Why exercise helps weight loss in more ways than one

March 7, 2010 by secretslimming

How exercise helps to accelerate weight loss

Exercising has a lot of benefits, if you are on a weight loss program. One great benefit is that while you are exercising, you will be burning additional calories over and above those that you have been using previously.

As a result, exercise will help to get rid of the additional weight you are carrying. If regular exercise and you have become strangers, it is time to start getting yourself reacquainted with doing some exercise.

However, there is more than actually burning off more calories when you are participating in exercise, because activity helps also to speed up your metabolism. This is another major benefit.

In essence, once you start a regular workout program, your body might actually burn more calories even when at rest, so that there will be an all-round improvement in the speed at which you are using up the calories. In fact, this improvement can go as far as burning off more calories when you sleep, because although your body is at rest, the “speed up” effect in your metabolism is a 24/7 thing.

What kind of exercise is best?

There is no one answer to the question of what kind of exercise is best, because to a large extent it will depend on what you want to achieve while getting rid of the surplus poundage.

For example, while most overweight people are likely to be primarily interested in getting rid of their surplus fat and not a great deal more, there will be some people who are equally interested in building their musculature.

For anyone that falls into this category, the exercises that you choose to do will be different from those that work best for people who are just trying to shed the extra pounds of fat. As an example, if you are trying to replace fat with muscle, then lifting weights is going to be more appropriate than would be swimming or running, although of course, all three forms of exercise would have significant benefits.

Before deciding what kind of exercise program is best for your, you need to know what your primary target is.

There are essentially two different types of exercise, aerobic and anaerobic.

Aerobic exercise is called this because it encompasses the exercises that make you “out of breath”, so that you begin breathing more deeply as a way of replacing the depleted levels of oxygen in your body and blood. Aerobic exercise works your lungs and speeds up your heart, and it is therefore generally better at burning fat than is anaerobic exercise. Aerobic exercise takes in such things as running or jogging, swimming, cycling and even walking.

Anaerobic exercise is the opposite, the kind of exercise that does not get you out of breath or make you “‘puff and pant” Falling into this category would be the weightlifting. As previously suggested, anaerobic exercise does not burn off the fat as quickly as does aerobic, but it does have the benefit that it is more effective for speeding up your metabolism, leading to the effect of burning more calories even when at rest.

Aerobic exercise works as part of a fat burning weight loss plan, because your body normally turns to carbohydrates to provide the energy that you need. However, when exercising, your body starts to look to the stored fat to provide some of the necessary energy as well, hence the weight loss effect.

Anaerobic exercise on the other hand will generally be almost entirely fuelled by the carbohydrates in your body, and therefore the fat loss effect is far less noticeable. It does however have the advantage of speeding up your metabolism.

Do not wait any longer, start your exercise program today. It will help you a great deal to achieve your weight loss goals.

Filed under: Exercise For Weight Loss
Tagged: Aerobics, Exercises To Lose Weight, Walking