One of the most common questions personal trainers get is, “What’s the best exercise to lose weight?” There are three answers to this question:
#3. Whatever Exercise You Like. The exercise you like is the exercise you’ll do. If you’ve been doing little or nothing for months or years, doing anything is a giant step in the right direction.
#2. Resistance Training (a.k.a. lifting weights).
#1. Table-Shoves (a.k.a. Fork-Drops). This is the exercise where you finally start tracking your calories and nutrients, eat healthier meals, stop overeating, cut back on the beer, etc. It doesn’t mean starve yourself; it means pay attention. You can’t outrun or outwork your diet.
Speaking of running, if you have more than a few pounds of fat to lose – and you want to keep it off – cardio alone will not work long-term. Most people find this fact counter-intuitive. Cardio is exercise, and exercise burns calories, right? Right. But contrary to popular belief, cardio does not increase your metabolism over time. In fact, the opposite is true.
When you perform cardio exclusively, your metabolism actually down-regulates in order to conserve energy. If you go from sedentary to walking every day, you may shed a few pounds short-term, but over time, you will continually have to do one (or both) of the following to yield the same results.
- Increase the exercise.
- Decrease your calories.
Obviously, neither of these can be done indefinitely. Eventually, you will be killing yourself for hours a week on a treadmill or elliptical while simultaneously not eating enough to fuel that exercise. This is the point where most people get frustrated, give up, and gain back whatever weight they’ve lost.
But here’s the kicker. Cardio is an endurance activity, not a strength one, and prolonged endurance activity does not require muscle. So, if you jog for a month and lose ten pounds, great, but it won’t be ten pounds of fat. It might be nine pounds of fat and a pound of muscle. If that still sounds like a bargain, when you gain the ten pounds back, it will be ALL FAT.
So, should you do cardio at all? Yes, absolutely – it’s good for you in other ways – but it should not be the centerpiece of your regimen if your goal is fat loss. That should be diet and resistance training, which does increase your metabolism over time.
Thanks for reading,
Dan
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