Healthy Living Magazine

People exercise for many reasons but one of the main reasons is to lose weight. There are so many ways to exercise its hard to know what’s right for you. Any form of exercise is good however the best exercises to lose weight are the most effective exercises. To see weight loss results you need to include both cardio and strength training exercise to burn calories, burn fat, and build muscles. These exercises can be done at home or in the gym. The best workouts include these exercise that work all the major muscle groups in the body to effectively lose weight.

Walking – Walking is a great cardiovascular exercise. What’s good about it? It can be done anywhere with no equipment necessary, plus everyone knows how to walk since we do it daily to move around. Include at least 30 minutes of walking in your daily exercise routine. To make it harder increase your time, speed and incline.

Interval Training – Interval training helps to rev up your workout by increasing the intensity for a set interval. By increasing the intensity of your workout your body burns more calories from fat helping to lose weight. For example, if you start walking, add in 1-2 minute intervals of jogging or running throughout your entire routine. Your overall fitness will improve, helping you to see faster weight loss results.

Squats & Lunges – Both squats and lunges work all major muscle groups in the lower body at the same time. This is a plus because you don’t have to do separate exercises for the quadriceps, hamstrings, and gluteals. Its important to maintain good form while doing both squats and lunges to get the maximum results and to avoid the risk of injury. While doing squats keep your back straight with feet shoulder width apart. Bend at the knees while lowering your rear and keeping your knees over your ankles. With lunges keep your spine straight and your weight on your back foot. Maintain balance while lowering your back knee towards the floor without actually touching the floor.

Abdominal Crunches – Abdominal crunches help to strengthen the core muscles. It’s important to contract your abdominal muscles while pressing your back into the floor, and raising your neck, shoulders, and upper back off the floor. To help avoid arching your back raise your feet off the floor, which engages your hip flexors.

Pushups – Push-ups are a great strengthening exercise for the entire upper body. Pushups strengthen the chest, shoulders, triceps and core muscles. Remember to keep your body in a straight line from your shoulders all the way down to your feet. Keep your abdominals and glutes engaged as you lower your body down and bring it backup. For beginners, you can start with your knees on the floor. To make pushups more difficult put your feet on a stair or bench.

Bent Over Rows – Bent over rows work the opposite muscle group than pushups, the upper back and biceps. Keep your knees bent, flex forward at the hips engaging your abdominals and extend your spine. For beginners perform bent over rows without weights.

Metabolism is determined by a lot of factors many of which you can do nothing about such as your genes and age and when your metabolic rate (how many calories your body is able to burn per day) starts to slow down as you get older, it can become quite frustrating for your weight loss goals.

Some people have a very fast metabolism which keeps them looking slim while others have a slower metabolism which means that they have to watch what they eat to prevent them from becoming overweight. It may be unfair but such is life and you have to work with what you have and make the best of it.

While your metabolism is determined by factors out of your control, there are still some things that you can do to make it work a little faster and here are 4 tips to boost your metabolism that will help change your physique and belly in addition to consuming foods for flat stomach as well as using the best exercise for flat stomach.

4 Tips To Boost Metabolism

Sleep

This is easy. Get enough shut eye of about 7 to 8 hours per night. Getting too little sleep at night can lead to you gaining weight. Studies have shown that getting less than the normal rate will cause one to consume 549 more calories during the day unawares and the body will burn 20% less calories during the day. The increased consumption from lack of sleep is believed to be the result of upsetting the balance of certain hormones that suppress the appetite and are important for regulating food consumption.

Lack of adequate sleep also messes the metabolism by increasing the body’s resistance to the hormone leptin (which regulates body weight) and increases the levels of the hormone ghrelin (which signals the brain and tells it that you are hungry). When ghrelin is messed up, it causes you to become hungrier more frequently which increases the risk of you overeating

Don’t Skip Breakfast

It is called the most important meal of the day for a reason. Eating breakfast will kickstart your metabolism earlier than if you went without breakfast and just had lunch and/or dinner.

When you do not eat breakfast because you do not have the time or you say you are not a breakfast person and so forth, it will negatively impact the amount of calories you are capable of burning in a day. You want to first make sure that your metabolism is working at its full potential before you start thinking of ways to increase it. When you skip breakfast, your metabolism will be in pause mode when you go about your day on an empty stomach.

When your stomach is empty, your brain signals your cells to hold onto energy since a meal is not in sight and your body is unsure when the next meal will be so the body goes into energy saving mode. This also means to your detriment that your body is holding on to the fat stores rather than releasing then.

Eating breakfast allows your brain to signal your body to kickstart your metabolism in order to turn the breakfast food into energy and expend energy and fat for your daily activities.

Eat More Frequently

Eating more frequently allows your metabolism to keep working throughout the day. With your metabolism up, this means more calories are being burned in a day than if you only had two or three meals a day with plenty of time for your metabolism to be in pause mode between meals.

Instead of 2 or 3 large meals, consider consuming 5 to 6 small meals every 3 to 4 hours a day. Do not just eat anything to get the most of the body’s calorie burning operations. Ensure that part of the meal features some type of protein whether from dairy, animal protein, etc. This protein aspect of the meal is important because protein helps to turn the calorie-burning switch on in the body.

Eating the wrong foods such as processed foods, foods with high sugar content, etc, can harm your body and increase your risk of developing insulin resistance which is to blame in many Type II diabetes cases. Too much sugary snacks will all put your normal metabolic rate out of whack and cause the body to store extra calories as fat.

Get Physical

Nothing affects the metabolic rate more positively than exercise. If you want to increase your metabolic rate outside of your normal rate, exercise is it. With exercise, you not only boost your metabolism during the workout but the calorie burning continues even after you complete your workout. Weight training is even more beneficial for the after workout metabolic rate as the body builds lean muscle from all the weight training which causes more calories to be burned as this muscle building is going on. As you get older, your metabolism slows down and a great way to speed it up is with exercise.

These are only a few tips to get your metabolism going despite genetic factors, age etc. Increasing your metabolism will cause you to burn more calories and shape a better body and belly.