Best Fat Burner for Bodybuilding: Burn Fat While Protecting Muscle Mass

What are fat burners?

As the name suggests, fat burners are supplements created to help reduce body fat. They do this by influencing the body in various ways. For a fat burner to be truly effective, bodybuilders should also be able to undertake exercise alongside eating in a slight calorie deficit.
Depending on how many ingredients are in the product, the effects of a fat burner will vary. These might include increasing fat metabolism, elevating energy, raising metabolic rate, impairing fat absorption, and suppressing appetite.
Many fat burners are created using multiple ingredients. These supplements are typically compositions of various fat burning compounds, supported by additional helpful ingredients.
For example, a high-quality belly fat burner pill might contain a thermogenic to increase metabolism, as well as an energy booster to counteract the tiring effects of calorie cutting. This multi-angle attack on body fat can be extremely beneficial for bodybuilders who need to train.
There are also single ingredient fat burners out there such a coffee, cayenne pepper, and green tea. These compounds are often backed up by numerous studies too, which we’ll take a look at later in this article.
Bodybuilding is an exercise in self-restraint, work-ethic, and pushing your body to its limits. And a fat burner could give you that extra push.
Natural bodybuilding, especially, relies heavily on nutrient timing, weight room stimulus, sleep, and clean supplements to get the look you’re going for (the same goes for enhanced bodybuilders, by the way).
During a cut, you’ll need to pay extra attention to diet and training, and this typically means adjusting your carb/caloric intake to lose body fat.
Carbs are the body’s preferred energy source, fueling athletic performance and muscle growth during a bulk. But during a cut, removing the readily-available pool of them, your body will dip into fat storage.
How do you do so while still fueling performance so you don’t lose your hard-earned muscle?
Combined with a well-adjusted diet, fat-burners accelerate fat loss by enhancing metabolism, reducing cravings, and increasing intra-workout energy.
The best ones even go the extra mile to protect against muscle breakdown.

Unfortunately, lots of fat burners on the market are loaded with stimulants and substandard ingredients.

While, on the surface, stimulants might sound good and make you feel like it’s working, they’re not necessarily effective at the cellular level.
What really works is combining daily exercise with a healthy dose of lean proteins, lots of fiber, good fats, and fruits and vegetables. Good fat burners simply accelerate those efforts.
With that being said, how do you sift through the chaff to pull out one that works?
Fortunately, we did the hard work for you.

How Fat Burners can Help Bodybuilders

For the average person, fat loss depends heavily on how much you eat rather than when you eat.
If you expend more energy than you take in, your body is going to reach into its fat stores to survive.
That fact still holds true for bodybuilding, but it takes a LOT more detail to go from lean to super lean.
Things like intermittent fasting, fasted training, and meal timing help lose fat AND maintain enough energy to support muscle growth.

Most fat-burning supplements focus on things like thermogenesis and fatty acid mobilization, which makes sense.

By moving fat into the bloodstream, good fat burners help you use stored fat to fuel both exercise and daily living. Depending on where you’re at with training, however, you might not have a ton of stored fat to burn.
So where does the energy come from?
Low-calorie, low-carb diets combined with hours of daily training essentially put you into starvation mode.
During this absence of “normal” food, protein breakdown can occur in an effort to provide amino acids to the liver.
From there, the liver either converts them to glucose or ketone bodies for energy. While losing stubborn fat is its own struggle, a bodybuilder’s biggest concern during a cut tends to be muscle protein preservation.
Therefore, bodybuilders should look for the best fat burner and muscle builder supplement that mobilizes whatever body fat they have left, increases metabolism so it burns off, yet also protects muscle.

Best Fat Burning Ingredients for Bodybuilding

We mentioned above that you should choose fat burners that are able to promote fat loss, while protecting your muscle mass.
After all, you don’t want to cut body fat just to be left with a skinny frame…
For this reason, we’ve researched the best ingredients to help you maintain muscle mass during a cut. As well as some thermogenics to boost your metabolic rate to promote fat loss. 

HMB (ß-Hydroxy ß-Methylbutyrate)

As a metabolite of everyone’s favorite BCAA, leucine, HMB can protect against muscle breakdown, aid recovery, and add energy during fasted training.
That’s why, in my opinion, HMB is THE number one ingredient you should look for in fat burners.
You’re not just looking to shed pounds, like the majority of the general population.
You’re after lean muscle mass and a chiseled, balanced look for bodybuilding.
Research suggests supplementing with HMB1 can preserve muscle protein during fasted training.
As such, during a cut, you can carry on shedding fat through your diet and training while protecting that hard-earned muscle.
You see, there’s another thing about training when you’re really low on energy – it sucks.
And your body, in an attempt to save itself, will be incredibly stubborn about losing its tried-and-true method of energy storage – fat.
So, whether you’re dragging yourself to the gym early in the morning or practicing IF throughout the day, your body will struggle to pull energy from elsewhere. Unfortunately, that can mean wasting away lean muscle mass.

Supplementing with quality fat burners featuring HMB:

• Gives you a little energy boost by accelerating metabolism to burn fat AND
• Keep muscle intact

If you ask me, that sounds like a win-win.

Coleus Forskohlii

Coleus Forskohlii is an herb with roots in Ayurvedic medicine known for its active ingredient, forskolin. 
This naturally-occurring enzyme stimulates the production of something called cyclic adenosine monophosphate, or cAMP. Cyclic AMP2 helps regulate both lipid and glucose metabolism, promoting calorie burn.
Further research suggests that forskolin supplementation limits hunger, thereby supporting calorie restriction and fat loss.
It’s also been shown to raise natural testosterone levels slightly, which contributes to muscle maintenance during a fat loss phase.

Coleus Forskohlii Benefits: 

• Helps regulate both lipid and glucose metabolism
• Promotes calorie burn
• Appetite suppressant 
• Able to raise testosterone levels slighty
• Supports muscle maintenance during fat loss

Cayenne Pepper Extract

Cayenne pepper extract comes from the same plant culinary artists use to add flavor to a variety of meals.
However, when pared down to supplement form, it can be standardized for its main active ingredients – capsaicinoids.
These compounds activate the release of norepinephrine and epinephrine, AKA catecholamines that start a “fight or flight” response. 
While eating cayenne pepper won’t make you leap tall buildings in a single bound, capsaicinoids CAN help generate heat to burn calories. This is a rare find in substances that aren’t stimulants.
Furthermore, a recent study shows that these compounds can mobilize white fat (the bad kind) while triggering lipase to burn it. It does so by converting it to brown (good) fat and activating its calorie-burning qualities.

Cayenne Pepper Extract Benefits: 

• Boosts metabolic rate 
• Can mobilize white fat while triggering lipase to burn it
• Promotes fat loss

Conclusion

Bodybuilding requires excruciating attention to detail about what you put into your body and how you train.
Tightening up your diet and exercise regimen reigns supreme, but, if you need a little help during a cut, add in a high-quality fat burner.
Stay away from that artificial stuff and protect your muscles with Burn Lab Pro. Good luck with your training!