At some stage, many people who are trying to lose weight decide to combine diet with exercise. The choice of workouts for weight loss is huge and it is easy to find something that suits our preferences and abilities. Any form of exercise helps with weight loss because it generates a calorie deficit. Which weight loss exercises should you do to make your workout as effective as possible? How much weight can you lose by exercising?
Which exercises should you choose to lose weight?
Physical activity is an obvious element when you are thinking about losing weight. During this process, you should also not forget the role of a properly planned diet.. It is commonly believed that weight loss based on a combination of diet and exercise is more effective, and healthier. In fact, according to scientific studies, the effectiveness of weight loss based only on a diet and only on exercise is similar. However, by combining a low-calorie diet with exercise, it is easier to generate a sufficiently high-calorie deficit that enables you to reduce body fat. To ensure that exercise on its own produces visible weight loss, you need to burn a minimum of 400-600 kcal per day, which is equivalent to an hour of running, swimming, or a two-hour walk or yoga session. For many people, it is impossible to devote 1-2 hours per day to exercise because of other responsibilities. Therefore, the most beneficial combination appears to be a diet that generates part of the caloric deficit, with a workout that accounts for the rest of it and carries numerous health benefits.
How does exercise help you lose weight?
- They generate a calorie deficit.
- The control of hunger and satiety signals is more effective.
- With the right exercises, the body composition of the person losing weight is improved. There is a lower loss of muscle mass and a higher loss of body fat.
- Exercise is healthy. It improves the cardiovascular system, reduces the risk of metabolic diseases, in particular insulin resistance and diabetes, and reduces fatness of internal organs as well as the risk of depression.
- Exercise improves mood.
How to choose weight loss exercises?
Probably you are wondering which exercises you should do to lose weight. Who should you listen to? After all, there are so many different opinions to be heard from all over. "For weight loss, the best is cardio!". "Cardio doesn't slim the body as well as strength training". "Walking makes no sense." "Walking is best for beginners". It is quite easy to get confused.
Indeed, some types of workouts are more effective in terms of burning calories. But the truth is simple - when you're just starting with regular physical activity, the most important thing is to get moving at all.. Ideally a minimum of three times a week, but choose the type of exercise to suit your physical abilities and time.
Recommended products to support weight loss
Weight loss exercises - marching
Can marching make you lose weight? Of course! The length and pace of walking are important, as marching, rather than walking, will visibly help you reduce weight. However, these are distances that are doable for everyone. On average, a person with a weight of 70 kg burns about 160 kcal during 30 minutes of marching, at a pace of about 6 km/h.. It is a fast walk, during which a person not used to exercising may catch out of breath while talking.
An hour of fast marching a day can burn about 300 kcal. Lowering the calorific value of your diet by an additional 200 kcal is enough to get rid of 0.5 kg of body fat per week. Of course, the human body is not a machine and sometimes pure mathematical calculations do not always prove themselves. However, they do allow you to estimate what kind of results you can expect during weight loss.
Walking can be considered among the most intuitive and simplest weight loss exercises. No equipment, no accessories, no driving to the gym and no scheduling time specifically for training. If you do not have the time, motivation or conditions to do other weight-loss exercises, start with marching. It is an ideal way to increase physical activity for beginners and those who are seriously overweight, as more intense training may overstress the joints. You only need to start walking to points up to 3 km away (half an hour's walk), e.g. to work, to do the shopping, to see a friend, instead of driving, to notice positive effects on your weight.
Losing weight via running
For the majority of people who begin to lose weight, running is the first-choice exercise. There is no surprise. Running gets the heart rate up quickly, we catch out of breath, sweat, and are constantly on the move. All this is associated with losing weight. Moreover, shoes and tracksuits are all you need to run. You can run anywhere, even in the streets around your neighbourhood. Although, it is healthier for the joints if the ground is cushioned, such as dirt or grass.
Running, as a way to lose weight, is really effective. A person weighing 70 kg burns an average of 300 kcal during 30 minutes of running at a pace of 8 km/h and 370 kcal by running at 10 km/h. Start with 30 minutes of running 3-4 times a week to promote effective weight loss and gradually increase your training.
Another significant fact is that running is one of the exercises that efficiently burn visceral fat, i.e. fat surrounding the internal organs. Fat tissue around them is more dangerous to health than subcutaneous fat, as it is important in the development of metabolic diseases.
Efficient weight loss exercises - HIIT training
High-intensity interval training (HIIT) without a doubt is one of the best exercises for weight loss. HIIT is a type of training in which very intense and fast exercises are separated by periods of rest. These exercises for losing weight are known for being short in duration, between 10 and 30 minutes, burning plenty of calories and sweat out of a person.
According to a study, during HIIT exercise, participants burned 25-30% more calories per minute compared to other forms of activity such as treadmill running, cycling or strength workout. Intervals are great weight loss exercises for busy people. You exercise less and burn more.
Intervals can be incorporated into many types of activity. It's not just ready-made exercise programmes for weight loss carried out by trainers online. The effectiveness of running or cycling can be easily increased by doing them not at a steady pace, but as HIIT.. How to do it? Run for 45 seconds at a very fast pace, and walk for another 45 seconds at a steady pace. Pedal your bike for 30 seconds very intensely and another minute slowly.
Weight loss training vs. strength training
Strength training for weight loss? It may sound surprising, but strength training is not only worth doing for muscle mass gain, but also weight loss. It's not an option from the end of the list for people who don't like any other activity that gets their heart rate up quick. Strength exercises are an effective weight loss workout. How does it work?
Thirty minutes of weight training burns approximately 115 kcal for a 70 kg person. Although weight training alone burns the smallest number of calories of the mentioned weight-loss exercises, in this case, it is just crucial to what happens to the body after the workout.
From the perspective of people who are losing weight, it is very important to note that the body continues to burn calories at an accelerated rate long after the end of strength training. Stimulated muscle cells metabolise faster, consume more oxygen and, therefore, more energy. The effect of increased calorie burning as a result of resistance training lasts for up to 38 hours! Increased post-workout oxygen utilisation is observed with strength training and interval training, but not during aerobic exercise.
Another aspect that supports the use of resistance exercise as a weight loss workout is that it increases fat-free body mass and, as a result, increases basal metabolic rate (BMR). BMR is the number of calories the body consumes to sustain vital functions without performing any activities. The greater the muscle mass, the greater the BMR. Six months of strength training can lead to an increase in BMR of up to more than 100 kcal. It may not seem like much, but when you consider that a 100 kcal per day deficit means 100 g less body fat each week - just because your body is using more energy than before - it sounds really good.
Finally, weight loss is not just about the scale showing fewer pounds, but about keeping your figure strong and firm. It can be achieveed with strength training.
