Everyone who’s looking to lose weight has the same question: what are the best exercises to lose weight fast? There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to losing weight. However, there are some general rules of thumb that will help you ensure you’re weight loss program is both effective AND efficient.
In order to be effective, your weight loss plan needs to cause you to actually LOSE WEIGHT, right? And it needs to do so in a safe and practical way. It’s neither safe nor practical to eat only celery until you hit your goal weight. We’re therefore going to ignore the unsafe and impractical. For our purposes, we’re also interested in a plan that will help us maintain that weight loss. There are plenty of ways to drop pounds quickly that are short term solutions with no lasting effects, we’re not interested in those.
Once we agree on what makes a weight loss plan effective, we then need to agree on a definition of efficient. With regard to how much weight you can expect to lose in a HEALTHY and SUSTAINABLE way, we’re going to say anything more than 2 – 2.5 pounds of weight loss per week for the average person is unrealistic. Not impossible, but certainly unrealistic.
Here’s why: you may be able to drop more weight than that in a week, but the effect of greater weight loss in that time period can be problematic – it can cause metabolic confusion that slows your loss moving forward meaning you might lose fast out of the gate, but lose the race in the end. It’s also commonly believed that weight loss greater than 2 – 2.5 pounds per week is difficult to maintain as it’s often not achieved through sustainable lifestyle changes, but through tricks that are impossible to maintain for an extended period of time.
Now that we’ve agreed upon what makes a weight loss program or plan effective and efficient, let’s review some basic exercises that are going to help you see progress:
- Cardiovascular exercises: these are exercises that increase your heart rate for an extended period of time, putting your body into a state whereupon it requires more energy than the readily available energy available in your bloodstream and therefore turns to fat stores for additional energy. Great cardiovascular exercises for weight loss include running, jump rope and biking.
- Resistance exercises: these are exercises that cause your muscular system to work against a force (gravity, weight, etc.) in order to develop additional muscle. Resistance training is great because a basic rule of biology is that the more lean muscle mass you have on your body (achieved through resistance exercises) the more fat your body will burn in everyday life. Muscle burns more fat than fat does. The most common form of resistance exercise is weight training, which is a great addition to any weight loss program.
- Active recovery exercises: these are exercises that allow the body to recover from the cardiovascular and resistance training you’ve been doing while keeping your body moving and benefiting from movement and exercise. Yoga is a very popular form of active recovery exercise but can include walking, swimming and other lower intensity exercises that are easier to sustain for longer periods of time.
Keep in mind that weight loss is best achieved through a comprehensive program that is designed specifically for you and that takes into consideration your personal goals, exercise and health histories along with your exercise preferences combined with a customized nutrition plan.
Losing weight is a lot like baking – if you leave out an ingredient you’re not going to get the end result that you’re looking for. Exercise is just one of the ingredients in weight loss. Need help determining what your ideal program should be? Elevate Fitness is happy to help you determine what solution is best for you. Try us out now for FREE: