Exercise For Weight Loss 

If Weight loss is your goal, then you are at some point going to have to incorporate some type of exercise program.

The problem many people face who want to lose weight and start an exercise program is where do they begin, and what type of exercises should they be doing. There is a massive amount of information available on fitness and training which virtually anyone can have access to. Because so much information is available it is easy to get confused as to what you should and shouldn't be doing.

Exercise will fall into 3 main categories:

Aerobic exercise

Resistance exercise

Flexibility exercise

You will need to incorporate all three types of training into an exercise program if you want health, fitness,and weight loss. At first glance it may seem like a lot of work and time is often limited for lots of people. However if planned properly all three types of training can be featured in an exercise program. With each session lasting less than an hour a day.

Let us look at the different types of training to see what is involved and what benefits you will be getting from each type.

Aerobic exercise

What most people will be aware of is that some form of aerobic exercise is going to be required in order for them to reach their weight loss goals. Aerobic exercise is a form of exercise that will raise your heart beat for a certain length of time. This can range from anything to fifteen to forty five minutes per day depending on your fitness levels. Aerobic fitness will increase your ability to take in more oxygen and make your heart stronger.

Your lungs will increase their abilities to take in more oxygen, which in turn will allow your body to receive more oxygen and more quickly. The consequences of this will mean that you will feel more energetic and less tired.

When your heart becomes stronger it doesn't have to work as hard to pump blood around your body. This is why a person who is aerobically fit will have a slower resting pulse rate compared to someone who is unfit.

Basically any action or movement that is going to raise your heart beat and keep it at that rate for a certain time, and forces you to take in more oxygen can be considered an aerobic exercise.

There are many ways to increase your aerobic fitness and the improvements can come quite quickly. In just a matter of weeks you will find that you can do a lot more than you did when you first began.

Apart from strengthening your heart and improving your lung capacity, aerobic exercise will help you burn more calories. It's a simple equation: the more you move the more calories you will burn and the more calories that you burn, the quicker you will hit your weight loss targets.

Conventional wisdom suggests that any aerobic exercise should be carried out 3 or 4 times a week, which each session lasting twenty to forty minutes.

Now this is fine if you already have a good level of fitness, but it's far from fine if you are just starting out. If you do try to work out for thirty or forty minutes, the chances are it will completely put you of from carrying on, and you will stop before you really have had a chance to start.

It stands to reason that if you are used to doing no exercise whatsoever and then you suddenly try to thirty minutes of aerobic exercise on your first attempt, you are going to struggle. You may even cause yourself some harm or injury.

The best way to start is slowly. You should build up momentum over a period of time. Begin by doing any aerobic activity for a short time, such as five minutes and begin adding a minute or two each time you do it. It may not sound like a lot but it is still five minutes more than you did yesterday. You even feel that five minutes sounds to much and decide to start even lower.

Don't worry about where you start or how much you can do. Keep in mind that where you start isn't important. What is important is that you do start. It is all about improvement and if you keep adding the odd minute or two as you progress, you will find that in just a few weeks that you will be doing three or four times more than what you where doing when you first started,and you will be losing weight

If you added just three minutes a week to each session of aerobic activity, you would add twenty four minutes in eight weeks. This will take you to doing twenty nine minutes a session in just two months. Overall this would mean you would have increased your aerobic fitness by almost 500% in just a couple of months. You would have achieved this without having to torture yourself because your body had been provided with the time to adapt.

Five minutes is just a number picked at random but you should pick your own number, one that you feel that you are going to be comfortable with and start from there. If you feel that you can add more than three minutes a week then feel free to do so.

There are many ways to increase your aerobic fitness and you should pick the ones that are going to suit you and your circumstance.

Cycling

Walking

Jogging

Running

Stationary bike

Treadmill

Elliptical trainer

Rowing machine

Stairmaster

Stepper

Swimming

Aerobic classes

Aerobic workout dvds

Trekking

Stair walking

Step ups

Skipping

Dancing

As you can see there is a wide variety of exercises that you can choose from to increase your aerobic fitness levels.

The secret is to start slowly and build up the time you spend on any aerobic activity over the coming weeks and months. Decide what you are going to do, keep doing it, and you cannot fail to improve.

Resistance exercise

Resistance exercises are exercises where your muscles contact against an external force (weight training). Stress is placed on your muscles and they will adapt to this stress by becoming stronger. Basically if you stress a muscle, the muscle will think ‘that was hard, I'll have to get a little stronger and a little bigger to cope with this the next time'.

Once your muscle becomes accustomed to the stress that you are placing on it, it will stop getting stronger or bigger. What you will need to do is slightly increase the stress that you are placing on your muscle. This will enable your muscle to get stronger again to cope with the added stress, and the process will keep repeating it self as long as you keep stressing the muscle.

Many people who start a weight loss plan often neglect or are ignorant of the importance of resistant exercise, focusing purely on aerobic activity. The fact is that the more muscle you have on your body the more calories you will burn. Muscle is a living component and your body needs to use more calories to keep it on your frame.

Apart from this muscle protects your bones and joints by taking the stress of your daily activities. Simply put stronger muscles protect your body, they make moving around easier and they help you to do things with more ease. On top of this the make you look good.

There are people who avoid resistance training because they mistakenly believe that their muscles will grow too large and make them to bulky. Unless you spend many years training like a body builder, with a near perfect diet, this is never going to happen. Your main aim in increasing muscle strength is because it will allow you to burn more calories just by having it, that will help increase weight loss and it will also give you that lean and toned look.

