Healthy Weight Loss – The Role of Exercise in Weight Loss

Why is Exercise So Important?

There are those who exercise as a means toward healthy weight loss and have a lot of reasons why exercise is so important to their lives.  They state that it is the exercise that helps them lose weight, it makes them feel better and they have better stamina and strength.  Is exercise, on the other hand, effective for weight loss?

You may already have heard that exercise is good for healthy weight loss, even though it only helps you maintain your weight.  You may also have learned that exercises involving weight bearing will help you lose weight—exercises like brisk walking or jogging—but that exercises like cycling and swimming don’t really help you lose weight. 

You have probably been disappointed when, after burning an extra five hundred calories daily, you didn’t burn an extra pound per week.  Is weight loss truly effective?

In an issue of a magazine put out by the American Council on Exercise, there was included a detailed study of the factors influencing the effectiveness of exercise on healthy weight loss.  It stated that, if a previously inactive individual begins running or walking five miles a day, the individual should lose a pound in one week. 

Where and When to Exercise

Others disagree because you need to subtract the amount of calories a person would have burned during that time I they had just sat there—their basal metabolic rate.  In addition, if you are a treadmill runner, the machine helps you run so you need to subtract 10-15 percent of the calories the machine indicates that you are using up.  

Exercising indoors may allow you to burn more calories than exercising outdoors.  The length of time you exercise and the intensity of your exercise are vital factors when it comes to determining how many calories you are burning as fat.  Before we move on, you will probably want to download a free copy of the Guide to Understanding Weight Loss to help you with your own weight loss program.

Weight-bearing exercises like running, walking, dancing, stair-climbing, etc. all have you bear weight against gravity and allow you to use more calories than in water aerobics, cycling or swimming.  The more muscles you utilize during your exercise program, the more calories are burned.  This is why the weight bearing exercises burn more calories.  On the other hand, you can swim for longer because it is not putting extra stress on your muscles, which may allow for healthy weight loss and make up for the caloric deficit per minute.  

If your workout involves the use of hills or inclines, you will burn more calories than you would doing the same activity on level ground.  If you work with weights, you may gain muscle weight which will thin your body but will partially offset the weight loss in boy fat.  Such resistance training burns fewer calories than in aerobic exercise.

How skilled you are at an activity affects the calorie-burning power.  If you are a rookie at an activity, you use unnecessary movements and muscles and work harder, burning more calories than if you are efficient at the activity.    Such rookies are also more prone to overuse injuries when doing these activities.

Anaerobic and Aerobic Activities

Both anaerobic and aerobic activities raise the calories expended for up to 24 hours after the exercise is over with.  It can be as little as an extra ten calories or as much as 150 calories.  It doesn’t sound like a lot of calories, but it does add up.
Overweight individuals burn more calories in their activities than those of normal weight.  Those, however, who over-train will likely do less for the rest of the day, leading to less calories burned that day than if you train just enough for your body and or healthy weight loss.  You may consciously or subconsciously eat more on days you exercise so that you offset the calories you gained while exercising.  

Gender plays a role, too.  Women can burn fat better under their skin while they have a hard time burning belly fat.