Work Out To Lose Weight

If you've struggled to lose weight by counting calories or following faddy diets, then you'll probably have worked out by now that you need to work out to lose weight. Sure you need to watch what you eat but the golden rule is that you need to take in fewer calories than you work off.

So how do you work out to lose weight? There are two schools of thought here; one says do long periods of medium rate exercise four or five times a week and the other says do short periods of much more intense exercise only two or three times a week. Let's look at both methods.

If you spend one hour running (outdoors or on a treadmill), bicycling (on the road or in a gym) or using another aerobic type fitness machine, running or cycling at a medium pace then you will lose about 500 calories; that's approximately two doughnuts or two and a half pints of beer. You will do your cardiovascular system (lungs, heart, circulation) a huge amount of good and you will certainly become fitter but you won't lose much weight unless you drastically cut down your food intake.

However, if you do what is known as high intensity interval training, you will only need to do around thirty minutes exercise two or three times a week as the fat keeps on burning after you've actually finished your work out because it increases your metabolic rate.

Here's what a typical high intensity interval training work out to lose weight would look like:

• Warm up for three to five minutes by jogging gently but increasing pace slightly towards the end of the warm up • Pick up the pace to high for one minute then reduce to gentle for a further one minute. Repeat this six to eight times. • Cool down for three to five minutes in the reverse way to the warm up i.e. starting at moderate pace and reducing to gentle towards the end.

At most, this work out to lose weight totals twenty six minutes and you don't need expensive equipment or to waste time, money and fuel travelling to a gym.

You can apply the principles of the high intensity work out to any discipline, not just running. You can bicycle or row if you wish or you can use weights or at a gym, weight machines. Depending on which machine you choose, you can more easily target the area of your body where you want to lose fat.

Whichever method you choose, the important thing here is to realise that you must work out to lose weight as well as reducing your food intake.

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