Lose Weight: Exercise Techniques and How Tos

Losing Weight

Losing weight is a lot easier when your metabolism is in high gear. A sedentary lifestyle does nothing to help increase metabolism, which is one of the top reasons people have trouble losing weight. One key to pumping up metabolism is exercise. Exercise makes weight loss efforts more effective in several ways. To lose weight, exercise techniques that increase metabolism and burn more calories are most helpful.

Build Muscle, Increase Metabolism

The more muscle you have, the more calories you burn at rest. This means you don’t have to do anything in order to burn those calories. The normal, everyday functions of your body burns more calories when you have a higher percentage of muscle. This is important if you are trying to lose weight. It means you can enjoy more pounds lost with less effort. To increase muscle mass, you’ll need to perform some sort of total body strength training program. This can mean lifting weights 2-3 times a week, using resistance bands, or even adding 2-3 pilates workouts each week. Not only does muscle burn more calories at rest, but the act of strength training actually burns more calories and increases metabolism for hours after your workout. For this reason, you should always strength train if you’re trying to lose weight.

Burn Calories with Cardio

While strength training builds metabolism-boosting muscle, cardiovascular exercise burns more calories during exercise. This calorie burn combines with the calories you cut through diet and adds up to weight loss. Cardio should be done most days of the week for at least 30 minutes. For the most calorie burn, choose high calorie burning cardio activities, like running or kickboxing. Jumping rope also burns tons of calories.

Interval Training

To lose weight, exercise techniques like interval training can make a real difference. Interval training burns more calories than steady cardio, resulting in better weight loss results. It’s really easy to incorporate interval training into your current workout. Simply add several periods of higher intensity exercise to your workout. For example, if you currently walk for 30 minutes a day, you could do several short spurts of jogging during the workout. Start with 4 or 5, 45 second blasts of jogging, followed by recovery periods of walking. The great thing is that you don’t need to add more time to your workout. You’ll burn more calories and increase your metabolism in the same amount of time.

So, if you need to lose weight and thought that you could skip out on the exercise part, hopefully I’ve shown you why you should work out for better weight loss results. From a higher metabolism to greater calorie burn, exercise is an import part of any weight loss program.