As Dr. Eric Helms puts it, weight training is great for maintaining muscle mass and ensuring that the weight you lose is primarily body fat, but it's not a great tool for fat loss itself. Don't lift weights for the sake of trying to burn as many calories as possible or to lose fat. Lift weights because it tells your body to keep and even build more muscle as you're losing fat, which ultimately is like most people's goal when they're trying to transform their body.

Something Dr. Eric Helms said gave me a lightbulb moment: I think a far better way to think about this is how do I re-engineer my life such that I'm not trying, but I'm being more active? At this point, I realized just trying to build an optimized fat loss workout plan for Kevin wasn’t going to be enough.

I needed to find a way to test how we burn calories in all areas of our life. That means testing every chore and activity you can do with your free time whether it’s vacuuming, reading, or folding the laundry and starting right off with standing. I was finally starting to build a clear picture of all the ways you can maximize calorie burn through the course of the day. For example, walking outside burned an impressive 6 calories per minute for Kevin. Although that’s almost 1/3rd of what he burned doing sprints, I’m pretty sure he’d much rather go for a 30 minute walk than suffer through 10 minutes of sprints.

Anyways, now that I have all the data, it’s time to reveal the best fat loss exercises and create the ultimate fat loss routine.

Kevin and I actually had the same top three best fat loss exercises. Sprinting, Boxing and the Devil’s Press.

Low effort fat loss exercises that still burned a decent amount of calories: longboarding, basketball, incline walking, and plain old walking outside. And high effort fat loss exercises that didn’t end up burning very many calories: power walking.

But jumping jacks, planks, crunches, and most strength exercises, also burned a surprisingly low amount of calories relative to their effort. But while it’s easy to assume the exercise that burns the most calories must be the best, my experience with Kevin has shown me it just isn’t that simple. 

Dr. Eric Helms sums it up:

I think really what we will want to think about is energy expenditure over time that I will adhere to. Think of all of these different fat loss exercises and intensities as tools, and you want to have a robust tool belt. The whole variety in your tool belt is going to make it far more likely that you could adhere to exercise long-term and get the fat loss that you're after.