In recent years, popular thinking around fat loss has placed nutrition ahead of exercise. In one sense, this is true. In the context of affecting net energy expenditure (calories in versus calories out), nutrition is a vastly more powerful tool for most people than exercise. However, exercise is extremely helpful and important in the fat loss process in other ways.
Resistance exercise (ie. lifting weights, isometrics, Yoga) has been shown in countless studies to have a number of positive effects on the fat loss process. These include minimizing the proportion of lean muscle tissue lost and, perhaps most importantly, minimizing weight regain once you have reached your goal weight and begin to eat more (this is a whole topic in and of itself!).
In exercise for fat loss, it is important to find your sweet spot. If you are just beginning with exercise as a part of your fat loss journey, you will want to engage in such a way that your body feels better after every session. Seek the help of a genuine Exercise Professional so that you can have a degree of custom-fit to your exercise, helping to ensure that it becomes a process of building your body up rather than breaking it down. The sweet spot here is where the exercise is challenging, but not so much so that it causes you to be distractedly sore or deterred from the process by an injury to your body or to your confidence.
This might seem counterintuitive, but our advice would be to focus on strength training exercise during the fat loss process. This is especially true if you do not have a lot of exercise experience. Custom-fit, effective strength training will have all of the positive benefits of exercise on fat loss while also helping to ready your body for wider varieties of activity.
With that said, please do include healthy aerobic and anaerobic activity where you are able to do so. Walking, jogging, hiking, cycling, swimming and similar exercise to these in the gym can be useful to the fat loss process. These sorts of activities are also a great place to directly include your family and loved ones in your fat loss process.
Lastly, exercise of all sorts, done effectively and appropriately for you, will have a positive benefit to your mental and emotional health, helping you to stay on a consistent and effective course towards your fat loss goals.
We hope that you enjoyed this guide and use it well! If you are interested in guidance or coaching around any of the facets of fat loss, please send us an email at hosts@striation6.com so that we may connect you with one of our on-staff Exercise Professionals.
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