The Best Exercise for Weight Loss
First up, let’s be real. While exercise is great for your health and your body, there is one thing that trumps it, and that’s food. What you choose to fuel your body with is even more important than your exercise routine when it comes to weight loss. That doesn’t mean you should throw in the towel, though. It just means that it’s crucial that you make sure your food choices aren’t undoing all your hard work.
So what is the best exercise for weight loss, you ask?
The number one training method we recommend for weight loss is High Intensity Interval Training, or HIIT. Basically, HIIT is any form of exercise where your heart rate spikes (anaerobic) and comes down repeatedly. It generally involves going hard at an exercise for a set interval of time, followed by active rest, and repeat.
What are the benefits?
-
It burns more kilojoules/calories – not only does a HIIT workout burn more fuel than a steady-pace run during the workout, you also continue to burn fuel two hours afterwards.
-
It’s time efficient – HIIT expends a lot of energy in a short period of time, meaning you can workout in 30 minutes or less. The trade off is that because it’s so short, you will need to be working hard the whole time.
-
It’s flexible – HIIT can be whatever you want it to be. You can make your own circuit, you can run, cycle, or anything else that takes your fancy. By turning your favourite workouts into interval training, you can keep yourself dedicated and interested in exercise!
-
HIIT is for anyone – you can change your workouts to suit you, from beginner right through to advanced.
-
It’s great for your health – HIIT is proven to be great for your heart, and can also help improve your endurance.
Where to find a great HIIT workout
A quick Google and you’ll be inundated with lots of free HIIT workouts to try at home – most don’t require equipment, just your own body. There are also loads of free and cheap Apps with HIIT workouts and timers that you can download for your phone – we love Seven and Seconds Interval timer.
As mentioned above, you can turn any of your favourite workouts into HIIT so long as you can get your heart rate up high enough. Running, cycling, skipping and rowing are all great for HIIT, as are high knees, fast feet, lunges and jumps. A basic principle to go by is the more more muscles you incorporate, the more kilojoules/calories you’re going to burn.
If you need help with losing weight and would like some advice, book a free 15 minute phone chat with a qualified Naturopath. Click here to book now.
Struggling to drop those extra kilos?
Click here to download our free guide on weight loss to discover our top tips on losing weight and keeping it off naturally.
