You're Burning Fat All Wrong — The BEST & WORST Exercises for Fat Loss

0:00 Wake Forest took 249 adults, average age 67, and they put them on an 18-month weight loss program. One group only cut calories. One group cut calories and did cardio for exercise, and one group cut calories and lifted weights. 18 months later, they measured everybody with a DEXA scan. And here is the part that nobody expected. The cardio group lost 1.6 6 kilos of lean mass. The group that only dieted and did nothing else lost 1.0. The group that lifted weights lost 0.8. Okay, I want you to hear that one more time. Adding cardio to a diet caused people to lose more muscle mass than doing no exercise at all. This study was published in Obesity in 2017, and it should change how anybody over 40 thinks about exercise. Because if you're grinding it out on the treadmill 5 days a week or doing long runs trying to shrink your belly, there's a very real chance you're losing the wrong type of weight. So today I'm ranking exercises for fat loss from worst to best. And I'm grading every single one of them based off of three things. Number one, time cost. How many minutes did this actually eat out of your week? Number two, fat loss power. What does the human research say it does for fat loss, body fat? not just your smartwatch calorie number. And number three, can you actually stick with it after 40? Because the greatest fat loss exercise on earth is worthless if your knees hate you by week three.

1:36 I'm grading these like a report card. A+ down to D minus. No confusing tier names, no insider language. If an eighth grader can't understand the graphic, I didn't do my job. So, we're starting at the bottom because some of what you're about to see is the exact thing that most people over 40 are doing most of. Let's start with the D minus. Endless ab work. This is at the bottom of the list. Crunches, sit-ups, ab machines, even planks for time and every 10-minute belly fat burner on the internet. Not because core strength doesn't matter. It does. It's the reason why you could carry your groceries without tweaking your back. But as a strategy to remove fat from your midsection, this is the single most wasted hour in the gym.

2:21 Here's the study. Researchers took 24 sedentary adults and had one group perform seven different ab exercises, two sets of 10 reps, 5 days a week for 6 weeks. Everybody's diet was held steady on purpose. After 6 weeks, they measured body weight, body fat percentage, abdominal fat, abdominal circumference, and skin folds. Nothing moved. Not one of those measurements changed. Sure, their abs got stronger, but their belly stayed exactly the same. And there's an even smarter experiment that proves this point even more. A team put 104 people through 12 weeks of resistance training on one arm only, their non-dominant arm.

3:03 If you could burn fat off a specific body part by working that body part, the trained arm should have gotten leaner than the untrained one. They scanned both arms with an MRI and it didn't happen. Your body does not take fat from the muscle you just worked. It pulls fat from wherever your genetics decide in whatever order your genetics decide. Which is why belly fat feels so stubborn for so many of you. It's usually last in line. So if you stop doing one thing today, stop treating ab exercises as fat loss exercises. So I grade this a D minus because of time cost, fat loss power, which is essentially zero. The ease is high. It's easy, but it's kind of useless for fat loss. The next on the list gets a D-grade. The daily cardio grind. The belief that if some cardio is good, then more cardio is better. 60 minutes, 6 days a week, forever. Now, I know this one is emotional for some people because it feels like virtue. But there's a study out of Pennington Biomedical that pours cold water all over this. They took 411 sedentary, overweight, post-menopausal women and randomized them into three exercise doses plus a control group. Every session was supervised. No cheating, no skipping for 6 months. Then they compared how much weight each group actually lost against how much the math they said they should have lost. The lower doses landed just about where we would predict it. But the highest dose group, the women exercising roughly 194 minutes a week, only lost about half of what the calorie math predicted. The gap has a name. It's called compensation.

4:42 The more you drive up the burn, the harder your body pushes back on the other side of the equation through appetite and through how much you unconsciously move the rest of the day. And there's a longevity angle here, too. The Copenhagen City Heart Study followed roughly 1,100 joggers and 3,950 non- joggers for over a decade. Light joggers had the lowest death rate of anybody. Moderate joggers did well, but the strenuous joggers, defined as fast pace, plus more than 4 hours a week, had a mortality rate that was not statistically different from the people sitting on the couch. Now, I want to be fair here. The strenuous group was small and the confidence interval was wide. So don't treat it as settled research, but the shape of that curve should tell you something. More is not automatically better. So cardio gets a grade D. Time cost is brutal. Fat loss power is blunted by compensation. Ease is poor.

