Not only will exercise help to get the blood flowing to your muscles and help loosen up these tissues, losing weight if you have a pendulous abdomen (or beer belly), will help to take a lot of the tension off your back. When you carry excess weight, those muscles in your back have to work extra hard to counter-balance any excess weight in front, which can cause or exacerbate back pain.
What is the best exercise to do for losing weight? I get asked this question a lot. The answer is simple: Choose an exercise that you ENJOY doing—this way, you will stick with it!
If you hear your friends or the “experts” say that swimming is the best exercise, but you’re terrible at swimming and hate it, how beneficial do you think this will really be for you? How long would you last? A week? Maybe 10 days? Then, you’d go right back to your old habits of sitting on the couch and munching on potato chips.
But, if you choose an exercise that you actually ENJOY, you’re much more likely to stick with it, and that is the key to success. Of course, you don’t want to choose an activity that causes more pain while you’re doing it. But if you love it and it doesn’t exacerbate the pain, by all means, go for it!
I do recommend that you choose something that is more of an aerobic than anaerobic activity when you’re first starting out. Let’s go over the difference between these two types of exercise:
Aerobic exercise — The literal translation of this is “exercise that is done with oxygen.”
Anaerobic exercise — This is exercise done “without oxygen.” It’s more high intensity-based, as opposed to endurance-based.
Aerobic activity is going to be activities like jogging, swimming, cycling, and even walking. These activities are lower intensity compared to anaerobic activity. You will most likely sweat a little less, and you’ll be breathing more slowly while performing them. You’ll also be burning a higher percentage of fat as energy while working out.
Anaerobic activity is your higher intensity training. Sprinting, swimming faster, cycling faster, and weightlifting are examples of anaerobic activity. These require bigger bursts of energy, use more fast-twitch muscle, and demand heavier breathing. They also require a higher percentage of sugar for fuel while you are exercising.
I highly suggest that you track your heart rate with a heart rate monitor while you’re exercising. If you’re on a piece of exercise equipment at the gym like a treadmill, it may have a built-in heart rate monitor. These aren’t the best, but they can give you a pretty good idea of where you’re at. They monitor your heart rate at your wrists, and they tend to not be quite as accurate as a monitor that straps across your chest and reads your heart rate that way.
You want to first track your resting heart rate. This is a good way to gauge how healthy your heart is. Ideally, your resting heart rate will be low. Marathon runners have very low resting heart rates, because their hearts pump blood and oxygen more efficiently. So, a marathoner will have a heart that requires less beats per minute than someone who has a weaker heart.
A typical adult resting heart rate is somewhere in the 60-100 beats per minute range. The healthier you are and better in shape you are, the lower it will be because your heart is beating more efficiently, so it requires less beats to move oxygen filled blood to your tissues. A high level marathon runner may have a resting heart rate in the 40’s.
When you are exercising, you want to exercise at a pace where you are training in your Target Heart Rate Zone.
When you’re in this zone, you’re burning a good amount of calories, and you’re also burning a good percentage of fat for fuel.
You really shouldn’t be so concerned with how many calories you’re burning while you’re working out. You may be exercising for 30 minutes or even an hour a day, but that means there are still 23 hours left in the day where you are NOT exercising.
But if you exercise in your Target Heart Rate Zone, your metabolism and liver will be working more efficiently the rest of the day, and you’ll actually burn more calories while you aren’t even exercising!
