The Best Exercise To Lose Weight

There is a lot of debate about the best exercise to lose weight, and most people wrongly believe that doing some sort of interval training has a vital importance for getting lean.

However, as you may know already, no exercise per se burns that many calories, so you would be better off to set up a caloric deficit by adjusting your diet.

Also, you should be aware that when restricting your calorie intake, training volume should be decreased accordingly because the risk of over training is much greater.

Trying to see how much exercise you can endure is always a mistake when overall calorie intake is reduced.

Your main goal is to keep your lean mass while burning fat, and proper weight training (which by definition is interval as well) is best suited for this purpose.

There is no reason for doing interval training in a cardio mode when you can get the same metabolic adaptations from your normal workouts.

As noted above, any additional exercise would be redundant, and would make you waste time and maybe muscle.

Shorter intervals have a greater impact on fat mobilization because you can keep a higher level of intensity, which will increase exponentially both adrenaline and noradrenaline output.

This becomes even more important at the end of your diet when trying to get very lean because high intensity exercise seems to overcome the lipolytic insensitivity associated with stubborn fat.

Intensity is also correlated with total muscle mass trained. When you exercise more muscles in the same time, the energy requirements that have to be supplied increase accordingly.

The catecholamine levels go through the roof, and this further increases glycogen breakdown in the liver and muscles.

As a result, the liver starts producing more glucose in order to sustain the intense effort, and heart rate and blood pressure raise dramatically.

So it make sense that the best exercise to lose weight should work as much muscle mass as possible, and for this purpose the classic 20 rep squat would be optimal.

Before the steroid era, high rep, heavy parallel squat was considered the master exercise because it has a great potential to build overall mass and strength.

Back then, the recipe was rather simple: chose a weight that you can use for 10 reps, and do 20 reps! This is brutally hard, mind you. If you try it, you'll see what cardiovascular work means.

However, I wouldn't recommend going so far when dieting – increasing the intensity too much is not a good idea while you are in a calorie deficit.

You can choose instead a lighter weight, and do the reps more sequentially with a big breath between each one of them.

After one set lasting about 2 minutes, you will be exhausted, and feel the heart going out of your chest.

This is the best exercise to lose weight because you'll get all possible metabolic benefits that an interval training could give you, while stimulating your body to maintain or increase its lean mass.

As a side note, some folks may be more genetically gifted for deadlifting instead of squating. However, both are excellent exercises, so each trainee should emphasize one or another according to his/her body structure.

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