For some Fort Lee residents, running plays a vital role in their lives. There’s nothing wrong with running. It’s a great cardio workout. If they do it simply for weight loss, other ways to achieve that goal can be more efficient. Only doing cardiovascular workouts isn’t a healthy option. Your body needs workouts to build more than just cardio endurance. It requires strength, flexibility, and balance exercises, too. All types of exercise burn more calories than you would watching television, but two of them are better. Cardio is one, and strength-building is the other. Both torch calories, but one boosts your metabolism as it burns extra calories.
Both cardio and strength training burn a lot of calories.
Whether running, bike riding, or jumping rope, you’ll burn more calories than you would doing yoga or stretching. You also burn extra calories doing strength training, too. There’s a reason to include both in your workout. Cardio burns calories but gets those calories from burning fat and muscle tissue. Strength training also burns calories.
What’s the difference between the two?
While cardio burns the most calories, it gets them from muscle tissue and fat. Strength training burns fat and builds muscle tissue. That’s important for your weight loss program. The more muscle tissue you have, the more calories you burn, even when you sleep. That’s because muscle tissue requires more calories to maintain than fat tissue does. The more you have, the more fat tissue you burn 24/7. You get a boost to your metabolism.
Change your workouts and burn more calories.
You can add one variable to strength-building and cardio workouts to make your body a virtual oven to burn calories. Instead of doing steady-state workouts, change the workout to HIIT—high intensity interval training. The difference between the two is the intensity level. For steady state, you continue at the same pace throughout the session. For a HIIT workout, you go at peak intensity for a minute, more or less, and then reduce the intensity to a recovery pace for that length or longer, returning to the high-intensity level. You continue to change intensity throughout the workout. It adds cardio to strength-building workouts and increases the calories burned for both types of exercises.
- Don’t forget to add flexibility and balance training to your workout. You need all four forms of exercise. Flexibility training doesn’t burn extra calories. It increases your range of motion, so you don’t have an injury that can set you back for months.
- No matter what exercises you do, consistency is the key to weight loss. Unless you regularly workout, you won’t get the results you want.
- Intense training is the best for burning calories. It causes excess post-exercise oxygen consumption—EPOC. That makes the body burn extra calories for hours after quitting the workout. HIIT is one example of intense training.
- You can’t out-exercise a bad diet. No matter how many calories you burn, you won’t see results if you don’t change your dietary habits. It takes 2 ½ hours to burn off the calories of a Big Mac, small fries, and a small soft drink.
For more information, contact us today at VIP Fitness Center