Weight Loss Exercise Program
Creating an exercise program that revolves around weight loss will help in keeping you focused and determined. By planning everything before hand, you are more likely to follow through and achieve your weight loss goals. While this may take some time, once the exercise program is set in place it is simply a matter of following it.
Follow the steps below for starting an exercise program:
Find Your Heart Rate: To make the most out of your workouts you need to figure out your target heart rate zone. This decreases chance of injury and increases performance. (do not skip this step)
Find Your Intensity: For best weight loss results, its is best to incorporate both low and high intensity workouts into your exercise program. Low intensity workouts consist of exercises typically of long duration. They generally fall within 50-60 percent of the target heart rate. This heart rate zone is known as the fat burning zone, particularly because the percentages of calories from fat burned is higher than that of a high intensity workout.
High intensity workouts include exercises that use 80- 85 percent of the target heart rate. While the percentage of fat calories burned is lower, over-all calories burned is higher.
Better workout results are generally achieved with high intensity workouts.
Choose Your Exercise: A weight loss program should consist of exercises that target large muscle groups. Running and Swimming are good examples of such.
Strength training should also be incorporated in a weight loss program. This will help in improving joint strength and developing a faster metabolism.
For optimum results in weight loss, incorporate strength training first followed by a low to mid intensity cardio session. Ideally strength training will use up the glycogen stores. The cardio session will then serve to burn up fat stores.
Duration of exercise: The duration of the exercise is based on the intensity of the workout. Be sure to work out for at least 30 minutes a day for 3 to 5 days a week. Include variety in your workouts to increase caloric expenditure. In other words 30 minutes of well thought out exercises is better than one hour of sloppy exercises.
Warm up and cool down: It is extremely important that prior to working out, the body be warmed up. Allow at least 15 minutes to warm up the muscles. This will decrease chance of injury. The same should be applied to cooling down. The warm up and cool down are just as important as the actual workout itself. If done incorrectly, you may find yourself inactive for a long period of time.