Move More

While I believe that miraculous and healthy bodies come in all sizes, many of us want to lose a bit of weight at this point in the year.  There are two things we need to do to make that weight come off:  move more and eat less.  Today I’m going to talk about moving more; tomorrow about eating less.

Exercise comes in three basic flavors:  cardio, strength, and flexibility.  For weight loss purposes, we want to focus on the first two (but if we neglect flexibility too long, we will be more sore and uncomfortable).  We do cardio to burn calories.  To maximize the number of calories we burn while doing our cardio, we want to incorporate intervals.  Intervals are short periods (no longer than a minute) during which we go as fast and as hard as we possibly can.  Then we take another short period (up to two minutes) to recover at a more relaxed pace (not stopping!!!).  When we repeat this over the course of our workouts, we burn more calories overall and amp up our metabolism so that we are burning more calories even when we aren’t working out.

Strength training builds muscle.  We want muscle because it is lean body mass.  Lean body mass is denser than fatty body tissue, making us smaller at the same weight.  It uses more calories as we go through our normal days, which translates to a higher metabolic rate.  It also looks better.

We can do cardio almost every day (the occasional day of rest is good for all of us!).  Unless we are body builders, we don’t need to get into the complicated systems for doing weight training every day; we should shoot for two to three workouts a week on non-consecutive days.

The best workouts are the ones we actually do, so start small and work up!