Lose Belly Fat Fast

Archive for the ‘Weight Loss Exercise’ Category

Interval training – it’s been a buzz word for a while now it seems. And there is a good reason for it, whether you want to burn fat, gain muscle or improve your stamina interval training works great. What makes it so good? We’ll get there, but first a quick over view of what interval training is: as the name suggests it’s a work out routine where you do exercise in intervals, usually very short (from 20 seconds to about 3 minutes depending on work out) followed by a quick break, then exercise, then break.

There are several reasons why this method is very effective. Firstly it allows you to go at or near maximum effort – something that isn’t possible with a flat work out with no breaks, the rest periods in between allow you to keep going at that maximum level for longer amounts of time. Why is doing exercise at maximum effort matters? Well, just think about two athletes running a 100 meters. One is a sprinter that runs it at a sub 10 seconds, the other is a long distance marathoner who runs it at high but sustainable pace of 6 meters per second. The sprinter can only run 100meters at that speed, marathoner can run for hours. Which one do you think will burn more calories and have a more effective work out? Of course the sprinter. (read: Running to Lose Weight)

Interval training allows you to do exercise at maximum effort which produces much better results than exercising at 70% or some such level of your maximum in the same period of time. Time is the second part that makes interval training so great. At some point you reach a level where your fitness is so good that doing exercise in aerobic regime (sustainable level) hardly produces any results unless you do it for hours. But doing them at maximum level with short breaks in between allows you to get a great work out in a short period of time.

While interval training becomes a necessity for high level athletes (except marathoners) it is a good program for an average Joe or Jane as well. The fact that you can get an amazing work out in just 5-10 minutes is very appealing to many people. Not only that but you can use body weight exercise, combined with interval training you can get an awesome work out in less time than it would take you to get to a gym!

Want to lose some weight? One of the first ideas that comes to mind is running to lose weight. It is after all a very popular method to stay fit and healthy. But is it the best way to go for someone who just wants to drop a few (or quite a few) pounds? The answer may surprise you!

A while ago I remember reading an article on this subject that came to a conclusion that running is bad for weight loss. The reason for such an interesting conclusion was the fact that running (like any exercise) makes one more hungry than usual, and these caused people to eat more, so much more in fact that they would not only make up for the calories lost during a run, but even go over that – in effect making them gain weight compared to if they did not run.

The problem with that conclusion is of course that it’s based on a silly factor – that people who exercise don’t follow a diet. Well, as I mentioned in Weight Loss Is Simple But Not Easy exercising without a good diet is most often a total waste of time – No matter how many calories you burn, you can always eat more. This study however does highlight the importance of a diet when it comes to losing weight.

But back to the topic at hand, how well does running to lose weight work? Assuming your diet is in order and you aren’t going to eat a box of donuts just because you ran a few miles, it works pretty well. How well? Depends on your level of fitness. If you haven’t worked out in years then running will be an awesome weight loss exercise. You’ll burn lots of calories and it won’t take too much time (10-30 minutes should make for a nice work out.)

However as your fitness improves you will find that running for the same 30 minutes no longer produces the same results it used (read: Why Do I Lose Weight So Slowly?) What happened is that your body adapted and you now need to either increase the time spent running or increase speed at which you run, or a combination of both. Which is why I can’t help but be amused by the people at a gym who run on a treadmill for an hour five days a week for years and then wonder why they aren’t losing weight. Doing that might’ve been a great way to burn fat when they first started, but by now their body has adapted and hardly burns any calories.

So if you like running but find that you aren’t getting the kind of weight loss results you used to in the past, it doesn’t mean that you have to quit running to lose weight. It just means you need to increase your speed and/or run for longer periods of time. Although as your fitness gets better and betters you might come to a point where doing other exercise will give you better results than running.

It still works though and should be used as it is a great exercise to keep one self fit and healthy, but you would likely want to reduce the frequency down to about once or twice a week for longer runs.

You hear it every where – the key to losing weight is diet and exercise. But which exercise exactly are effective weight loss exercise? There are so many work out programs with completely opposite advice – some tell you to do lots of cardio, others tell you to hardly do any, some tell you to use weight training, others tell you to stay away from it. There is enough information out there to make your head spin, and yet after spending hours you won’t be any closer to the answer you are looking for than you were when you started.

So I figured explaining what makes for a great, effective weight loss exercise is a good place to start. Now you are probably waiting for me to list a bunch of exercise and claim that those are the best ones to do. Well, I am afraid you will be disappointed as I am not going to do it. Instead I will explain what makes a given exercise effective and why they differ for different people, or even for the same person over a period of time.

An exercise (or a combination of several) can be considered good for weight loss if it gives you a great work out. What do I mean by a good work out? A work out when you feel pretty tired and one where you burn a lot of calories. However, this obviously depends on each person and their levels of fitness, what might be a great work out for one person may not even be a good warm up for another. And that is the reason why there isn’t the best exercise or the best work out routine.

If you are carrying a hundred plus extra pounds, then just about any exercise will burn a ton of fat. Going up a flight of stairs is an exercise in itself, go up 10 times as fast as you can and sweat will be pouring from you like it’s raining. Yet as your level of fitness improves and your body adapts, doing the same 10x going up a flight of stairs won’t do much for you at all. And eventually you will reach a point where it does practically nothing at all as far as losing weight goes.

That’s actually one of the problems with running for weight loss – your body adapts and you end up having to run for longer and longer periods of time to get the same results. And who wants to run for 3 hours?! The solution for having a good work out that doesn’t take hours is increasing intensity and getting closer to maximum effort. In other words as you become more fit you will likely want to look at interval training and weight training, as well as sprints or other similar exercise.

However the same interval or weight training that is great for a fit person trying to lose some weight isn’t all that good or even harmful for a person with a low level of fitness. Interval training will cause more problems than you care to know about, and weight training doesn’t give the best bang for the time spent when running a few hundred feet is “hard” and makes for a good work out.

I hope that you found this informative and that it clarifies the seemingly conflicting advice that different weight loss programs give. You should also use this information to adjust your own work outs. As your body adapts and your fitness level improves, the work out routines that were once great will become less and less effective. You need to adjust and change things up or you will find yourself spending more and more time to get the same results.