Everywhere you look you will find exercise information. It can come in fitness magazines, the beauty salon, your co-workers, the Internet, and infomercials.
The theory behind weight loss is pretty simple: Burn more calories than you eat and you'll lose weight. Exercise is a great tool for that because it burns calories, right? It follows that starting an exercise program, even if you didn't change anything else, would lead to weight loss, right? Well, not exactly. The problem is, many beginners notice that the weight doesn't always come off as quickly as they expect, which can lead to excessive frustration and crankiness.
What is the relationship between weight loss and exercise?
Your weight is determined by the number of calories you eat each day minus what your body uses. Everything you eat contains calories, and everything you do uses calories, including sleeping, breathing, and digesting food. Any physical activities in addition to what you normally do will burn those extra calories.
Balancing the number of calories you expend through exercise and physical activity with the calories you eat will help you achieve your desired weight. The key to successful weight loss and improved overall health is making physical activity a part of your daily routine.
How much exercise do I need?
How much exercise you need to make a difference in your weight depends on how much you eat and what activity you are doing. A medium-sized adult would have to walk more than 70 kilometers (or 40 miles) at an average speed of 5 km/hr to burn up 3,500 calories, the equivalent of 0.45 kg of fat (or one pound of fat). Although that may seem like a lot, you don't have to walk the 70 kilometers all at once. Walking 2-3 kilometers a day for 30 days will achieve the same result, as long as you don't eat more than usual.
If you eat 100 calories a day more than your body needs, you will gain approximately 4.5 kg (10 pounds) in a year. You could lose the weight or keep it off by doing 30 minutes of moderate exercise daily. The combination of exercise and diet is the best way to control your weight.
What is the best exercise for weight loss?
The two main programs to discuss are aerobic or cardio programs and resistance or strength training programs. Each program acts on your body in a different way, so they should be examined separately to determine which is best for promoting weight loss.
An aerobic program usually consists of various forms of cardiovascular exercise performed three to six days per week. Assuming each session lasts 30 minutes and you are working at a moderate intensity, the caloric expenditure is easily about 300 calories per session. More challenging types of cardio and higher intensities may burn up to 500 calories in a 30-minute session.
Now, compare a cardio session to a resistance training session of equal duration. The resistance training session will burn less than half the calories of the cardio session. The main reason for this is that during the cardio session your heart and your muscles are working continuously for 30 minutes. In a strength training session, after you take away the rest between sets and the rest between muscles worked, you are really only working for about 10 minutes.
But the Resting metabolic rate (RMR) has been reported to remain elevated for 10 to 15 hours after a resistance training session. After following a resistance-training program for some time, your daily RMR may also increase as you build more muscle. Muscle is more metabolically active than fat, so individuals with more muscle mass usually have a higher resting metabolic rate.
So, follow a program that includes a combination of both strength and cardio training. This way you will receive all of the short-term and long-term benefits of exercising.
Some factors are out of your control. People are born with metabolic differences. Some have a higher resting metabolic rate or produce more fat-burning enzymes than others. People with a low percentage of slow-twitch muscle fibers seem less able to burn fat in skeletal muscles and thus may have a harder time losing weight through exercise. Finally, gender counts. Women tend to burn more fat under the skin but have a harder time getting rid of abdominal fat than men do.
Good informative article. Both types of exercises i.e. Cardio and weight training exercises plays an equal important role to reude your weight. Cardio exercises works more on burning calories while weight training improve your muscle mass, tone your body muscles, and also burns calories. So, have a balanced exercise plan for proper weight loss.
Useful information. Cardio exercise like running, brisk walk, cycling, jogging, stair climbing. Weight training exercise is also more important.