What Makes an Exercise Effective

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.


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