Exercise Tips For Losing Weight

In this article, I’m going to give you 9 easy exercise tips for losing weight.

Follow these tips and you likely get the results you want out of your exercise program.

The first thing you want to do is get medical clearance for exercise if you have or have had any health conditions.

Next..

Exercise Tip #1 – Learn How To Exercise!

Trust me, this is tip #1 for a very good reason.

Any Personal Trainer can tell you that the majority of gym members don’t know what they’re doing. Not to sound mean, it’s just the truth.

Most exercises have ineffective routines and get little results or they perform movements that will eventually lead to injury.

These are two big reasons for the high gym drop out rate.

Here are three things you need to know:

1. How to design a safe and effective exercise routine
2. How to perform movements correctly
3. How to stretch safely and effectively

Take my advice – learn from professionals, no other exercises. I don’t care what they look like.

People will likely tell you to do exactly what they do. The problem with that is no two bodies are the same.

The same thing that works for someone else may be ineffective for you or may even work against your body and lead to injury.

Learn from a competent professional either online or off.

Exercise Tip #2 – Be Consistent

It’s Monday. You had a good 45-minute workout and your week is off to a great start. You finish the week strong with 5 days of exercise.

The next week you only manage to get in 2 days exercising.

You didn’t lose all the benefits of that “excellent” week that you had, but you just diminished its effects.

The benefits of exercise are cumulative. The more consistent you are week in and week out the more you can expect to see results.

You need to get in 3 to 6 days every single week. Obviously, 6 days will get you results much faster than 3, but the point is you have to be consistent if you’re going to see any results from your exercise program.

Out of all the exercise tips for losing weight, being consistent is the most important one.

Exercise Tip #3 – Easy Does It

If you’re new to exercise or you haven’t done it in awhile, ease your way into it. Your body will punish you for doing too much too fast.

I’ve seen it time and time again…

Jane Doe wants desperately to lose 30 pounds. The first week she’s highly motivated and she works out 5 days for an hour or longer.

The soreness sets in and is so severe that Jane has to sit out for recovery. Jane loses her motivation and doesn’t even return because now she associates exercise with pain.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Some soreness is unavoidable. Extreme soreness is avoidable.

Give it some effort, but take it easy at first.

You have a much better chance of losing weight if you’re able to exercise consistently versus having to miss workouts because of extreme muscle soreness.

Exercise Tip #4 – Put In Work

After that initial 3 to 4 week break-in period when you first start your program, you need to step it up.

When I worked as a Personal Trainer, I saw people in the gym all day long coasting through easy workouts, holding conversations with others or talking on their cell phones.

These are the very same people who wonder why they’re at the gym 5 days a week and seeing little to no results.

You don’t need to half kill yourself, but you do need to give it some effort.

Use a subjective rating of perceived exertion or RPE for short. At any time you can ask yourself “on a scale of 1-10, how hard am I working?” Most of the time you should be around 7 or higher.

Exercise Tip #5 – Hit The Weights

In most gyms, the cardio machines are usually much more crowded than the weightlifting area.

Weight training helps you lose weight in multiple ways…

First, the act of lift weights burns calories.

Second, your muscles will demand extra calories as they rebuild from being broken down during weight training.

Third, weight training builds muscle, and muscle helps you burn more calories even when you’re resting and doing nothing.

Exercise Tip #6 – Use Free Weights

Free weights are more effective than machines for building muscle and strengthening your body in general.

It’s easy to understand why…

When you lift or move objects in your everyday life, those objects aren’t usually attached to a machine, are they?

Whether you’re carrying groceries or moving furniture around, those things don’t have a pulley system to help you leverage the weight.

When you use free weights, you’re using your muscles the same way you naturally use them in your everyday life. You get better muscle fiber recruitment as a result. This makes you burn more calories and build muscle faster.

Exercise Tip #7 – Do Some Supersets

If you have some weight training experience, add supersetting to your routine. When you superset, you do two or more strength training exercises back to back with little or no rest in between.

This keeps your heart rate up and gives you a cardio and weight training workout at the same time. Supersets burn a bunch of calories and you can lose fat quicker by incorporating them.

Exercise Tip #8 – Do Some Interval Training

Most people do moderate intensity steady state cardio workouts. They hop on a treadmill or an elliptical machine for 30 or 40 minutes or longer and maintain a heart rate within a certain zone.

If you’re not doing some interval training, you’re missing out.

Basically, you mix moderate intensity periods with high-intensity periods. You repeat that cycle usually around 6 to 10 times or so.
Here’s an example of what an interval workout looks like:

• 4-minute brisk walk to warm up
• 3-minute jog
• 30-second hard run
• 3-minute jog
• 30-second hard run

Repeat that cycle until your workout time is up.

There are unlimited ways to customize an interval workout.

It doesn’t matter if you’re using a treadmill, a stationary bike or whatever… You can do an interval style workout.

Interval training burns lots of calories in a very short period of time. A good 20-minute interval workout done right can burn more total calories than a workout 2 to 3 times longer.

Be careful when you first start doing interval training. If you go all out from the very start you risk injury. At the very least you’ll be very, very sore for days.

Exercise Tip #9 – Have Some Fun!

Pick some fun ways to burn off some calories.

Go skating, ride a bike, play Wii Fit, play basketball, have lots of sex – all of those activities burn calories.

Go dancing once or twice a week – that’s great exercise!

Who said exercise has to be boring?