Weight Loss Exercise Programs Free Weight Loss Exercise Programs
The weight loss exercise programs consist of four parts. Review the parts according to your own needs for fat loss. These fat burning programs are superb for weight loss!
The four components are strength training, mild fitness training, intense fitness training, and stretching for flexibility. Furthermore, since weight loss exercise programs involve no competition, please forget about what anyone else does or does not do.
These exercise programs do not stand alone; it is critically important that they are used in conjunction with the best possible diet and nutrition.
If you prefer to read those pages later, you will find them listed on the navigation buttons.
sidebar quotation from Philip J. Goscienski, M.D.: "Most modern humans do not exercise as if their lives depended on it--but they do."
Weight loss exercise programs:
Trainee Level
From the standpoint of physical training, where are you? Before embarking on our weight loss exercise programs, please classify yourself as either a beginner, intermediate, or master (advanced, expert) trainer. If you have any doubt, classify yourself at the next level down.
For the purpose of clarification, let's consider you a "beginner" for your first year of training.
Let's classify you as an "intermediate" trainer if you have been training regularly for one to ten years.
Let's classify you as a "master" if you have been training regularly for ten years or longer.
Our working assumption here on this page, is that you are new to weight loss exercise programs. However, our free programs also provide some interesting ideas that will be useful to intermediates and trainees who are more advanced.
If you are a master trainer in excellent physical condition, you may pick up a useful idea or two in this section, but that will be more likely to occur in the weight loss foods, nutrition, psychological, and spiritual sections of this website.
In the sections on strength and fitness, you'll find weight loss exercise programs for both beginners and intermediates.
Let's here set aside walking (or whatever exercise you choose for mild fitness training), because you'll determine the frequency with which you walk after you set your strength and intense fitness training schedule.
Weight loss exercise programs:
Guidelines
The rule for weight loss exercise programs is the same as the general rule for living well: pay attention. In this case, pay attention to your body. Learn to "read" it.
A day or two after strength training, you may experience delayed-onset muscular soreness (D.O.M.S.) in various muscle groups that you trained.
Here's the guideline: note when all D.O.M.S. disappears and then wait at least 24 hours before another strength training session.
There's nothing wrong with waiting 48 or 72 hours, or even longer if necessary. This permits systemic recovery. Meanwhile, ensure that you get two intense fitness sessions weekly and simply go for a walk on the other days.
If you are a beginner or intermediate trainee and follow this guideline, in practice it may look like this:
2 strength training sessions weekly
2 intense fitness sessions weekly
At least 3 walks (more if you wish)
2 full-body stretching sessions weekly
(stretch daily if you wish)
It will be the same for more advanced trainees except that they may reduce the strength training sessions to once a week [or even possibly less frequently] and should take one day off from formal exercise per week.
This initially may seem like a lot of clock time to devote to any weight loss exercise program, but it's not.
A strength training session requires just thirty or forty minutes if you are training alone.
An intense fitness training session requires eleven minutes including warming up and cooling down!
A full-body stretching session can be done in 15 minutes.
Therefore, excluding walks, that's a maximum of about 106 minutes weekly, in other words, less than two hours weekly.
That's not too bad to promote flourishing physically, is it?
What about walks?
If you are not now regularly walking (or doing some other equivalent mild fitness training), it may take you some months to work up to walking well.
Once you are walking well, you'll be walking four miles in an hour at least three times a week.
Unlike strength training, you may find fitness training boring. If so, we recommend listening to an audio program during your walks. It may be a reading from a book, music, a spiritual talk, business training, a motivational talk, a lecture, or whatever.
In other words, while you are walking, you can be nourishing your mind as well as training your body.
You can listen also while doing your stretching routine, which is best done after (not before) a strength training or intense fitness training session.
If so, you may think of your walking (and stretching) time as being doubly beneficial. You need not even count them as primarily hours spent exercising!
If you don't count them, you are psychologically back to less than two hours weekly to get sufficient exercise. That still leaves you with over 166 hours each week to do whatever you want!
If you don't find fitness training boring, then just do it. There's certainly nothing wrong with going for a walk (or stretching) without deliberately listening to something.
If you are a competitive athlete, you'll have to adjust your training around your sport. Overtraining can become a problem during the season if you don't carefully monitor your workouts. We are assuming on this website that you are training the same way year round—but that won't be true for competitive athletes.
The strength and intense fitness training sessions can—and must—be brief because they are intense.
Because they are much less intense, the mild fitness training sessions require more time.
sidebar quotation from Jerry Brainum: "We know from a big body of research that weights are far superior to aerobics for building muscle, and more muscle means more calories burned at rest. How big an increase you get after a weight workout depends on its intensity level."
Free weight loss exercise programs:
How to Start
The weight loss exercise program for 'fitness exercise' is presented in the Fitness Walking section of our website:
If you want to personalize weight loss exercise programs, we show you how to tailor it to fit your individual circumstances.
For adjusting weight loss exercise programs, see the Exercises for Weight Loss section of our website:
If you want to achieve weight loss more quickly, you may spend more time walking (or doing other kinds of mild fitness training).
