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Try This One Exercise Proven to Burn Fat, Tighten Your Core and Improve Balance

Fitness | Weight Loss

Enough scouring of social media to put together dozens exercises that will help you achieve your all your physical health goals.

Rather than isolated exercises that focus on one muscle (be it your heart, your abs, or your glutes), look for full-body exercises that engage many body parts and challenge your body’s resistance, flexibility, or balance at the same time.

In this article, we introduce you to an exercise that will help build core muscles and burn excess calories while improving your balance.

But first, let’s look at the differences between full body and isolation exercises.

Full Body vs. Isolation Exercises

The key for isolation exercises is in the word itself: it includes the exercises that focus on one specific muscle at time. These include most weight lifting exercises that aim to build muscle mass and sculpt individual muscles. If you are exercising mainly to achieve a certain physique, these will likely be the exercises you turn to.

Isolation exercises include bicep curls, standard squats, barbell rows, and crunches.

Full body exercises, on the other hand, will often engage many muscles at once. Since they require you to move your whole body, they often also improve balance or flexibility, and will also get your heart pumping.

When your heart rate goes up, you are burning energy (calories), and if you burn more energy than you have consumed, your body will start breaking down fat for energy.

Full body exercises are ideal for people who have limited time to exercise, who are interested in improving overall physical health, and who easily get bored with repetitive, isolated exercises.

If you are reading this, it is likely you are looking for good full-body exercises to get the job done!

And, without further ado, here is the full-body exercise that will help you burn fat, tighten your core, and improve balance: The Ball Balance

The Ball Balance

For this exercise, you will need a stability ball. Note that the exercise is divided into two parts.

How to do it:

Part 1:

  1. Lie on a stability ball face down, so your abdomen is centered on the ball.
  2. Put your hands on the floor in front of you so they are 90 degrees with you body, and your legs stretched out behind you, so your toes are about hip-width apart on the floor.
  3. Raise your right arm forward to engage your shoulders and upper back, and simultaneously lift your left leg off the ground to the same level as your body to engage your glutes.
  4. Hold for 10 seconds, keeping your head down looking at the floor ahead of you. This will help prevent injury.
  5. Switch your arm and leg and repeat.

Part 2:

Source: Static Flicker

  1. With both hands on the ground, inch forward so your body starts rolling over the ball.
  2. Keep going until your feet are on the stability ball. Hold for 5 seconds.
  3. Slowly roll back into your starting position.
  4. Complete this circuit 5 times.
  5. Over time, build up to 4 sets of 5 lifts each side.

This exercise engages your abs, forearms, shoulder, upper back, hamstrings, lower back and glutes, while also helping to improve your balance. It will also get you sweating and burning excess calories!

Do you know of any full-body exercises that get your heart going? Share below

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