Aerobic Cross-Training for Weight Loss

Obesity is a problem faced by many people all over the world. Unhealthy eating habits and lack of exercising are the main reasons for people being obese. Two factors that help in losing weight are diet and exercising.

Diet does not reduce fat:

When you diet, you lose weight, which is mainly water and muscles. You have to reduce the fat in your body to shed a few pounds off your body. For this you have to increase your metabolism level. Aerobic exercises like walking, jogging, biking, swimming, running, skiing, skating and treadmill, help to raise the metabolism in your body, thus helping your body to burn more fat and reducing your weight. Aerobic exercises also improve the function of your heart. Usually aerobic exercise involves one activity performed for a specific time.

Aerobic cross training:

Sometimes these aerobic exercises might not be effective. You might not achieve the level of fitness you are aiming at. Or you might get bored doing the same exercise everyday. Walking or jogging everyday for an hour, might turn out to be boring, and you might want a change. Now what is the alternative? Instead of doing the same exercise everyday, why don’t you change your method and do two or three types of exercises together. This is known as aerobic cross training, combining two or three aerobic exercises in an aerobic session. It also adds variety to your daily exercising program. It makes aerobic exercises fun and interesting.

Instead of doing one activity for 60 minutes, you can do two or three activities in an hour. You can do 20 minutes of stationary cycling, followed by 20 minutes of walking and 20 minutes of jumping rope. Or if you have a swimming pool nearby, take a 15 minutes walk to the pool, and after swimming for 15 minutes, you can take a 15 minutes jog back home.

You can combine aerobic activities to one workout session according to your interests. This helps you to fight the boredom of doing the same exercise everyday and also make you enjoy exercising.

Benefits of aerobic cross training:

It adds variety to your daily exercising program, making your exercising interesting and enjoyable and it kills boredom.
Since it makes your exercising enjoyable, you will exercise for longer hours.
When you do the same exercise everyday, you will be straining certain joints. Whereas cross training improves the overall condition of the entire body.
If you were doing only one exercise, then only upper or lower muscles will be toned. Since you are doing variety of exercises, the muscles in both the upper and lower body are toned.
Since more muscles are working, these muscles burn twice the amount of fat for their maintenance, which reduces the fat from your body, resulting in weight loss.
Aerobic cross training increases your heart rate and improves the functions of the heart.

Whether you are doing one activity or combination of activities, aerobic exercises should always be begin and end with stretching exercises, because it reduces injuries to your muscle tissues and prevents soreness.

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