5:42 This one burns you out. Next we have the C-grade. Long, slow, steady cardio as your only tool. Now, what I'm talking about is the treadmill or the elliptical on their own. 45 minutes at a moderate pace a few times a week with nothing else in the program. Now, I want to be clear, this is not a bad activity. It's a bad only activity. And that's the distinction that nobody makes. Go back to the Wake Forest trial that I started at the top of this video. The cardio group did lose some real fat, about 6.8 kilos of it. That's not nothing. But they gave up more lean mass to get there than the group that only dieted. And in older adults, that trade is expensive because when the weight comes back, it tends to come back as fat rather than muscle. You see, your goal is not to lose weight. Your goal is to lose fat.

6:33 There is a difference. That's the whole problem in just a couple of sentences. You could shrink but get weaker at the same time. And the scale will congratulate you for it. There's a second issue. A 2023 review pulled 11 randomized trials that used DEXA scans and compared interval training against continuous cardio in adults with excess weight. Body fat percentage, no meaningful difference between them. Visceral fat, no meaningful difference either. So steady cardio isn't inferior for fat loss. It just cost a lot more out of your life to get the same result and it doesn't defend your muscle while it's happening. So, this gets a grade C.

7:12 Time cost is high. Fat loss power is real but modest. Ease is good. It earns a passing grade, but nothing more. The next grade gets a B. Group classes and body weightight circuits. These are things like boot camp classes, spin classes, aerobics, the circuit class at your gym. We have popular gyms in the United States like Orange Theory Fitness and Barry's Boot Camp and others that have these classes. This is where things get genuinely useful. You do get some resistance work. You get heart rate elevation. You get accountability. And honestly, for a lot of people after age 40, showing up is 90% of the battle.

7:50 That's because the heaviest weight at the gym is the front door. Now, the ceiling is the issue. Almost every class is built for a room, not for you. The weights are light enough where everybody could finish, which means after about 8 weeks, your body has adapted and has nowhere to go. There's no clear way to add additional weights week after week. Look, if a class is the thing that gets you moving, keep it. Just understand it's a starting point rather than a destination. So, the grade is a B. Time cost moderate. Fat loss power is decent.

8:23 Ease is excellent, and that does count for a lot. The next exercise on the list gets a B+. This is low impact intervals. Now, we're getting to the top half of the exercises. intervals on a bike, a rower, or an incline walk. Hard effort for a short window, easy for a short window, and then repeat. The classic study on this is out of the University of New South Wales, 45 women, 15 weeks. One group did 20 minutes of interval cycling three times a week, 8 seconds hard, 12 seconds easy, over and over.

8:58 The other group did 40 minutes of steadystate cycling three times a week. The interval group lost significantly more fat, including trunk fat, and they improved their fasting insulin. The steadystate group at double the session length did not see the same body composition changes. Now, here's the honest caveat. Those were women averaging 20 years old. So, I'm not going to pretend it maps perfectly to my audience, which is typically people over 40, but we do have data on older adults doing this. The Generation 100 trial in Norway put 1567 people aged 70 through 77 through five years of supervised training twice a week. One group did intervals at around 90% of peak heart rate over 5 years. 95.4% of everybody in that study was still alive against a national expectation of about 90% for that age group. The interval group had the lowest death rate of the three at 3%. Though the difference between the two groups was not statistically significant. The takeaway here is not that intervals are magic. Takeaway is that people in their 70s did hard intervals twice a week for 5 years and they thrived. You see, because your age is not a reason why you can't do this. So this gets this exercise gets a B+. Time cost is low.

10:25 Fat loss power is strong. Ease is moderate. It's demanding, but it's short. Now, before I reveal the top three exercises on this list, there's one problem we have to solve first. Because remember what I showed you at the very beginning of this video. You can lose weight, you can lose belly fat, you can watch the number on the scale go down, and you could lose valuable muscle along with it. And after 40, that's a terrible idea because I don't just care about you becoming lighter. I want you losing the fat while protecting as much as the valuable lean tissue underneath it as possible. And there's one ridiculously simple thing I personally use to support that goal, and it's creatine. And the research here, specifically in older adults, it's pretty remarkable. A metaanalysis pulled 22 randomized control trials with 721 participants with average ages across the study ranging between 57 and 70.

11:22 They were resistance training two to three times a week. Some received creatine, the others received the placebo. And the creatine groups gained an additional 1.37 kg of lean tissue compared with placebo. That's roughly three times the additional pounds of lean tissue. Same training, same effort, but different result. And there's another reason why this matters so much in a video about fat loss. A separate meta analysis looked at 19 studies involving over 50 adults. The creatine groups also reduced their body fat percentage slightly more than placebo. Now, I'm not going to exaggerate that finding. The difference was about half a percentage point, and the difference in the absolute fat mass was not statistically significant. So, creatine is not a magic fat burner. I take it because when I'm trying to improve my body composition after 40, I care just as much about what I'm keeping as what I'm losing. And that's exactly why I personally use Myioscience Micronized Creatine every single day.

