If you could focus on 2 ultra-productive weight loss methods that would consistently help you to lose the maximum amount of bodyfat, would you do so?

There are numerous ways of helping your body to use its natural systems in order to burn through bodyfat, and a good diet and exercise program is a great place to start. However, you can turn your body into a hot, 24-hour per day fat burning engine by practicing two very simple techniques!

Use Your Legs

The lower half of your body contains a higher percentage of muscle tissue than the upper body, and since it is muscles that are the calorie-burning centers of the body, it just makes sense that the more you use your legs, the more calories you will burn.

However, the benefit to getting regular leg exercise does not stop with simple calorie burning. The muscles of the body are also directly responsible for your overall metabolic rate, which, in simple terms, means the rate at which your body uses energy.

Bodyfat is nothing more than energy that has been stored by the body for later use, so if you increase your metabolic rate, you will also increase the amount of bodyfat that your body burns each and every day, even when you are not actively exercising.

Whenever you are working out, yes, you are actively burning through calories, and that is certainly something that you should do on a daily basis. However, by frequently targeting the large muscles of your legs - the quadriceps, hamstrings, and gluteals (butt muscles), you will cause your body to need a constant supply of energy in order to feed the large metabolic needs of those muscles.

For general weight loss, you should be doing resistance exercises for your legs at least twice a week, if not three times each week. Remember that as I covered in the third installment of the Health, Diet, and Weight Loss Checklist, resistance exercise is different than cardiovascular training. I will cover the leg-specific cardiovascular system of losing bodyfat in the section below.

For now, here is a list of 4 of the most effective resistance training exercises for your legs, each of which has numerous variations:

• Squats
• Lunges
• Deadlifts
• Step-ups

Early Morning Cardiovascular Training

Another way to burn through massive amounts of bodyfat is to do cardiovascular training early in the morning before you eat breakfast. The longer and more intensely you workout, the more bodyfat you will use.

This is due to the fact that your body is in a state of carbohydrate depletion whenever you first wake up. Most people sleep for 6 to 8 hours, and they also usually stop eating 2 to 4 hours before they go to bed. Add that up to discover that when you wake up, it will have been between 8 and 12 hours since you ingested any carbohydrates.

Since carbohydrates and bodyfat are the two primary sources of fuel that your body uses during cardiovascular training, it is simple physics that if there are no carbs available, your body will be forced to use stored bodyfat for energy during your cardiovascular training session.

Referring once again to the fact that the muscles in the legs are the largest muscles in the body, they will need the highest amount of energy in order to complete that cardiovascular activity. Since cardiovascular training itself is already a high calorie burning activity, you will rapidly deplete your body's supply of energy (bodyfat) by doing your cardiovascular training while in a carbohydrate-depleted state.

There is one caveat to this method, however. It is possible for your body to attempt to break down muscle tissue for energy during cardiovascular training, and that is the last thing that you want! In order to eliminate that possibility, it is best to keep pre-breakfast cardiovascular training in the moderate intensity range.

You can use a heart rate measuring formula or device in order to keep your heart rate at around 75% of your maximum, or you can just listen to your body. While you are doing pre-breakfast cardio, it is not unusual to start getting hungry, which is natural and means that you are using bodyfat for energy. However, if you start to get really hungry and/or if you start to feel faint or light-headed, that means that your body is not able to break down bodyfat quickly enough to fuel your training session. If that happens, crank down your intensity level far enough to lessen those types of feelings.

Also, as is always the case when exercising, if you have any strong feelings of dizziness, being light-headed, faint, or just generally feeling ill, you should make a judgment call about stopping that exercise session completely, and possibly taking a visit to your doctor for a check up.

Conclusion

Regardless of what your personal goals are for your exercise and nutrition program, everyone should have the goal of getting to and maintaining a reasonable level of bodyfat. Even if you aren't concerned about your physical appearance, excess bodyfat is simply unhealthy on many levels, so keeping it under control should always be a priority.

By following the two simple guidelines that were given above, you can now maximize the time and the effort that you spend exercising by engaging in methods that will give you the most benefit for every minute that you spend working out!