Best Exercises for Weight Loss this explains how to burn more fat
Here we consider the very best exercises for weight loss.
You'll learn the best ways to train to "burn" more body fat.
In Part 1 of this section, we looked at exercises in general as well as the supportive aids. If you haven't yet read it, we encourage you to do so. Its link is at the bottom of this page.
The important supportive aids we offer you include our two free e-courses:
How to Cure Emotional Eating and Meditation: an aid to Weight Loss.
This page is about strength training and intense fitness exercise (cardio).
On the next and final page in this section, we look at mild fitness exercise.
Strength training for weight loss
Strength training may be the very best way for you to exercise for weight loss. Strength training will enable you to lose weight and achieve lasting weight loss. Increasing your percentage of lean muscle mass is a key to achieving lasting weight loss.
It's difficult to achieve lasting weight loss without regular strength training.
All strength exercises for weight loss aim to increase lean muscle mass. It is not easy to do. Furthermore, there is no quick way to do it.
So, if you are already following the strength training program presented here on our website, just keep working and be patient.
All it requires is 2 thirty to forty minute workouts weekly.
The key to effective strength training is perfect technique with sufficient intensity. During each workout, do your best to increase either your reps or your poundage on each movement.
That's how to increase intensity. Increased intensity is the way to increased effectiveness; it's how to maximize the benefits of strength training for weight loss.
In addition to testosterone and insulin, human growth hormone is one of our three primary anabolic hormones. During strength training, it is released by using heavy weight--especially when using the largest muscles such as when doing squats or deadlifts.
However, it won't be released until training intensity is high enough to produce a burning sensation in the target muscles. So here's a critical question when doing strength exercises:
"Are you regularly going for the burn?"
Effective strength training means using an excellent program, perfect technique on every rep, and ever increasing intensity. We explain exactly how to do that in the strength training section of our website. (We're especially proud of that section!)
You will find the main strength training section of our website listed on the menu buttons. Alternatively, the page link awaits you at the bottom of this page.
Intense fitness training for weight loss
The perfect exercise complement to strength training is intense fitness training. If you are not now doing it (and few people are), our initial recommendation for you is GXP [Graded Exercise Protocol] that will sustain your heart rate between 80 and 85% of its predicted maximum for a measured amount of time.
Once you can do that for 10 minutes, you may, if you want, switch to HIIT [High Intensity Interval Training] or P.A.C.E. [Progressively Accelerating Cardiopulmonary Exertion].
The recommended exercises for weight loss presented here at this website include doing intense fitness training three times weekly for between three and ten minutes (excluding warm-ups and cool-downs) at each session.
That may be less than 10 minutes weekly!
Intense fitness training will improve cardiovascular fitness as well as really help with losing fat.
If you combine intense fitness training with 2 thirty to forty minute strength training workouts weekly, that's still less than 2 hours of exercise each week.
That's not too much exercise, either. Assuming that you are also eating and recovering well, you will not be overtrained.
So why not work up to that and give it a good try?
If you do, you should experience improved body composition that may even be dramatic!
The improvement may be so noticeable that you'll want to do even more. Please resist that temptation! Why?
It's because intense fitness exercise makes serious demands on your body's recovery ability.
Too much intense fitness exercise inhibits increasing lean muscle mass.
This explains why, for example, long distance runners are not muscular. They often have a low percentage of body fat and are in excellent cardiovascular condition, but they also have little muscle mass even though they put enormous energy into intense fitness training.
So there's a trade-off. There's no free lunch. Your ability to recover from intense fitness exercise will inhibit you from increasing your lean muscle mass if you do too much of it.
Start with our recommendations and see how they work for you. Tweak what you are doing based on the feedback you receive.
Experiment! Why not do just two sessions of intense fitness training per week for a couple of months in addition to your two weekly strength training workouts?
Exercise is like medication: too little isn't effective and too much is counter-productive. Find the sweet spot for you.
Sometimes master bodybuilders do so much strength training that they never do any intense fitness training. When they talk about doing "cardio," they are usually talking about what is here called "mild fitness exercise" [see the next page].
So, if you do strength exercises for weight loss properly, you may not even need to do any fitness exercise. Especially if you hate cardio, consider investigating this option. We recommend reading Charles Poliquin's German Body Comp Program.
If there's a strong reason (such as obesity or you simply hate it) that you'd greatly prefer not to do any fitness exercise as part of your exercises for weight loss program, then relying on just strength training and nutrition as a means of achieving improved body composition is much better than staying too fat.
Web pages related to exercises for weight loss
Let's move on to the final page in this section of our website and look at mild fitness exercise. Alternatively, you may wish to read part 1 of this section if you have not already done so. Please see the following pages of our website to make your selection:
If you would like some in-depth reading about exercising well, please see the physical well-being section of our best self-help books page, which is listed on the navigation buttons.
Alternatively, here are our initial recommendations:
Al Sears, M.D., P.A.C.E.
Lauren & Clark, You Are Your Own Gym
Sears, Dr. Sears' High Speed Fat Loss in 7 Easy Steps
McRobert, Build Muscle Lose Fat Look Great
Poliquin, German Body Comp Program
Wendler, 5/3/1
You should be able to borrow these books from your local library if you do not want to buy them.
If you are now looking for something in particular in relation to exercises for weight loss, here you can FAST-SEARCH our website or the World Wide Web.
