Burning major calories is the key to losing weight, and here’s how to do it. All of these methods will help you burn calories and thus lose weight, which is what this article is all about.
First, Do Something Active Every Day
Walking a long way from your car into work, riding your bike and taking a walk with a friend are examples of incorporating exercise into your daily schedule. While all of these types of exercises are not specifically “intense calorie burning workouts”, they do add up and they make you a more active person overall.
Adding these little things to your routine makes a difference. They get you up and moving around and even though they aren’t the big guns, they will help you burn major calories in the long run.
Do Brief, Intense Weight Lifting
Weight lifting is one of the best methods to burn major calories. It’s simple, and the actual act of lifting weights combines with the increased metabolic rate of your muscles. You end up losing even more weight!
Weight lifting sessions, even short and intense ones, allow you to burn massive amounts of calories. Lifting weights is seriously hard work and your body acknowledges that.
The extra muscle you’re building will burn major calories even when you’re resting. So, you’ll be getting paid dividends on your exercise even when you’re sitting on the couch. Pretty cool, huh? Also, keeping your sessions brief makes it more likely that you’ll keep doing the workouts. Which is better all around.
If you’re feeling really guilty and out of shape, you might want to do a long 2 hour weight lifting session but only once in a while. Ideally, doing short 20 to 30 minute weight training sessions regularly will be much more productive in the long run. And you’ll stick to it.
Start Sprinting!
Sprinting will help you burn major calories in several different ways. The biggest way is simply through the exercise itself. A single sprint will take you maybe 30 seconds (until you’re too tired and revert to a jog), but a few of those really add up.
I like to find a nice hill and sprint up it as fast as I can, and when I’m spent, walk back down to the bottom and do it again. Just a few of those will work wonders for you, and then you’re all done!
The other ways that sprinting will help you burn major calories are a little more complex. First, stressing your leg muscles to their max means that your body will want to build up those muscles. So, even after you’re done sprinting, your metabolic rate will stay increased as you build up your muscles.
Also, this building up of muscle mass will help you lose weight (or keep you at your ideal weight) over the long-term. The more muscle you have, the more calories that lean tissue will burn, since muscle tissue is a very “metabolically expensive” tissue, so it needs a lot of energy even when you’re not using it.
These aspects, when taken together, allow you to burn major calories. Your muscles will lay the foundation for you to burn even more calories tomorrow, and the days after.
What About Slow Jogging?
Slow jogging is good for some kinds of social activity, but on the whole, it is not productive for burning major calories. Why is this? Slow jogging, specifically for 20, 30, and 40 minutes or more, does primarily burn fat for energy. While shorter, intense bursts of effort uses carbohydrates stored in your muscles (glycogen). But that’s not the whole story.
Slow jogging, since it’s slow, does not put very much stress on your leg muscles. Thus, when you’re done running your body wants to grow in a way that will make it easier to do whatever you do habitually which in this case is jogging. So, it will start to take away from the muscle in your legs (since you really aren’t using all of it) and will use that as fuel in the future. Not good!
Slow jogging also takes a long time to burn calories. Even burning just a few hundred calories can take a long time. That means you will spend all your non-eating and sleeping time jogging to lose weight. No, that’s just not the ticket.
Eat Right & Don’t Eat Major Calories in the First Place
The best way to get rid of a lot of calories is to not eat as much as you have been. Not eating the extra calories is the best way to do it.
I say this because the human body is tremendously efficient when it comes to not burning calories through exercise. You would have to jog at a decent clip for about 6 hours to burn off a single pound of body fat (3,500 calories)!
A big component with the current obesity problem is the sheer overabundance of food. Eat a large bowl of cereal for breakfast, have a mocha on the way to work, snack while working, eat lunch, drink soft drinks while working in the afternoon, maybe have another snack, and then have a big dinner with dessert. Eat popcorn while watching a movie, and go out for drinks with your friends on the weekend. Does this sound familiar? If so, you need to take a serious look into the mirror if your goal is to lose weight and keep it off for a lifetime.
There is food available everywhere! Just by virtue of the sheer volume that’s around, if you eat it then yes, you will get fat. So, cut your calorie intake. Not drastically, and not so much that you see visions of cakes dancing before your eyes, but cut back to a healthy amount with maybe a 200-300 daily calorie deficit. This will be enough to show you weight loss results, but not so much to tax you to the breaking point.
Eat Healthy!
Real food, which is food that once grew, ran, jumped or swam, is good. Anything that is overly processed (energy bars, diet shakes, cookies, fast food, etc.) is normally more calorie dense and (thanks to the refined sugars) will leave you feeling hungry again soon after. Refined sugars spike your insulin and leave you hungry just an hour or two after you’ve eaten them. If you eat real food, this won’t be such a problem.
So, If You Just…
By exercising well and eating right, you’ll be able to drop major calories and lose that 5, 10, 15, or however many extra pounds you’re carrying. It takes some effort, but it works. Follow the rules above to reach your ultimate weight loss goals!
