If you’re currently looking to lose weight, you’re going to be highly interested in hearing about what you can do to help boost your metabolic rate.
While your metabolism is quite determined by your overall body weight, genetics, and muscle mass content, there are definitely things you can do day to day that will impact how many calories you are burning from minute to minute.
Those who are most successful with their weight loss programs are those who know how to boost their metabolism properly through exercise and diet, helping bring their weight loss program to a whole new level.
It’s important to keep in mind though that not all exercise is created equally, so removing exercise from your workout that isn’t going to provide much benefit will help you create more room for exercise that will.
Here’s what you need to know.
Cardio Training for Weight Loss
First up, let’s look at cardio training. Cardio training is essentially any type of exercise that gets your heart rate up and keeps it there for an extended period of time.
As far as weight loss goes, this also helps to increase your caloric burn per minute while you are doing the exercise, thus creating a higher daily calorie deficit, furthering your weight loss.
The problem with traditional cardio though – cardio that’s performed at one pace for 30 to 60 minutes is that after you’re finished with it, you’re maybe going to burn another 10-30 calories after the session.
Yippee.
When trying to lose weight, 10-30 calories is nothing to write home about.
If you switch your cardio over to interval training though, where you will work extremely hard for very short bouts of time – say anywhere from ten seconds to one minute (depending on just how intense you make these), then you will start really seeing that metabolism skyrocketing.
When done in this manner the body will expend a greater number of calories while it’s trying to recover, hence you’ll get much better weight loss results over the long term.
After an interval training session where you’ve completed 10 high intensity intervals for example, you’re going to see a calorie burn of up to another 200 calories in the few hours that follow that workout.
Weight Training for Weight Loss
Moving on to the weight training side of things, this is one type of exercise that is definitely going to prove to be advantageous for you for boosting that metabolic rate.
First of all, when done with shorter rest periods between sets (typically 30 seconds to one minute), strength training is also going to take higher levels of expended energy by the body during the recovery process.
To top that off though, weight training will help you add additional lean body mass to your frame, which will really boost your metabolism, causing the body to burn more calories 24 hours a day.
Since lean body mass is factored in to your basal metabolic rate, it’s when this is boosted that you will have the easiest time maintaining your body weight.
Therefore, if you have one option of what to do in the gym to get the best weight loss results, weight training should be it.
Relaxation Activities
Finally, the last type of exercise to consider is relaxation exercises. With these, studies have actually demonstrated that you might experience a lower basal metabolic rate, meaning a high percentage of your workout program spent doing yoga, meditation, or deep breathing could actually make it harder to lose weight.
The research suggests that those who engage in these activities for longer periods of time have BMR’s 13% lower than those who don’t.
While 13% may not seem like a big deal, add this up over a month and it will make a difference.
So, this is something else to keep in mind. While I wouldn’t suggest completely giving up these activities if you do enjoy them as they will have many other health benefits, I would suggest complimenting them with other forms of training that are aimed to increase the metabolism to help offset this effect.
If boosting your metabolism is a goal of yours, be sure you are not overlooking any of these points.
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