What are the best exercises for weight loss? It depends on your goal. Getting rid of the extra pounds, and becoming toned and trim, is the focus of an entire multi-billion dollar weight loss industry. There are diets, fad diets, supplements and more, but the real key to weight loss is exercising more and eating less. Of the two, exercises to lose weight are in many ways the most effective, because the way weight loss works is by burning more calories than you consume.
You can either reduce the calories you consume, or increase the rate you burn them at, or do both. Let’s compare those – reducing caloric intake is the essence of a diet. In order to create a weight loss, you eat less. If you’re careful about this, it won’t feel like privation (cooking at home more often, eating off of smaller plates, and being aware of how many calories are in a given serving size of dish can go a long way towards caloric restriction.)
Exercises to lose weight involve making a commitment of time. You have to do some exercises every day, or increase your level of physical activity on a constant basis – it takes about twenty to thirty minutes per day to get the benefits of this, but it doesn’t take a gut busting, chest heaving aerobic workout to make it happen. Simply walking four miles for most people will do it, and that can be arranged by parking farther away from the store and walking more.
Of course if you do want to go into organized exercise for weight loss, the best exercises to lose weight involve varying your routine. Doing resistance training and core body strength workouts three days a week and alternating with some aerobic activity on the other days gets you the best of both worlds.
Resistance and core body strength training causes your metabolism to accelerate, helping you build up muscle mass; weight lifting basically damages the muscle fibers, which get repaired stronger by the body – you need to give your body about 24 hours off after the weight lifting to get the benefits, but that doesn’t mean you don’t exercise; you switch to working on a treadmill or stationary bicycle to keep your heart rate up and burn off more calories.
For actually losing weight (as opposed to losing fat), working out aerobically is the most time efficient. For losing fat, and for building up muscle to replace it, you want to do resistance training. The best exercises to lose weight combine both approaches, and they have one other secret.
It’s called sports. Exercising to improve your performance at a specific sport – or just taking up a sport – gives you a reason to exercise – you enjoy it. If you only commit to exercises to lose weight, your weight loss program will grind to a halt when you get bored with the exercise in question. You need to find exercises, or patterns of exercises, that you’ll enjoy doing. One of the best resources for exercises that will help you lose weight is a book called Fat Loss For Idiots, which has plenty of fun exercise and diet tips to help you build a personalized, and effective, weight loss program.
If you’re looking to achieve the same success with fat and weight loss that lots of others have seen, Fat Loss 4 Idiots is the single most valuable quick fat loss diet tool for this purpose.
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