Many people who want to lose weight at some stage decide to combine diet with exercise. The choice of workouts to lose weight is huge and it’s really easy to find something that suits our tastes and abilities. Any form of exercise helps with weight loss because it generates a caloric deficit. But what exercises to lose weight should you do to make your workout as effective as possible? How Much Weight Can You Lose By Exercising?
What exercises to lose weight?
The thought of physical activity is an obvious element when you decide to lose weight. When losing weight, you can’t forget about the role of a properly planned diet. Weight loss based on a combination of diet and exercise is widely considered to be more effective and healthier. In fact, according to scientific studies, the effectiveness of weight loss based on diet alone and exercise alone is similar. However, by combining a low-calorie diet with training, it is easier to generate a sufficiently high caloric deficit that allows you to lose body fat.
In order for exercise alone to give visible weight loss, you need to burn a minimum of 400-600 kcal per day, which is equivalent to an hour-long run or swim, or a two-hour walk or yoga session. Dedicating 1-2 hours every day to exercise is impossible for many people due to other responsibilities. Therefore, the most valuable seems to be combining a diet that will generate part of the caloric deficit with training, which is responsible for the rest of it and has numerous health benefits.
How do exercises help to lose weight?
- They generate a caloric deficit.
- The control of hunger and satiety signals is more effective.
- Thanks to properly selected exercises, the composition of the body of a person who is losing weight is better. There is less loss of muscle mass and more fat loss.
- Exercise is healthy. They improve the condition of the circulatory system, reduce the risk of metabolic diseases, in particular insulin resistance and diabetes, reduce the fatness of internal organs and the risk of depression.
- Exercise improves mood.
How to choose exercises to lose weight?
You’re probably asking yourself what exercises to do to lose weight. Who to listen to? After all, you can hear so many different opinions from all sides. “Cardio is best for losing weight!”. “Cardio doesn’t lose weight as well as strength training.” “There’s no point in walking.” “Walking is best for beginners.” You can get confused. Indeed, some types of training are more effective in terms of burning calories. But the truth is – when you’re just starting out with regular physical activity, the most important thing is to move at all. Preferably at least 3 times a week, but choosing the type of exercise according to your abilities, both physical and time.
Can walking lose weight? Absolutely. The length and pace of the walk is important, because it is the march rather than the walk that will help you lose weight visibly. However, these distances are achievable for everyone. On average, a person weighing 70 kg burns about 160 kcal during a 30-minute walk at a pace of about 6 km/h. It is a brisk walk during which a person who is not used to exercise may catch his breath while talking.
An hour of brisk walking a day allows you to burn 300 kcal. It is enough to reduce the caloric value of the diet by an additional 200 kcal 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 are not 100% accurate. However, they allow you to estimate what kind of effects you can expect during weight loss. Walking can be counted among the most intuitive and simplest weight loss exercises. No equipment, no accessories, no going to the gym and no scheduling time specifically for training.
If you don’t have the time, motivation, or conditions to do other weight loss exercises, start with walking. Walking is an ideal way to increase physical activity for beginners and those who are severely overweight, when more intense training can put too much strain on the joints. It is enough to start walking to places no more than 3 km away (half an hour of walking), e.g. to work, shopping, to a friend’s house, instead of driving a car, to notice positive effects on the scale.
Weight loss through running
Running is the exercise of choice for most people who are starting to lose weight. No wonder. Running quickly raises the heart rate, we get out of breath, we sweat, we are constantly on the move. It’s all associated with losing weight. In addition, shoes and tracksuits are enough to run. You can run anywhere, even on the streets around the estate. Though healthier for the joints if the substrate is cushioning, like ground or grass. Running, as a way to lose weight, is really effective. A person weighing 70 kg burns an average of 300 kcal during a 30-minute run at a pace of 8 km/h, and 370 kcal when running at a speed of 10 km/h. Start with 30 minutes of running 3-4 times a week to support effective weight loss and gradually increase your workout.
What’s even more important, running is one of the exercises that burn visceral fat, i.e. fat that surrounds internal organs, particularly efficiently. Adipose tissue around internal organs is more dangerous to health than subcutaneous fat, because it is important in the development of metabolic diseases.
Efficient exercises for weight loss – HIIT training
High-intensity interval training (HIIT or simply intervals) is unquestionably one of the best exercises for weight loss. HIIT is a type of training in which very intense and fast exercises are separated by rest periods.
These weight loss exercises are known for their short duration, from 10 to 30 minutes, burn a lot of calories and make you sweat. According to one study, participants burned 25-30% more calories per minute during HIIT exercise compared to other forms of activity such as treadmill running, cycling, and strength training. Intervals are great weight loss exercises for busy people. You exercise less and burn more. Intervals can be incorporated into many types of activities. It’s not just ready-made exercise programs for weight loss conducted by live and online trainers. The efficiency of running or cycling is easy to increase by doing them not at a steady pace, but as HIIT. How? Run for 45 seconds very fast and the next 45 seconds go at a leisurely pace. Pedal your bike very hard for 30 seconds and slowly for another minute. And so alternately.
Weight Loss Workouts vs. Strength Exercises
Strength training for weight loss? It may sound surprising to many, but strength exercises are worth doing not only to gain muscle mass, but also to lose weight. And it’s not at the bottom of the list for people who really don’t like another activity that gets your heart rate up quickly. Strength training is an effective weight loss workout. How does it work? 30 minutes of exercise with weights allows a person weighing 70 kg to burn about 115 kcal.
It is true that strength training itself burns the least calories among the weight loss exercises mentioned above, but in its case what happens to the body after training is just as important, or perhaps even more important. From the perspective of people who are losing weight, it is very important that the body burns calories at an accelerated rate long after the end of strength training. Stimulated muscle cells metabolize faster, consume more oxygen and, consequently, energy. The effect of increased calorie burning as a result of resistance training lasts up to 38 hours!
Increased post-workout oxygen utilization is observed during strength training and interval training, but not during aerobic exercise. Another point in favor of using resistance exercise as weight loss training is increasing lean body mass and, as a result, increasing basal metabolic rate (BMR). BMR is the amount of calories your body uses to sustain your vital functions without doing anything. The greater the muscle mass, the greater the BMR. 6 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 deficit per day means 100 g less body fat each week – just because your body uses more energy than before – it sounds really good.