Competitive bodybuilders, for example, are very concerned about reducing body fat (about getting "cut," "shredded" or "ripped") immediately before contests.
In addition to doing strength training in that pre-contest period, they may spend an hour each morning and another hour each evening doing fitness exercise.
As long as it's mild fitness exercise that you tolerate well, you may emulate them if you want to. The pace at which you make progress is up to you.
The trick is to balance the fitness and strength training.
We recommend that you don't do mild fitness training more than three times weekly until you are confident that you are not overtraining.
Then, if you want, you can add in additional walks.
If you decide to do two training sessions in one day, it's best to separate them by 8 or 10 hours.
Begin with the weight loss exercise program suggested here, but please experiment to find an excellent balance for you.
Weight loss exercise programs:
Organization
So, here's how you might organize your week of training.
On Mondays and Thursdays, do strength training for thirty or forty minutes.
On Tuesdays and Fridays, do intense fitness training in about ten minutes and then do a fifteen-minute stretching routine.
On Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, go for a walk.
That's it!
Do you want to lose weight faster? Add in a couple of more walks per week.
For example, you could split your fitness training on Tuesdays and Fridays into two sessions. Go for a walk in the mornings and do your intense fitness training in the evenings (or vice-versa).
Want more?
Add in a couple of more walks on the days that you do strength training. In other words, go for a walk every day, perhaps every morning.
Then on Tuesday and Friday evenings you'd do your intense fitness training, and on Monday and Thursday evenings you'd do your strength training. Because of the dangers of overtraining, we don't recommend that beginners of weight loss exercise do any more than that.
If, on the other hand, during a week's vacation, you wanted to walk 12 or 14 times weekly and eliminate strength training, nobody would arrest you.
What about recovery from the other kinds of exercise? We recommend twice-a-week intense fitness exercise (of the kind presented here on this website) every week from now until you are in your dotage.
With respect to strength training, we recommend that everyone take one whole week off at least every two or three months.
Free weight loss exercise programs:
Supportive Aids
Additionally, to support the weight loss exercise programs, there are free psychological tools. See the Psychology section of our website:
Our free email-series are delivered direct by e-mail. If you would like them, simply request them via the boxes provided in the Meditation and Emotional Eating sections of our website.
The Emotional Eating section is listed on the navigation buttons. And here is the link to the Meditation section of our website:
It's because of what's known as the specificity-of-exercise principle: exercise produces specific effects. If one wants to become a better hockey player, one shouldn't practice baseball: practice hockey!
Basically, there are two kinds of physical exercise. "Aerobic" ("with oxygen") exercise is sustainable fitness exercise such as brisk walking or jogging. "Anaerobic" ("without oxygen") exercise is exercise such as resistance training or sprinting that is not sustainable.
Since both types stimulate fat use ("fat burning"), the best weight loss exercise programs use both to promote permanent weight loss.
However, fat can only be used in the presence of oxygen, which is why aerobic exercise is preferable for weight loss exercise programs.
Since oxygen plays much less of a role in anaerobic exercise, it is much less useful for fat burning. Notice that anaerobic exercise is usually much more intense than aerobic exercise.
It's possible to walk briskly and continuously for thirty minutes, but it's not possible to do bench presses or sprint continuously for thirty minutes.
Muscle glycogen is the major fuel for anaerobic exercise. Circulating blood glucose will come into play in an anaerobic workout only if it lasts for over two hours.
Why not, then, only do aerobic exercises on a weight loss exercise program?
It's because of what happens when one is not exercising. An intense anaerobic session will increase one's strength, which correlates to increased muscle mass. The greater one's muscle mass, the higher one's resting metabolic rate, in other words, the more calories one uses when one isn't exercising, which is most of the time.
Since anaerobic exercise promotes a greater increase in one's post-training metabolic rate than aerobic exercise, both types of exercise are important in any well-designed weight loss exercise program.
How can the fat burning benefits of aerobic exercise be maximized?
Roughly, during the first half hour of aerobic exercise one burns about 50% glycogen and about 50% blood glucose. After that, one begins to burn fat, and, the longer one keeps exercising, the more fat one burns.
This is why we recommend mild fitness training sessions that last an hour. If one is doing aerobic exercise for less than half an hour, one not burning fat. To burn fat, one needs to exercise for forty minutes or, better, fifty minutes or, better, an hour.
Because the risk of injury significantly increases, we don't recommend ever exercising for more than an hour at any one workout.
Bodybuilders preparing for a contest want as low a percentage of body fat as possible. The information on this page explains how we, too, can emulate them temporarily if we want to lose body fat rapidly and we are willing to put in the time and energy required.
In the two or three months before a contest, some bodybuilders will walk briskly for an hour first thing each morning and then walk for another hour early in the evening. This is in addition to their midday strength training workouts! There's never any need for us to train this hard, but at least now it's possible to understand why such a program works.
This web page has outlined a total, free weight loss exercise program that you can live with for the rest of your life.
(If you are a competitive athlete, it's an excellent off-season program; just ensure that you are not overtraining during the season.)
May you enjoy good health and natural weight loss!
Click on the first link, listed below, to go from free weight loss exercise programs to the benefits of exercise.
