If you want to lose belly fat permanently, your metabolic rate must be shifted into high gear. Your metabolic rate is what determines how many fat calories you burn in a given day. The biggest factor that influences your metabolism is the amount of lean muscle you have on your body.

Based on this fact, it is imperative to build, or at the very least maintain, your lean muscle during a fat loss phase. Every pound of muscle you build requires between 35 to 50 calories per day to maintain itself. These additional calories are burned over the course of the entire day, even when you are at complete rest.

So just by building one pound of lean muscle, you will burn an additional 12,775 to 18,250 calories per year, while at rest! So if you can add 4 pounds of lean muscle, it will encourage your body to burn an additional 51,100 to 73,000 calories per year, which equates to a loss of 15-21 pounds of unwanted fat. Once you factor in the additional caloric cost of your training sessions, you can see that your fat loss results can be quite dramatic.

So it is clear that in order to lose belly fat we should perform activities that encourage muscle building/maintenance while we avoid doing anything that leads to muscle loss.

The best way to build and maintain muscle is to perform resistance training. With a well designed resistance training program, you can burn calories during your workout; but even more importantly, you will stoke your metabolism to burn calories 24 hours per day, even during sleep!

Here is how to perform your resistance training to cause a positive metabolic effect:

You will be performing 3 full body workouts per week. These workouts should be performed on non-consecutive days, such as Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Alternately, you could opt for a Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday schedule. Spacing the workouts out in this manner allow for optimal recovery between training sessions.

In addition to that, spacing out your workouts every 48 hours ensures that your metabolism will stay elevated all of the time. I have witnessed this for years and finally, scientific studies are actually confirming my findings.

Recent research has shown that after performing a properly designed full body workout, people's metabolism stays elevated for approximately 40 hours. So just when your metabolism starts to come back down to normal, you are ready to rev it up again with another training session.

In my experience, full body training in a multiple station design is the best way to ignite your metabolic rate.

I have many ways of designing full body workouts. Let me show you one that is simple and particularly effective. Pick 2 exercises for the lower body, 2 exercises for the upper body and 2 direct abdominal exercises.

Without any rest, perform a circuit of all 6 exercises in this order: Upper, lower, ab, upper, lower, ab. At this point take a 60 second rest and repeat this entire sequence twice more.

Here is an example of a simple circuit:

1a) Inverted Rows x 1

1b) Step Ups x 20 reps each leg

1c) Reverse Crunch On Decline x 12-15 reps

1d) Incline Push Ups x 1

1e) Split Squats x 12-15 reps each leg

1f) Med Ball Slams x 12-15 reps

Train hard and watch that fat melt right off your belly!