Exercising is a very important aspect of losing weight, as it provides a way for your body to burn any extra calories that you have accrued during the day. Exercising also strengthens your heart, lungs, muscles, and helps to speed up your metabolism. There are mainly 2 types of exercises; aerobic, and anaerobic.

Each one of these plays a different role in how they affect your body. For losing weight we will be heavily focusing on the aerobic exercises, and will touch on a few of the anaerobic exercises. It is very important to start off very slow to begin with as you don't want to overload your body and cause physical damage. Remember that before doing any kind of strenuous activity to first consult with your doctor.

These exercises focus on getting your heart rate up. These are the types of exercises that help your body to burn calories, strengthen the heart and cardiovascular system, increase muscle and joint flexibility, and help to increase your lung capacity. It is recommended that you get anywhere from 10-60 minutes of aerobic exercise, depending on your physical capabilities. Exercises that would fall into this category include things like jogging, running, skipping, cycling, and swimming. *Note that these exercises will do very little for toning/firming muscles*

These exercises focus on building, toning, and firming your muscles. These exercises cause strain on your muscles causing them to be broken down. During the healing process the muscles patch up the damaged muscle fibers so that they're able to handle future stress. Through this process the muscles increase in size and density. Exercises that would be included in this are activities like any kind of weight-lifting, pushups, chin-ups, and crunches. It is important to state that in order tone and firm your muscles you will be aiming for less weight more reps(usually 12-15 repetitions)

Stretching is an important part of any kind of physical activity. The main purpose of stretching is to stimulate and cause more flexibility in the joints and muscles. The biggest issue when it comes to stretching is doing it with cold muscles. This can actually cause more damage than good. It is recommended that you spend about 5-10 minutes warming your muscles up through a series of light jogging and moving the muscle group(s) specific to the exercise or sport being done. Working out or exercising with cold muscles is one of the best ways to hurt yourself, and render you unable to exercise for a while.

The exercises that you mainly want to focus on are the aerobic exercises. You should try to aim for about 10-20 minutes of this type of exercise for the first few weeks then work up to 30-40 minutes. Remember the goal is to raise your heart rate, so do these exercises at a pace that’s going to get your heart pumping. I do suggest that for the first couple of weeks that you take it easy so that your body can get used to this new fitness change. You want to try to do aerobic exercises about 4-5 times a week. After a couple of weeks you can start adding in some light weight training. Your goal is to do 3 sets of 12-15 repetitions.

Lifting weights will help to build muscle to replace the fat well as strengthen and tone your already existing muscle. Remember again to warm up, and stretch before and after exercising. Finding the time to add these new changes to your busy life may often appear hard, however if you actually sit down and think about it, for most of us we sit down at night and watch up to 3 hrs of television, or use the computer.

You could easily take 30-35 minutes away from watching television or being on the computer to make positive changes to your body and health. Like the old saying goes where there’s a will there’s a way. *For workout plans visit our workout plan section.*