Monday, February 23, 2009

Think You Know The Best Exercise To Lose Weight? Think Again!

By Heather Hughes

Most exercisers today do long-duration cardio and aerobic activities as exercises to lose weight. They think this will help them lose fat fast, but this is a huge mistake. Recent studies have shown that long-duration cardio exercise doesn't work to burn fat. When this is what everybody's been doing, how could it be wrong?

There are several reasons for this. I'll focus on the two that matter the most. What happens when you exercise on an elliptical trainer or treadmill over the course of 30 minutes is that your body does burn fat. This sounds great, but it's not what you want.

What you are doing when you do moderate intensity cardio is sending a signal to your body to store fat so that you have it there the next time you exercise. What's happening here is that you're giving your body the message to store fat so that it's there the next time you workout. Now this type of workout is not completely useless, it does burn calories while you're doing it, but as soon as you're done your body goes straight back to storing fat. This is so not what we want. We want is to burn the fat off of our bodies as quickly as possible.

The other thing that happens with medium intensity aerobic activity done several times a week is that your body becomes really good at it. Your training your body (lungs, heart, muscles, etc.) to become super efficient. You may be asking "What's wrong with that?". I know it sounds good to make your body efficient, but is not very good for you. What's happening is that you end up working within what you're good at, and never improve your aerobic capacity.

This is important, because your aerobic capacity determines how well your body handles all kinds of stress. If you don't expand your aerobic capacity, and that's what happens with this type of exercise, you are probably actually diminishing your long-term health, not to mention not letting your body burn the fat should.

There is good news though, you can reverse these effects by doing high-intensity resistance training instead. These workouts with only 15 to 20 minutes on average, and you can do them just two to three times a week.

These types of workouts are amazing. They burn carbs during a workout. This is important, because when you do this over the next 24 hours your body will reach into its fat stores, and burn the fat that is on your hips, thighs and tummy. Isn't that a neat trick? That is the best kind of exercise to lose weight.

You must do what you're doing to make this effective. You must have intense workouts (not too crazy though) and you need to keep your rest periods between sets of exercises below 60 seconds.

When you use this type of exercise program to lose weight, you will be getting the result that you want. You'll be burning fat and losing bulges. - 15438

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