When you want to get your upper body looking fit and fabulous, you need a workout designed to focus on that area of the body. A lot of people will forget their upper body with their weekly exercise routine, instead working on the lower body.
Upper body exercises help to improve core strength and make your belly and arms look fit and toned. If you’re building up lean muscle in your upper body, you can increase your resting metabolism over time.
An upper body fat burning workout can not just get rid of fat but can also improve musculature and tone. If you manage to couple your workout with a healthy diet, you can develop muscle quickly and reduce fat fast.
Bear in mind that you can’t target specifically the fat in the upper body, as exercise of any kind will help to decrease fat throughout the body. However, with a decent upper body fat burning workout routine, you will help build up the muscle in those areas, and it will feel like you are turning fat into muscle.
The workout routine we’re going to share with you is an upper body fat burning workout men and women can both use. It’s designed to build up lean muscle and to get rid of fat without you having to spend hours and hours exercising.
What is the Best Upper Body Fat Burning Workout?
We want to share a few quick tips about working out your upper body in order to burn fat. This will help you get the most out of your exercise routine.
Make sure you challenge yourself with the exercises you do. If the workout routine is too easy and you’re not sweating, you’re probably not burning a lot of calories.
Your weight and physical fitness level will help determine what kind of exercises you need to do and at what rate you should be going to really make a difference in the amount of fat that’s hanging on to your body. You also want to focus on the intensity of the workout.
If you feel like the workout is too easy and you’re not challenging yourself, simply pumping up the intensity and doing things at a faster pace or lifting weights that are heavier can make a huge difference.
It’s also not a bad idea to change up your workout routine every now and then so you don’t get bored of it. You may find some routines a little boring and mind numbing, and it’s not a bad idea to switch things up if you find yourself growing tired of the workout regimen you’ve been doing.
Start with Cardio
Some of the best exercise for your upper body and for your entire body is cardiovascular exercise. We’re going to start off with some exercises you can do at a decent speed to warm up and get your heart pumping.
If your heart is pumping at a high rate for more than a few minutes, you’ll start burning some serious calories. You also benefit your heart over the long term by strengthening it, getting your heart the exercise it needs to be more resilient and long lasting.
The warmup period should not be very intense. You want to ease into it and stretch your muscles so that you are not over tired or sore when you’re done with the entire set. You can save the high intensity pace for the main set and just keep the warmup at a relaxed pace.
To begin our fat burning upper body workout, start with a few of these cardio warmup exercises, which can be done for about 30 seconds each.
- run in place
- high kicks
- jumping jacks
- shoulder rolls
- squads
- small arms circles forward
- small arm circles backwards
- big arm circles forward
- big arm circles backwards
- arm swings
The Ultimate Upper Body Fat Burning Workout
The main part of this upper body fat burning workout women and men can use will give you some nice variety of exercises. You can switch those around in any order you want and change up the intensity as necessary to suit your needs.
For each of these, you’ll do 10 reps of every one of them and then run through the entire set a second time. That means a total of 20 reps for each exercise by the time you’re finished with the main set.
- chest fly with dumbbell on each hand
- reverse fly with dumbbell any change
- one minute of jumping jack
- ventral raises with resistance bands
- lateral raises with resistance bands
- one minute of lateral jumps
- dumbbell pullover
- overhead press
- one minute of burpees and high kicks
So, what you have here are three sets of exercises. Each one starts with two set up upper body exercises, followed by a minute of lower body or total body exercises.
What this does is put the focus primarily on the upper body, but brings in the entire body so that every part can enjoy some benefits from exercising. In other words, this is a full body workout with the upper body focus. So, if your upper body is a problem area for you or you think it needs some extra work, this is a great set of exercises to start out with.
Upper Body Workout Cool Down
Now, we’re going to give you some exercises you can do for about 20 seconds apiece to help cool your body down and stretch out the muscles. This is essential to finish off your routine so that you don’t have muscle soreness afterwards. Like the warmup section, you want to keep this relaxed and keep the intensity medium or low. It should definitely be a lower intensity than the main workout so that your body has a chance to cool down and your muscles can stretch out properly.
- run in place
- side swings
- cross wings
- toe touch and shoulder touch
- wall chest stretch
- alternating big arm circles
- alternating shoulder rolls
- arm cross pole
Closing Thoughts
When you’re doing an upper body superset workout with fat burning cardio intervals like this, you want to make sure you’re doing it enough times throughout the week to get the full benefits.
We recommend going through this exercise about two or three times a week. It’s important that you get enough down time and rest between each session so that you don’t overwork your muscles and overtire your body.
It’s also important to keep doing the exercises regularly, so if you try to squeeze too many sessions into a short period of time, you may need several days of rest. That extended rest period can be bad for your metabolism, and it can make it difficult for you to lose the weight you’re trying to lose.
If you want to lose a lot of weight and tone your upper body, you to keep up the exercises and not stop for too long. About 48 hours of rest between each session is ideal, but it doesn’t have to be exactly that amount of time.
If you are feeling muscle soreness from the last time you did the set of exercises, you may need additional rest. Remember to adjust your intensity as needed to suit your level of activity and overall health. How much weight you lift during the exercise is up to you, and you’ll need to adjust that based on your strength as well.
Your results may vary from someone else based on your gender, fitness level, intensity, weight, mass, and other factors. How many calories you burn will be determined by these factors, and your muscle development will partly be determined by these factors as well as the kind of diet you are on.
If you are looking to lose fat quickly, build muscle, and tone your upper body, you need to focus on a diet that is high in fiber, low in fat and sugar, and high in protein.
