Using exercise to burn calories has many benefits. Exercise is known to boost your mood, increase your metabolism, lower stress, improve your sleep as well as help you lose weight. Exercise will give you more energy, which can help you stick with your calorie burning program and meet your health and fitness goals, too.
Any type of exercise is better than no exercise, so start small and build your way up to more intense workouts as you gain strength. Once you lose a little weight, you’ll have more energy and find it easier to get motivated to workout more.
Free Report: 6 of the Best Exercises for Fat LossHow To Exercise To Burn Calories
Even if you don’t have time for a lengthy exercise session, start with several shorter intervals to get your heart pumping, the blood moving, and your muscles working. Keeping your metabolism high can help you burn more calories. Cardiovascular exercises are effective at boosting metabolism, as is building more muscle mass through strength training exercise.
Muscle uses more energy than other forms of tissue, like fat. The more muscle you have, the more calories you’ll burn, even when you’re not active. Not only will you burn fat and calories while you’re exercising, but the more you workout, the longer you will keep burning calories after exercise is complete.
Mix It Up
Mixing up cardio exercise with strength training is ideal for burning calories and promoting weight loss. The key is to find activities you enjoy and to stick with it regularly.
Exercise can be everything from running on a treadmill and lifting weights at the gym to playing basketball with your kids. Riding your bike, swimming, yoga, Pilates, hiking, walking outside, playing catch with your dog, or working in your yard are also good forms of exercise. Find one or more that you enjoy doing, and it won’t feel quite so much like “work.”
Challenge Yourself
Once you get comfortable with your exercise choices, look for ways to add more resistance or make it more challenging. Add an incline to the treadmill. Take the stairs two at a time. Add weights to ankles and wrists while you walk. Increase your speed or distance. Keep pushing yourself to improve, and you’ll continue to increase the number of calories you burn with each session. It can be helpful to enlist the support of others or to hire a personal trainer to give you suggestions for ways to improve your workouts.
Don’t Forget Your Lower Body
Strengthening your core as well as your legs, hips, and butt not only burns calories but also increases your agility, stamina, and flexibility. Since these are all things that decline in old age, it’s good to develop habits early that will keep you strong and healthy into your golden years. Squats and lunges are two great exercises that work on multiple muscle groups and promote many lifelong skills.
Burning Calories for Better Health
Burning calories isn’t just a matter of eating less or exercising more, but these two fundamental principles should guide your weight loss plans. Finding the right combination of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats will be important, as will getting plenty of cardiovascular and strength-building exercise. The key to burning calories is to make sure each calorie you do eat is packed with nutrition and providing your body with some benefit.
Focus on eating whole foods, reducing processed ingredients and meals, and eliminating empty calories from your diet. Quality is definitely more important than quantity, and if you concentrate on eating a variety of fruits and vegetables at each meal, along with smaller amounts of lean protein, you likely won’t even be hungry for anything else after each meal or snack.
6 Of The Best Exercises for Fat Loss
When you exercise there are two factors that will affect the number of calories you burn. There are the intensity, or the rate at which you exercise, and the type of exercise itself. For example, some cardio and weight training exercises burn more calories than others. To learn more about the best ways to exercise to burn calories, download my free report 6 of The Best Types of Exercise for Fat Loss.
