If you want to lose weight, there is a right way and a wrong way. The right way is one that uses a combination of diet and exercise, but the best type of weight loss plan also involves doing the right type of exercise. There is something known as the “aerobic instructor syndrome” to those in the fitness world. It is when you walk into an aerobics class, and the instructor is heavier than you are. Constantly working out and moving around, you know that they take care of themselves, but it is discouraging for onlookers to think that someone who is in shape could likewise need to lose weight. What causes the syndrome? It is the result of exercising in the wrong way.
There are many ways that you can have exercise work against you. That is right, if you aren’t working out in the proper way, you may as well be home laying on the couch. That is not an endorsement to throw the gym shoes in the trash; it is a wake up call to train smarter, not harder if you want to lose weight.
To Lose Weight Follow These 7 Exercise Rules
1. Combine anaerobic with aerobic exercise
There is a tendency for women to do aerobic exercise and men to do anaerobic. Aerobic exercises are those which deal with the heart like aerobics, biking, running, and using an elliptical machine. Anaerobic is lifting weights, strength training or interval training. If you want to lose weight no matter what sex you are, you have to engage in both aerobic and anaerobic exercise. The key to weight loss is to burn more calories and to speed up the metabolism to burn more calories. By doing aerobic exercise, you can burn a significant amount of calories. When you do anaerobic exercise not only do you burn calories while you exercise, you build lean muscle mass which is key to speeding up the metabolism. A win-win proposition, it is the combination of the two which will have you losing the most weight in the least amount of time.
2. Circuit training
Circuit training is the best type of exercise that there is. It is a type of exercise routine that combines short bursts of energy followed by a retracting phase. Remember in gym class when they would set up different “stations” where you would perform an exercise and then the whistle would blow and you would move onto the next, that is an example of circuit training. It is the most taxing on the body and burns the most calories per hour of any other type of exercise you can do. It is also a great way to combine your aerobic exercise with your anaerobic exercise.
3. Big muscle groups first
If you have ever taken science class, there is something called the limiting factor. It is the factor that once worn out, will halt the entire process. The same is true of the body. When you are working out, you always want to do big muscle group exercises first. For instance, you want to do your gluteus muscle groups before your calves. Big before little so that you can tire out the big muscle groups before you focus on the smaller secondary movers.
4. Do anaerobic first
If you are going to combine your anaerobic exercise on the same day as your aerobic, get your anaerobic exercise in first. The key is to fully exhaust your muscles first, so that when you move to your aerobic exercise, you are signaling your body to take from your fat stores. Since aerobic exercise uses available energy before it moves onto your fat stores, by using it all up with anaerobic exercise first, you aren’t wasting any time or energy. It is a way of not using readily available energy instead of burning off those hard to reach fat stores.
5. Take a day of rest in between
If you are doing anaerobic exercise, the key to it is to fully exhaust the muscle fiber so that it is required to repair and to rebuild. Tearing up the muscle fiber necessitates that it regrows and recovers. It is in the recovery phase that muscles grow. If you don’t allow a day or two in-between workouts, then your muscles don’t have the time needed to rebuild and grow. That can lead to a condition called overtraining. Over training is not only detrimental to your immune system, it can lead to weight gain and plateau. When it comes to exercise there really is such a thing as too much of a good thing. That doesn’t mean that you can’t exercise everyday, it just means that if you work a specific area of the body you have to allow it 48 to 72 hours to rebuild and repair before you go in and tear up all the muscle fiber again.
6. Mix it up
When you are exercising, it is important to change it up. When you do the same thing every day your body gets used to the activity, and it no longer is “additional” or exercise. It is just something that your body gets really good at. If you do stomach crunches every day, the only thing that will happen is that your body is going to get really good at doing stomach crunches. That is what causes the aerobic syndrome. Aerobic instructors who do nothing but aerobic routines gain no benefit from it. No matter how many times they do it, it is no longer an exercise; the body is just used to it.
7. Low weights high reps
If you don’t want to “bulk” up then, the key to weight loss, is going to do high reps with a low weight. If you are trying to gain large muscles, then do the reverse. The higher the weight, the more bulk you will gain. That is why if you want to get the six pack abs you have to lose weight first and then move onto toning. That is the difference between building lean muscle mass to speed up your metabolism and building muscle for definition.