Friday, February 6, 2009

Exercising To Lose Weight? Is What You Are Doing Working?

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 many reasons, but I'll focus on the two most important. What happens when you exercise on a treadmill or bike at moderate intensity is that your body does burn fat during the exercise. This sounds like what you want, but it isn't.

Your brain is wired to keep you alive. So what you're doing is sending a signal to your body to keep fat around for the next time you exercise. It's unbelievable, I know, but what you really telling your body is that "you'll be doing this exercise again, so keep some fat around". It is true that you're burning calories during a workout, but as soon as the workout is over your body goes to storing fat again for the next one. Obviously, this is not what we want. What we want is to burn fat as fast as possible.

The other thing that doesn't help is that when you perform medium intensity cardio and aerobic activity several times a week, you just get really good at it. You train your body to become very efficient. You may be wondering, "How can that be bad?". Making your body too efficient is not good for you. You end up working where you were really good, and you never improve your aerobic capacity.

This is crucial because your aerobic capacity is exactly how your body knows how to respond to all kinds of stress. When you diminish your aerobic capacity, as you do when you do these types of workouts, you can actually be hurting your long-term health, as well as not letting your body burns much fat as a can.

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.

But the exercise must be performed correctly to be effective. You must have enough intensity and you must keep your rest periods between sets below 60 seconds.

This is the best exercise to lose weight. It will give you the results that you want, and instead of just losing weight, you will be burning fat. - 17944

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