12:28 Not because it's fancy, not because it has the flashiest label, and it's definitely not because it contains 15 different ingredients you've never heard of. This is 100% pure creatine monohydrate. third-party tested, no fillers, no artificial ingredients, made right here in America. Just a simple form that's been studied again and again. And that matters to me because if I'm putting something in my body every single day, I want to know exactly what I'm getting. Maybe you're thinking, "Okay, Ben, how complicated is this?"

12:59 It's not. It's just five grams a day. One scoop. That's it. No complicated protocol. No loading phase required. No cycling on and off. Just one scoop once a day, done. Why leave one of the simplest, most studied tools for helping to support your training sitting on the table? Especially after 40 when the muscle you're working so hard to maintain becomes increasingly valuable. So, if you're wondering which creatine to get, I've made that decision easy for you. Use the exact one that I personally use. My audience gets an exclusive 20% off myioscience creatine when you click the first link in the description box right below this video or grab your phone, open up the camera app and scan the QR code on the screen. I recommend you do it before this exclusive offer runs out. You also get a 100% money back guarantee and the coupon code is automatically applied so you get the discount and you get the guarantee and you know exactly what you're getting.

13:58 Let me actually show you how simple this is. I'm going to click the first link in the description box below and then I'm going to get to this page right here. Myioscience micronized creatine monohydrate. You'll scroll down and personally I'll do the subscribe and save option because it saves me an additional 5%. But honestly, there's a bigger reason why I do that. I don't have to think about reordering. Creatine works through consistency. So, I'm going to add that to my cart. The coupon code is automatically applied with an additional 5% off savings. I don't want to run out. I don't want to forget about it after 3 weeks and then have to start the new habit again. It simply shows up when I need it. And I'm almost done. But before I check out, there's one other thing that I would personally add. If I scroll down here, you can see goes perfectly with the vitamin D3 and K2.

14:43 I'm going to add that to the cart. The coupon code is also applied to that. And again, I'm not trying to build a giant supplement cabinet here. I want fewer things to think about, not more. But look at this. An analysis of more than 26,000 American adults found that approximately 7 out of 10 were below the vitamin D sufficiency threshold used in that analysis. Seven out of 10. And hey, skeletal muscle contains vitamin D receptors. Now, that doesn't mean seven out of 10 people automatically need a supplement. And I'm not saying vitamin D3 is some secret muscle building pill, but I simply don't want to overlook a foundational nutrient that is relevant to muscle function. So, here's how I personally keep this ridiculously simple. Creatine is my daily foundation for supporting muscle, the muscle that I'm training. Vitamin D3 helps me cover another foundation nutrient I don't want to overlook. That's it. Creatine D3 done. No 20 bottle supplement cabinet, no complicated protocol, no wondering what to take every morning. It's one scoop of creatine, two capsules of the vitamin D. So, I recommend adding the vitamin D3. Hit check out, put your information, you're done. And if you're exercising after 40 to lose fat, remember this. Don't only think about what you're trying to lose. Think about what you're fighting to keep. That's your muscle. And this is one of the most simplest additions I've made to support it that costs less than a cup of coffee per day. So click the first link in the description box below or scan the QR code on the screen to get your 20% off myioscience creatine. Now we've reached the top three exercises for fat loss after 40. And number three is interesting because you don't need to add another workout to your week. You take something you're probably already doing, make one simple change, and researchers suggest that under the conditions studied, it could increase the amount of energy that activity demands by around 13%. No running, no brutal interval session, you're just making walking work harder for you. This next exercise gets an A minus. Rucking and or weighted vest walking. Rocking simply means you're just walking with a weight on your torso, either in a pack or a vest, a weighted vest, and it might be the highest return per minute of anything in the low impact category.

17:09 Research commissioned by the American Council on Exercise found that walking on a 5 to 10% grade while wearing a vest loaded at 10% of body weight increase calorie burn by 13% compared to the same walk with no vest. Now, 13% is not a miracle, but it's real and it's free once you own the vest. And guess what? It stacks onto your walk every day. The same walks you're probably already doing. What I like even more is the loading. You're putting weight through your hips and spine while you move, and there's no jarring impact on your knees the way that running gives you. One rule, if you're going to do this, start light. 10% of your total body weight is plenty. I see people start with strapping on 40 lbs on day one and wonder why their back is angry by Thursday. So, this gets an A minus. Time cost, none extra. Fat loss power is good. Ease is very high. The next exercise gets an A. This is going to be walking after meals. This is the one that nobody expects to see on this list, and it's the one I want you to start doing today. Not walking in general, walking specifically in the window right after you finish your meals. A metaanalysis in sports medicine looked at what happens when you break up sitting with short movement. Standing up after meals lowered blood glucose by about 9.5% compared to staying seated. Light walking lowered it to about 17% and the walking breaks in those studies were only 2 to 5 minutes long. A second review confirmed that the timing matters. The benefit is largest when you move as soon as possible after your last bite of food. Wait too long and the effect fades. and exercise before the meal didn't blunt that post glucose response at all. Here's why this belongs near the top for my audience. Lower glucose spikes means lower insulin. And insulin is the hormone that tells your cells to store fat rather than release it. You see, you're not deficient in willpower. Your signaling is blocked. 10 minutes of walking after your biggest meal of the day, that's usually dinner for most people, is one of the cheapest ways that you can unblock it. So, this gets an A. Time cost 10 minutes. Fat loss power. Indirect but powerful through the reduction of insulin. Ease probably the easiest thing on this list.