Resistance training mainly comes in the form of weight training. You can also do resistant training without weights. There are many exercises you can do using just your body weight that can still help you build and strengthen your muscle. Some of these exercises will include: push ups, squats, pull ups, dips etc.

Dumbels

Barbels

Body weight

Weight machines

Cable machines

Any thing that weighs something

Any of the above can be considered as resistance exercises. As with aerobic exercise resistance exercise must be done progressively as well. This means that you must increase the amount that you do each time you do it. This increase doesn't have to be anything significant. As long as it is a little bit more than you did the last time, it is progressive and a improvement.

Try increasing your exercise load by one or two reps at each session. Once you are doing five or six reps more than you did originally it will be time to increase the weight that you are using slightly, and then you can go back to your original rep count. You continue going through the same process repeatedly.

If you have not done resistance training before, then there is some good news for you. For the first six months you will be able to make dramatic progress. Simply because this will be a new experience for your body and it will not like what you are doing. Your body will over compensate to cope with resistance training by getting stronger fairly quickly. After about six months you result will start to slow down a little but you will still continue to improve.

Some people can find the terms reps and sets confusing. If for example you are doing a bench press and you do it 8 times, it will mean that you have done 8 reps. If you then stop that will mean that you have done one set of 8 reps. You will stop for a little rest and then you will do the bench press again for 8 times, that will mean that you have completed another set. Its simple isn't it?

Not all reps are the same, if you do lower reps i.e. 4-6 with a heavy weight this will give you muscular strength. If you do 12-15 reps with a lighter weight this will give you muscular endurance, meaning that your muscles will be able to do more before getting tired.

Ideally you would want to focus on muscular strength and muscular endurance. This would be achieved by doing 8-12 reps for 2-3 sets.

The one thing to remember is that your muscles grow when they are resting and not when you are training them. When you train a muscle it will get small tears in it and basically it is broken down. When you rest it gives the muscle the chance to repair itself, and grow slightly bigger and stronger than it was previously. So you will need to get one or possibly two days rest between each resistance training session.

There is no down side whatsoever in having stronger muscles, there are only benefits.

Your muscular strength and endurance increases which will result in your daily activities becoming much easier.

By incorporating a weight training programme you will offset the natural loss of muscle which occurs as you get older.

Resistance exercise improves your metabolism which will help in burning calories much quicker, leading to fat loss.

Training with weights will give you a strong body which will be healthier and less prone to injuries.

Psychologically you will feel a lot better. If you know that your body is strong and looks good, you will automatically feel good, giving you more confidence and a better self image.

It is never too late to start getting the benefits of resistance training. Whether you are twenty or sixty you will reap benefits.

Flexibility exercises

The benefits of exercising for flexibility are largely over looked by most people. Basically these types of exercises are stretching exercises and their value cannot be understated.

Most people stretch for about thirty seconds before a work out and that's pretty much it. Just because you are not going to get a six packs, define legs, or bigger muscles through stretching doesn't mean that stretching isn't important.

When we were children we were very flexible. We never had any problems with sticking a toe in our mouths if we felt the need. As we become older our flexibility leaves us and our muscles become tighter. When you have tight muscles the scope for injury is huge. How many times has a sudden movement resulted in you feeling some sort of pain or even worse a pulling of a muscle. This happens because your muscles have lost the elasticity that they once had.

How often do you see young children pulling their hamstrings or a thigh muscle? You don't often hear from children suffering from bad backs, pulling a shoulder muscle or any other muscular pain. This is because of the flexibility that they possess.

Muscles tighten with age and those muscles can be easily injured. If however a muscle is flexible it will have the ability to stretch its self in various directions quite easily, thus decreasing the chance of any injury.

Apart from the benefits your muscles will receive from stretching, your joints and tissues will also benefit, because it's easier for your blood to go past a flexible muscle than a tight one. Remember that your blood acts like the transport system that carries oxygen and nutrients round your body and it is these nutrients that enable your body to heal itself and remain healthy.

So stretching is far more important than most people initially think. It should be incorporated into any exercise programme based on its own merits. Try to touch your toes a couple of times before you begin an aerobic or resistance training session is just not going to be enough.

Traditionally people stretched before they started any exercise but resent studies have shown that this can lead to injuries. When your muscles are cold, it means that your muscles are tight. You need to warm them up first with some light work, like running on the spot, using an exercise bike, or a rowing machine. Anything that is warm is going to be more flexible than when it is cold.

Once you have warmed up then that should be the time to stretch your muscles. However it doesn't end there, you should also stretch your muscles after you have finished your training session. Stretching after exercises is extremely important because your muscle, tissues and joints have been stretched. Stretching after training allows blood to travel quicker into areas like your joints and tendons. This will help with the repair process and will allow you to recover more quickly from your training session.

After a time you will notice that you begin to move more freely and with ease. Another side affect is that you will cut back on the noises, the noises that you make when you get up in the mornings and push yourself out of bed. The ‘oohs' and ‘aahs' and the grunts and groans will stop.

So stretching is a must if you want to be able to move around with ease and not feel spasms of pain each time that you bend down or reach to pick something up. The benefits you will receive from stretching:

Increases your ability to perform on a daily basis

It helps reduce muscle soreness after exercise

It improves your posture

It relaxes your muscles and significantly decreases any risks of injury

Increases the flow of blood and nutrients to tissues and joints

Lengthens muscles and improves muscular flexibility

As you can see there is a multitude of exercises which will be beneficial for weight loss. Find your preferences and your Types of Exercise. 

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