Official Site of Marygrove College Athletics

Sports For Weight Loss: Advice From A Fitness Instructor

With the help of sports, you can accelerate the process of losing weight. There are cases when you cannot lose weight without sports. But if you do sports incorrectly, it will not help you lose weight. Let’s discuss this issue in this article.

Why strict diets for weight loss just does not work

Everything is quite simple. Both strict diets and sports perform the same task but by different methods: keeping a strict diet and doing sports, you are trying to create a calorie deficit. In other words, you try to spend more calories than you eat.

The basic difference between strict diets and sports is that when you keep a diet, you expose your body to serious stress with negative consequences, while with the help of sports, you just force your body to spend more calories.

To understand this aspect better, let’s draw an analogy with the situation that often occurs in our life:

For example, you decided to make some expensive purchase. You have 2 options – to spend less money or earn more. You will be able to make this purchase quicker if you spend less and earn more at the same time.

The situation is similar with weight loss. You need to spend more calories than you eat so that the body can take the missing calories from the stores of fat.

How to make sure that the expenditure of calories exceeds their intake with food? Everyone decides for himself:

  • you can eat less,
  • you can completely stop eating,
  • you can go in for sports,
  • you can start eating less and go in for sports.

Some of these methods will give a steady result quickly, some will not give a result, and some will only worsen the situation.

Let’s briefly analyze what happens in the body with each variant of behavior. After that, you will be able to make a right conclusion.

As we have already mentioned, a strict diet makes the body save, and sports loads increase energy costs.

In conditions of nutritional deficiency, the body aspires to maintain its former weight at all costs. Hunger accompanied humanity in all ages, so the human body has a system of responding to a sharp decrease in the amount of food:

  1. The body starts to conserve energy (calories) – you freeze, feel dizziness and headache, general weakness, you want to sleep;
  2. The body begins to compensate for the lack of energy by burning its own muscles instead of fat. After drastically reducing the amount of food, you tend to reduce the protein intake. The body cannot function normally without some amino acids (constituents of protein). In addition, the muscles constantly require energy. If a person is starving, the body saves, and muscles prevent it from saving.

Medical research revealed that in the conditions of complete fasting for one day in the adult body, 22-24 g of tissue protein (own muscles) is split to cover the minimum physiological costs.

The conclusion is very simple:

  • With a rigid diet the metabolism slows down, muscles decrease, fat remains, your forms lose volume, the skin becomes flabby and cellulite, you are tormented by a strong appetite and have to resist the strongest urges of hunger, you start to eat more, which means you gain even more excess fat than before the diet;
  • If you are engaged in sports, your body starts to spend more on the accelerated metabolism and on trainings. Thus, the energy consumption is increased by 20-50%.

For example: during 1 hour of physical activity it is possible to burn from 200 kcal to 1000 kcal and increase the metabolism by 2-5 hours by 10-20% after training.

In fact, with proper workouts, you can burn 1-2 kg of fat in a couple of weeks.

If you are engaged in sports and begin to eat a little below the norm, success in losing weight is guaranteed to you!

In this case, in addition to increased energy consumption, fat burning will increase a small calorie deficit.

How do sports help to lose weight?

Sport helps us lose weight by acting in 4 directions:

  1. During training, a person can burn 200 kcal – 1000 kcal per 1 per hour (depending on the sport, body weight and level of physical training);
  2. Sports increase metabolism, and your body begins to spend 10-15% more calories even at rest and during sleep;
  3. When training, the body spends mostly fat. Your muscles become strengthened, your skin becomes more elastic, cellulite is reduced, the body shape becomes more attractive;
  4. During the physical activity, adrenaline secretion increases. This hormone stimulates lipolysis (the breakdown of fats).

How to do sports to lose weight?

Incorrect training can reduce any effort to “zero” and bring you a huge disappointment.

There are 2 fundamentally different types of physical activity:

  1. Anaerobic (oxygen does not participate in the energy production reaction);
  2. Aerobic (oxygen takes part in the energy production reaction).

Aerobic exercise is perfect for weight loss for the following reasons:

  • It burns a lot of calories;
  • Aerobic load accelerates the growth of mitochondria, that serve as a kind of “furnace” for burning fat. The more mitochondria you have in your cells, the more excess fat you can “burn”;
  • Aerobic stimulates the secretion of “fat burning” enzymes;
  • After aerobics, the muscles recover much faster than after weight training, so you can train up to 5 times a week;
  • During aerobic training, fat begins to be “burned” directly during training;
  • During weight training, fat is almost not affected and begins to be consumed 30-45 minutes after the last exercise;
  • Another undoubted benefit of aerobic exercise refers to weight loss indirectly: these loads train the cardiovascular system. Your heart starts to pump more blood in one stroke and the pulse of a trained person in a calm state is much lower than that of an untrained person, which means that the heart of a trained person is more relaxed.

What are the best sports for weight loss?

Which sport is better to choose? The best way is to find a gym and a personal trainer. He will help you choose a training program, based on your level of physical preparation and the desired results.

The choice of the sport depends on you, the most important thing in all these sports activities is your desire to lose weight, the regularity of training and its combination with proper nutrition, herbal supplements and weight loss medications from Canadian Health & Care Mall.

When you have excess fat in all problem areas, training can be basic, and if you want to lose weight in particular areas – hips, waist, back or hand area, training can be directed to one of the problems.

You can give preference to active training, running, aerobics, yoga, stretching. You can choose training on the simulators, with the use of sporting shells, and hoops. You can also do jogging, swimming or dancing – these are great ways to keep the body toned and gradually lose weight.

Category: Sports Tips

Today - 6 August 2021