19:36 This brings me to the A+ exercise on my list. Full body resistance training. This is number one, and it was never even close. Three reasons and they're all backed by human data. First, it protects the tissue that is disappearing. You see, after age 30, muscle mass begins to decline somewhere between the range of 3 to 8% per decade, and it accelerates after age 60. Strength drops even faster than size does. A quantitative review found strength declining two to five times faster than mass in the same subjects.

20:14 Second, muscle predicts how long you live. A metaanalysis of 38 studies covering more than 1.9 million people found that adults with higher grip strength had a 31% lower risk of dying from any cause. And research using the NHANES data found that older adults in the top quartortile of muscle mass index had significantly lower all-c cause mortality than those in the bottom quartile. Third, it changes your metabolism at rest. Researchers put men aged 50 to 65 through 16 weeks of heavy resistance training. Their body weight did not change at all, but body fat dropped, lean muscle mass went up, and their resting metabolic rate rose up 7.7%.

21:06 Which means they were burning more fat just sitting on the couch. A separate 24-week study found a 7% increase in resting metabolic rate across young and older adults alike. The scale showed nothing changed, but the body showed everything changed. So, two to three fullbody sessions a week. Push, pull, squat, hinge, carry, that's the whole prescription. This gets an A+. Time cost moderate. Fat loss power the highest on this list. Ease is moderate and it's worth every minute. So, here's the full report card graphic I'm going to show on the screen. A+ full body resistance training. A walking after meals. A minus rocking weighted vest. B+ low impact intervals. B group classes and circuits.

21:58 C long steady cardio alone. D the daily cardio grind. And D minus endless ab work. If you're over 40 and you take only one thing from this video, let it be this. Move the hour that you're currently spending on cardio into two to three lifting sessions and walk after your meals. That single swap changes your metabolism faster than anything on this list. Now, here's the last piece of this. You can do the resistance training. You can walk after your meals.

22:28 But if you're losing fat after 40, you also need enough protein to help to maintain the lean tissue you're fighting to keep. Think of it this way. Lifting gives your body the signal. Protein provides the building material. And hey, the research backs this up. A systematic review pulled 20 randomized control trials in adults over 50 who were losing weight. The higher protein groups retained more lean mass and lost more fat mass than the standard protein groups. That's the goal after 40. Don't just lose the weight, lose the right weight, lose the fat, keep the muscle.

23:05 And I know this is where most people struggle. It's not knowing they need to eat more protein. It's actually eating it enough every day. You're busy. You're traveling. I get it. You don't want to cook another meal. I don't enjoy cooking myself. And that's exactly why I keep Equip Foods Prime Protein in my kitchen. Now, look, whole foods always comes first. Eat the eggs, eat the red meat, eat the small fatty fish. That should always be first. But when life gets busy, I can get over 20 gram of a complete protein in just 30 seconds. One scoop, I mix it with water or unsweetened coconut milk, or sometimes I just put in my coffee. Done. And I like Equip because it's incredibly simple.

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25:45 For me, it's much simpler. I'm already making the shake or making my coffee. One extra scoop, no extra habit. So, add the collagen if you want and then hit check out. Prime protein helps me hit my protein target. Collagen is my additional add-on. Click the second link in the description box below if you want this deal or scan the QR code on the screen. And remember, they back their offer with a 100% money back guarantee. And hey, if you got any value from this video, hit the subscribe button, hit the like button, share this with somebody you know. Comment down below with your biggest takeaway. I read almost every comment on this channel. And if you loved today's lesson, I recently published a video about something I do before bed, and it helps your body burn fat while you sleep. It's so simple, but so effective. Here's a clip from that video. Then click the video on the screen coming up in a few seconds, and I'll see you in that next video. Four things are supposed to switch on. Number one, your body releases growth hormone, which is fat burning, anti-aging, and muscle building. Number two, cellular repair enzymes are activated. Autophagy kicks in, which is your body cleaning out damaged cells and cell components. And lastly,