If I were to give you my usual short, quick, and to-the-point answer, this article would be very short. Let’s go over a few things here first.
There is the old standby of cardio. Call it jogging on the treadmill, doing the stairmaster, being on the elliptical, my aerobics class, or Zumba, it’s all basically the same stuff. Running or walking a mile burns anywhere from 50 to 75 calories. Let’s say you do an hour of Zumba, or an hour on the treadmill, or an hour of whatever. At a decent pace, you are going to burn anywhere from 350 to 550 calories; not bad. Remember, you’re doing this for an hour, that’s a long time, longer than most people can go.
If you go to the gym on a regular basis like I do, you know that the people who use this type of equipment or do these classes, look the same month after month after month. What about burning those 500 calories? A pound of fat is 3500 calories so doing seven classes means one pound of fat loss right? Yes, until you go to Starbucks and have a White Chocolate Crème Frappuccino at 510 calories. Or a plain bagel with cream cheese, or one waffle with syrup, or four (yes only four) pieces of bacon, or two Snickers bars. You get the idea. All those are about 500 calories. You just ruined your one hour workout.
What about high intensity interval training (HIIT)? If I were going to do cardio, this is what I would do. The reason? I can burn calories much more efficiently than long, slow cardio. HIIT training involves periods of explosive work followed by active rest periods. Depending on your fitness level, you’ll burn about twice the amount of calories as regular cardio. Then, your body has to recover from the HIIT and you’ll continue to burn calories from that session for the next 48 hours. So 20 minutes of HIIT will burn about 350 calories per session and then probably another 200 calories over the next two days to repair and recover. Cool huh?
Again, that’s great until you go to Starbucks, or eat a couple cookies, or a couple glasses of fruit juice, or… you get the idea.
Weight training is my exercise of choice. I’ve been training with weights since I was 12 years old. Weight training shapes your body, something no amount of cardio can do. Now, one person can go to the gym and lift weights and go through the motions for an hour and burn 50 extra calories. Or, you can come train with me, push your body to its limits, sweat your butt off, fatigue a particular body part, work until you are dead tired, and burn 500 calories in that hour.
Then, like HIIT, your body has to recover. After a hard weight training session, it’ll take your body about 72 hours to fully recover. During that recovery, your body is using another 400-600 calories to fix the damage you’ve done. Yes! A thousand calories in an hour. Remember, I’ve been in the gym over 30 years. I’ve rarely seen anyone train hard enough to burn 1000 calories total per training session. I’d say most people are expending 200-300 calories in a workout session, total for the hour.
After the gym, you need that protein shake right? Well, there goes your 300 calories.
So what’s the best exercise to lose weight? Exercising your self control to not eat so much is the best exercise to lose weight. Not eating so much makes you lose weight the fastest, not exercising. We all have the time to not eat so much. There’s no excuse.
If you are not sure how to properly eat, read my 511 Diet plan.
