So you want to know how to cut calories to lose weight? It is less difficult than you might think. Take a minute to read these simple ways to reduce your caloric intake and slim down in a hurry.
How to Cut Calories to Lose Weight
3 straightforward ways to reduce your caloric intake so you lose weight faster:
1 – Drink lots of water
To create an effective weight loss routine, you want to begin by creating an outline. A proper workout should include a good warm up, resistance training routine, cool down and stretch. Lets go over each one.
Warm Up
A excellent warm up ought to consider any where from 3 to 10 minutes. A great example of typical warm up would be to walk to jog on a treadmill for a few minutes, but any constant activity would work for a warm up. The key to warming up is to start slow. A warm up bridges the gap between inactivity and exercise, a smooth transition is easier on your body. The purpose of a warm up is to elevate your heart rate and improve blood flow to the working muscle tissues. Warming up also warms up the synovial fluid in your joints, improving movement and range of motion. You’re correctly warmed up when you’re on the verge of sweating and your heart rate has reached at least 60% of your estimated max heart rate.
Resistance Training
Some of you may be wondering why resistance training is part of a weight loss routine. There are a number of reasons why resistance training is important when losing weight. The main reason is that weight training will build muscle. I’m not talking about large muscle tissues here, I’m talking about lean calorie burning muscle. You see muscle is what is considered an active tissue, that’s a tissue that requires calories to survive. For each pound of muscle you could melt away as many as 60 extra calories a day. That’s about 300 calories for every 5 pounds of muscle, it makes sense to me to swap 5 lbs of body fat for 5 lbs of muscle. Another reason that resistance training is great for weight loss is because the physical act of lifting weights burns tons of calories, often as a lot or more than doing cardio.
When you are putting together a workout choose exercises that require the most work and use the most muscles. The exercises that melt away the most calories are called compound exercises. These are exercises that recruit more than one muscle. Here are a few compound exercises that should be in your weight loss routine.
This is just a list of exercises, I’m not suggesting that you do each physical exercise listed above in one workout. If you choose to use this list to build your own routine I would suggest picking one exercise for each muscle group; the back, chest and legs and do a few sets of 10 to 15 reps. It’s important that before you attempt any of these exercises that you know how to them correctly and safely, you should also have permission from your doctor before you start any exercise program.
On a weekly basis you want to try and lift weights three times a week. A lot of my clients prefer lifting on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, then do primarily cardio on the other days, just to make sure they’re burning calories. You never want to lift the same muscle group two days in a row. For example don’t do squats on Monday then again on Tuesday. You want to allow your body to recover fully in between routines to maximize results.
Cool Down
After you’re finished with your exercises it’s always a good idea to end with a few a lot more minutes of cardio. I recommend doing 10-15 minutes of any cardio at around 65-70% of your estimated max heart rate. A proper cool down will increase blood flow to your entire body, helping to remove toxins and start the recovery process. After a great workout your body instantly starts the recovery process. After a workout your muscles need protein to repair the muscles and carbohydrates to restore the utilized energy. These nutrients are in your blood, by performing a proper cool down you will speed up the delivery of these nutrients.
Stretching
When you’re done with your cool down I suggest ending your workout with a few minutes of stretching. Some people are adamant that they stretch before their exercises and if that’s what you choose to do then that’s Ok. I suggest stretching at the end of a work out because it feels better to stretch the muscle tissues when they are warm. There are some studies that suggest that stretching a muscle before it is warm can actually increase the risk of injury. Another great time to stretch is in among sets. When you stretch isn’t that crucial, the important thing is that you stretch at some point during your routine. Do at least one stretch for each of the muscle groups that you utilized. Hold every stretch for 15-20 seconds. One last thing on stretching, it should feel good, if it is unpleasant then you’re probably stretching too much.