What Kinds of Fat Loss Exercise Can You Do Besides Hitting the Weights at the Gym?
15 Dec 2025 · 6 min
Podcast episode by JJ Virgin (Ask the Health Expert) covering non-weightlifting exercise options for fat loss, JJ’s “Core 4” Fast Fitness plan (move more, HIIT, resistance training, restorative practices), plus multiple paid sponsor reads (Wayfair, Earth Breeze, Monarch, Pacifico) and brief guest promo for a reading podcast. The episode mixes practical exercise advice, personal anecdotes, product endorsements, and invitations to follow JJ’s programs and socials.
Chapters
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What kind of fat loss exercise can you do besides lifting weights? This is JJ Virgin, four time New.
York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert.
And Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions, and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Clean collab from Instagram asks Question what kinds of fat loss exercise can you do besides hitting the weights at the gym? I love classes personally. All right, well, the answer is there's more to it than that. I'll be right back with that answer.
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All right, so let's talk exercise and fat loss. And it was very interesting. When I first started studying exercise a gazillion years ago, there was nothing talking about hormones and exercise. Now we know that your body's not a bank account, it's a chemistry lab. And just like food is information, so is exercise. And we want to make sure that the exercise that we're doing to our body is helping us have a good metabolism all day long. Be better at burning off fat, right? Be better at burning off fat and holding onto muscle, keeping bones strong and not making you stressed out, or lower your immune system, especially now. So the type of exercise you do is super important. And exercise can be super therapeutic, amazing, or destructive. So let's make sure, not on my watch, that that is not happening. All right, so I put together four different parts of exercise. It's called my Core 4 plan and is part of my Fast Fitness program. So Shameless Plug, because it is my podcast and it is my social media channel. So I get to. And by the way, if you're listening to this on Ask the Health Expert, yes, I'm recording live on Instagram and Facebook, so check me out over there as well. So I put together four different things in my fast fitness program. And here's the deal. We want to just move more all throughout the day. That's where a tracking device like a Fitbit, an Apple watch, et cetera, is awesome for just going, hey, get off your butt and move around. And I think one of the challenges is in the pandemic is that we just weren't doing all those daily activities of getting out and running errands and stuff. We were sitting on our butts. So get up off your butt. And so that's the first thing. One of my advices there, a piece of advice there is to get a dog. And because they are going to look at you and shame you into walking them. So that's the first thing. Hey, a treadmill, walking treadmill, desk, if you can actually get your hands on one. Now, these are slow, easy activities. That's step one. That's just move more. And if you're doing nothing right now, start there. Just move more and start tracking it. Because what you measure and monitor, you can improve. Next up is high intensity interval training. Now that could be done in classes at the gym. That could be done. I got a peloton. My code name is Warrior Mom FL for Warrior Mom, Florida. So I've been doing HIIT classes on there. And HIIT classes anywhere from 10 to 60 seconds. In fact, I was looking at some new research that I was saying 10 to 20 seconds is actually better. So where you go all out, like thighs burning, lungs burning, and then you recover and generally recover for twice as long. But the fitter you are, the faster you recover. It's a great indicator of fitness. Why do we like to do high intensity interval training to accumulate 4 to 8 total minutes of bursting in these 10 to 60 second bursts? Because it trains your sympathetic nervous system to handle stress better. Who doesn't need that? My gosh. And it also creates this massive oxygen debt. It's the good thing, because you know what that does? It makes your body then have to recover from that, which means more calorie burns after the exercise. You know, we used to say, oh, when you do aerobics, you burn more calories for 24 hours. Well, no, that's not true. But when you do HIIT training, you do increase your caloric expenditure after the fact. Your body's got to recover from all that oxygen depth. So that's the next thing. High intensity interval training, I call it burst of blast fat. I like to use, you know, like I can do the stairs at home, I have an exercise, or I got peloton. You can do it in the, you can do it in the pool, jumping up and down. So whatever you can do for 10 to 20 to 60 seconds, no longer, and then recover actively and repeat. Okay, next up, resistance training. Now, Clean Collab said she likes classes. So you could have a class doing HIIT training. You could have a class that was doing resistance training. For resistance training, I'm looking at something that you're doing say 8 to 12 reps somewhere in the 20 to 30 second range, because that's the best for building muscle. Then you recover for twice as long and repeat. The other thing I look at is doing full body motion. So in my fast fitness program, I show you how to do things with body weights and free weights that you could easily do at home. So, you know, now there's free weights available again, get some so that you don't get stuck if things get closed again. And you do things like push ups and pull ups and bent over rows and squats. Things that are active, that are, that are more related to daily life. So that if you're getting something out of the car, you know, you don't throw your back out. So I teach people to do multiple sets in that repetition range of as as many multi joint exercises as possible. And I divide them into upper body pushing, upper body pulling power core and hips and thighs. So that's the next one. And then the final one is some kind of restorative, yoga, stretching, that type of thing, which I was the big resistant person for years. And then here's where I use classes at the gym. That's what I go do a class on now when I've been home, I've been doing them online and which works great by the way because now I can do speed yoga 30 minutes instead of an hour. But I find I use classes for things where I wouldn't push myself as hard as I need to. So that's where a peloton is like, I'm loving it. And that's where yoga can be great because you won't quit. So that's where I use classes to try different things. I just recently was at a spa and I got a bunch of training and using one of those ARX trainers, oh my gosh. So I learned all sorts of cool things and what a great thing to have at home, inexpensive, that you can do. So I look for classes to push me where, beyond where I would do, to expose me to new things, right. And then for some fun. Because here's the thing, you gotta love what you're doing. Gotta love what you're doing or you probably won't do it. All right, so that's the big takeaway on exercise. Great question. And here's the thing. I've been listening to Mel Robbins five Second Rule audiobook. And what I would say too is if you're going, oh gosh, I know I should do, because I did this for years, by the way, I knew I should do yoga, but I don't want to. I would say do Mel Robbins 5 second rule and get your butt over there, do it. All right, see you next time. This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribe to JJ.com.
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