When it comes to shifting a few kilos and burning fat, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that calories in versus calories out is key. In other words, you need to burn off more calories through exercise than you consume through eating and drinking. Sounds simple. Until you consider that the average guy needs to torch around 7700 calories to lose 1kg of fat, at which point it can seem like an uphill battle. Not if you’re smart, though. Understand broad nutritional rules and repeat the best exercises for losing weight, and you’ll find that shedding some fat doesn’t actually take that long. You don’t even need to obsess about calories, says Elliot Upton, elite personal trainer at Ultimate Performance Fitness. “Realistically, the majority of calorie counters are grossly inaccurate; the variances that can occur are huge,” he says. “They use outdated formulas which only really consider people’s age and weight. This is massively inaccurate because even between people of the same age and weight there can be huge variance, particularly in hormonal issues, gut issues, genetics, body fat percentage, and muscle mass.” If your aim is purely to lose weight, though, try making smarter food choices instead of counting every calorie. Ditch sugar, swap white potatoes for sweet potatoes, white bread for wholegrain and white pasta for brown. And stick to a consistent exercise routine alongside these dietary changes and you’ll lose weight surprisingly easily. With that in mind, we asked Upton to put together his PT-approved list of the best exercises to lose weight. Grab some Savlon because these will burn.

The Best Exercises For Weight Loss: Short Term

Weight lifting exercises are among the best for losing weight because they have the potential to build the maximum amount of muscle and have a greater EPOC effect. For the uninitiated, that’s ‘Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption’ – a ‘calorie afterburn’ which means the exercises put such a strain on your system that you’ll keep burning calories even after you’ve put the weights down. “According to the Compendium of Physical Activities, a standard 60-minute session of resistance training can burn up to 432 calories per hour for a 70kg male,” says Upton. “That said, it’s extremely difficult to suggest a calorie count for these exercises because there is so much variance person to person in things like total load lifted and time under tension of the muscle.”