High-intensity workouts get your heart pumping quickly, burn a lot of calories and leave you drenched in sweat, creating much more of a challenge than low- to moderate-intensity workouts. By intensifying your workouts, you can exercise for less time and still increase your aerobic capacity, boost your metabolism and improve your stamina. Any exercise that vigorously engages your upper and lower body provides a high-intensity full-body workout. These workouts push you past your comfort zone, allowing you to burn fat and tone muscles simultaneously.
A martial arts-inspired kickboxing workout fully engages your lower and upper body. It causes you to start sweating quickly, strengthens your cardiovascular system and burns hundreds of calories per hour. Harvard Health Publications notes that a 185-pound person can burn more than 400 calories with just 30 minutes of kickboxing. The continuous striking motions of kickboxing work the muscles in your arms, while the spinning kicks, high kicks, low kicks and jumping kicks work the glutes and muscles throughout your legs. Knee raises and twisting motions engage the abdominal muscles and back. Join a kickboxing class at a boxing gym or martial-arts school to experience this intense, total-body workout.
Recreational swimming provides a moderate-intensity workout, but simply picking up your swimming speed, changing your stroke and swimming for a set duration of time turns swimming into an intense, calorie-blasting exercise. According to Harvard Health Publications, a 185-pound person can burn 880 calories per hour or more with swimming. This full-body exercise engages the arms, shoulders, torso, abdomen, back and legs. Water's buoyancy eliminates any impact on the knees or joints, which makes swimming an ideal exercise for individuals with bone or joint ailments, such as arthritis or osteoporosis. Find a local swimming pool, and swim for two to three hours each week for a high-intensity workout that tones muscles throughout the body.
With circuit training, you power through resistance exercises, working different muscle groups without resting, and sometimes adding bursts of aerobics in between. Circuit training can include exercises that work both the upper and lower body, such as jumping rope, running in place, jumping jacks, pushups, squats, lunges and crunches, providing a full-body workout. Circuit training not only promotes cardiovascular fitness, it also dramatically increases your body's calorie-burning potential. Muscles are more active than fat, and the muscles you engage while circuit training stay active long after you stop exercising, allowing you to burn calories throughout the day. Circuit train three to four times weekly for a full-body workout that blasts fat and builds muscles.
Many sports activities work muscles throughout the body, promote cardiovascular fitness and enhance muscle development. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists singles tennis and basketball as vigorous aerobic activities, and both of these sports engage muscles in your upper and lower body. To play basketball, you must use your arms to continuously throw, shoot and catch the ball, and your legs get an intense workout as you run up and down the basketball court. Tennis requires you to swing your arms consistently and run continuously to chase and hit a tennis ball. Choose a sport that you enjoy, make sure it provides an intense, full-body workout, and play it regularly to get in shape while having fun.
- Harvard Health Publications: Calories Burned in 30 Minutes for People of Three Different Weights
- Fitness: Kickboxing Workout -- Sculpt Muscles and Blast Fat
- CNN.com: The Benefits of -- Swimming
- WebMD: Take a Shortcut to Fitness with Circuit Training
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: How Much Physical Activity Do Adults Need?
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