How to Lose Weight

Exercise uses calories. It uses calories while you are doing it and it continues using calories for a few hours afterwards as your body recovers. In addition, exercise increases your metabolic rate so you are using more calories every day, even when you don't exercise.

Increasing the amount of exercise you do is the single biggest change you can make to your lifestyle to balance the calorie equation in your favour.

It is amazing how reluctant some people are to accept this simple fact. It is as if they have an allergic reaction to the thought of exercise. There is a certain type of man who finds the suggestion to exercise to be a slight against his slovenly lifestyle while some women seem to feel that exercise is too dirty and smelly for their delicate demeanor.

Really, whatever your objections against exercise, get over them. Exercise is good for you and it is so easy to make it a part of your life. It will help you lose weight, feel better, improve your health and live longer. To be blunt, not having any form of exercise in your life is stupid. Do you want to be unhealthy? Do you want to die younger than you need and miss years of watching your children and grandchildren grow? Okay, sermon over. Let's look at exercise.

Types of Exercise

Exercise can be divided into two main groups. Aerobic exercise is good for the cardiovascular system (lungs, heart and arteries) and anaerobic exercise is good for building muscle mass.

Aerobic Exercise

Aerobic exercise is activity that puts a constant demand on the cardiovascular system such as running, swimming, walking and cycling. Aerobic exercise tones and strengthens muscle and provides great cardiovascular health benefits. It strengthens the heart and reduces your resting heart rate. It widens your arteries and wards off heart disease. It should be a regular part of everyone's life.

It is possible to use more than 1,000 calories an hour in a strong aerobic session. Considering most people's metabolic rate is between 2000-3000 calories, you can see how much contribution regular aerobic exercise could make to increasing calorie usage.

Aerobic exercise has only a small effect in increasing your metabolic rate.

Anaerobic Exercise

Anaerobic exercise is resistance training such as weight lifting. It builds muscle mass. Anaerobic exercise does not use as many calories as aerobic exercise while you are doing it and it does not provide the same general cardiovascular health benefits. However, building more muscle mass increases your metabolic rate and therefore the number of calories you use every day. This is a tremendous advantage for losing weight and keeping it off. Every extra pound of muscle you build adds 50 calories a day to your metabolic rate. You should include anaerobic training as part of a balanced exercise routine.

If you really want to gain muscle mass, you should aim to do so mostly before and after you diet. It is quite difficult to gain muscle while you are dieting. Your body is running a calorie deficit so it does not have spare energy for building muscle. However, it is possible if you do plenty of weights and eat plenty of lean protein. In any case, even if you are not gaining muscle, you are using calories and counteracting your body's tendency to go into starvation mode and start consuming muscle tissue.

To gain muscle, you should do higher weights and fewer repetitions. Set the weight so you can 3 sets of no more than 8-10 repetitions. After exercise, your body needs protein to build and repair the muscle. You should eat some lean protein within an hour of finishing.

Mixed Exercise

Some forms of exercise such as circuit training are both aerobic and anaerobic. These are excellent training regimes for all-round fitness.

Next: Ways to Exercise