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If I hear one more time that walking is the best way to lose weight, I might throw a medicine ball at the dumbbell who says it. Don’t get me wrong, walking is better than sitting on your couch watching TV both in terms of fat loss and your health but after your body adapts to it, it provides little stimulus for fat loss. Any exercise is beneficial for your health, but we are talking fat loss here.
This goes for all types of slow and steady exercise, walking, jogging and all of the cardio machines. This type of exercise does nothing to preserve muscle and performing excessive cardio can actually break down muscle and slowing your metabolism making it harder to lose weight.
The problem is, the more cardio you do, the better you get at it. So you are burning LESS calories for the same amount of work. So you have to do more and more and more…in order to get the same result. Then at the point that you begin to lose muscle you will start to get fatter (even though your weight may stay the same or go down).
Think of what a sprinter looks like versus a marathoner. Marathoners look too skinny; because they have very little muscle as a result they have higher body fat percentages.
If you want to lose fat and improve your health you absolutely must maintain and preferably increase the size of your muscles. The more muscle you have the more calories you are burning even when you are sitting on the couch watching TV!
You can do this by performing resistance or strength training exercises. Many people are wary of strength training, fearing it will make them bulky or too muscular. For most women this is nearly impossible since they have significantly less testosterone than men, and it requires large amounts of food and hours every day in the gym. I recommend 2 – 3 full body workouts a week which could be as short as 30 minutes each!
You still need cardio; I am not recommending that you avoid all cardiovascular exercise, but perform it differently. Ignore the ‘fat burning zone’ charts in the gym and the ‘talk test’. These concepts are based on the idea that you burn a higher percent of fat calories with low intensity exercise than with high intensity exercise. That is partly true, BUT, does not take into account that you burn more TOTAL calories exercising at a higher intensity. PLUS high intensity exercise caused you to extra calories for HOURS after your exercise session.
Instead of an hour on the treadmill at a fast walk or jog, you should work in sprints and finish in 15 – 30 minutes. After warming up (5 – 10 minutes), push very hard for 15 seconds and then recover for 45 seconds. Repeat 5 times and then cool down for 5 – 10 minutes. Before you add more time to your exercise session, you can work harder for those 15 seconds increase the work to recovery ratio, i.e., work for 20 seconds and recover for 40, then 30 and 30.
High intensity exercise takes a lot out of you so you HAVE to shorten the exercise session. You get better results in less time! You can either perform your new shorter cardio sessions after your full body weight training workout or on the days in between.
If you are not used to working at high intensities you do have to build up to it. Start by pushing yourself just a little harder than normal and push a littler harder than that the next week.
For optimum fat loss you will still have to add in a supportive eating.
YES. Very important and relevant information for the people to hear. How many fitness followers are getting frustrated and confused when the cardio they’ve been told is the answer are not achieving their results? Too many, for sure. Thanks for putting the word out Katrina! I’ll be following your posts and progress. Go lady GO!