Running for Weight Loss?

Running for weight loss? Although we’ll agree that any exercise is good exercise, there are a lot of myths attached to walking and running.

For example, one of the most perpetuating of them is that walking and running burn the same numbers of calories. The reality is that they don’t. Walkers never enjoy the after burn calories that running creates. In other words, running is still burning calories for you even as you recover and remain at rest.

Thus, that “puts to bed” the idea that walking (even brisk walking) will give you the same calorie burning potential of a run.

This makes more people wonder just how much running is necessary to get good results, or for weight loss. Naturally, this varies from person to person and depends entirely on your goals.

However, you do need to consider a few essential factors that apply to everyone. For instance, running means you move farther much faster. This implies that if you can normally walk a mile in around 15 minutes, you can run it in roughly 10 or 12. This makes it possible to maintain that time span (such as exercising for 45 minutes each day in order to walk three miles), but you are optimizing the results.

As an example, you use 45 minutes per day to walk. If you ran for thirty minutes and used the fifteen minutes divided between warm up and cool down, you would still do that 45 minutes of exercise, but now you would be boosting the calorie burn substantially.

Add hand weights and you boost calorie burning even more. If you do intervals of sprinting every ten minutes, you just burned even more. It is easy to see that walking is great, but it imposes a lot of limits on your fat burning and weight loss potential. Instead of just walking briskly for longer distances in order to get past any plateaus or hurdles, you should:

• Add a short burst of jogging;
• Progress to long periods of jogging;
• Transition to mostly jogging;
• Add bursts of sprinting in the jogging; and
• On days when not doing high intensity bursts of sprinting, wear light ankle weights to make the run a challenge.

When you use intense exercise and strength training (such as that achieved by running with weights), it ensures that you create muscle. Muscle needs more calories and helps you to burn weight much easier than simpler and lighter rounds of straight cardio (such as brisk walking), and this means that running and jogging are great for those looking to lose weight.

Just like my series of Get RIPPED! videos, you can increase the intensity by increasing the weight! For video options, visit jarilove.com.