It’s obvious that a consistent exercise schedule will help you shape up, but intense workouts are not the only way to burn more calories. There are a number of strategies you can use to burn more calories without exercise throughout the day. These tricks can help to boost your metabolism and nickel-and-dime your way to greater fat loss. Here are my 5 favorite ways to burn more calories without exercising:
1. Stand
When you stand, muscles in your legs and core must work to keep you upright and stabilized. With your muscles and fat-burning enzymes activated, your body will burn 20% more calories standing than if you were sitting down. This can quickly add up to a few hundred calories per day if you make a conscious effort to tweak your daily habits.
Make an effort to stand at every opportunity—while you’re talking on the phone, at the gym resting between sets, waiting in line at the DMV, eating lunch, or using your computer. If you modify your desk at home or work to be a standing workstation, you can add several hours of standing to a normal day and burn hundreds of calories in the process.
2. Take movement breaks
Multiple studies have shown that people who spend much of their day sitting down have increased rates of a number of health problems, including high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, metabolic diseases, and heart disease. Here’s the kicker: these results hold true regardless of how active you are during the rest of the day. This means that, even if you exercise regularly, sitting for extended periods of time can have negative long term health effects.
The good news: short breaks from sitting can help to mitigate the risks. Data suggests that the total amount of time you spend sitting in a day is not as important as how long you spend in the chair before getting up again.
Whenever you end up in the seated position for an extended time, take a break every hour to get up and stretch your legs. Walk around, do a few body-weight squats, touch your toes—anything to get your body moving. This will help to keep your hormones and metabolism in check so that you can keep burning calories efficiently throughout the day.
3. Use cold thermogenesis
Running an entire marathon will burn about 3,000 calories, so how is it possible that Olympic swimmers can eat over 10,000 calories every day and stay thin? The answer: they spend a lot of time in cold water.
The human body has many mechanisms to control body temperature, and the main way your body keeps warm when exposed to cold temperatures is by burning calories to generate heat (cold thermogenesis). This can be utilized to burn a significant number of calories without exercising, and you don’t need to spend five hours each day in a swimming pool to get the benefits.
Cold showers and ice baths are great ways to chill your body and initiate cold thermogenesis, but I have a hard time bringing myself to suffer that discomfort on a daily basis. That’s why I choose to concentrate the cold on my Brown Adipose Tissue (BAT).
Areas of brown fat concentration
Brown adipose tissue is a type of fat that is particularly efficient at burning calories for heat. It’s what keeps bears warm during hibernation, and in humans it’s concentrated in the upper back, chest, and neck. You can activate BAT to burn calories by applying cold directly to these areas. Do this by placing ice packs on your upper back and neck for 30 minutes while you watch TV or read in bed. I personally use a Cool Fat Burner Vest, which is basically a vest that holds ice packs on these areas of concentrated BAT. This is definitely the most convenient option, as you can wear it around the house as you go about your normal activities.
Get creative and try exposing your body to cold temperatures to accelerate calorie burning without exercise.
4. Walk
Walking will burn upwards of 220 calories per hour, and it’s surprisingly easy to walk more if you make a conscious effort to do so. Try a few of these strategies to incorporate more walking into your day:
Beginner: Park far away
Habits like parking further away and taking the stairs instead of the elevator are small changes that can make a big difference over time.
Intermediate: Post-meal walk
Mild physical activity after eating, such as a brisk walk, will give your metabolism a quick boost and help prevent fat storage from the meal you just ate.
Extreme: Treadmill workstation
If you want to go all-out, set up a treadmill workstation. This will allow you to walk several miles every day and burn hundreds of calories in the process.
5. Build Muscle
Okay, this isn’t exactly void of exercise, but I’m not talking about the calories you burn while you’re lifting weights. Muscles are like furnaces that incinerate calories for energy—not just when you’re exercising, but every second of the day. Muscle is approximately three times more metabolically active than fat, so adding 5 pounds of muscle to your frame can help you burn an extra 30-40 calories per day at rest. Incorporate some resistance training into your workout routine if you want to maximize your metabolic potential.