If you want to lose weight, you need to look at two areas - your diet and your exercise. But which form of exercise is best for weight loss? Recent research suggests that the old formula of twenty minutes steady cardio may not be the most effective way to shift the pounds.
If you're looking at exercise as a way to help you lose weight it makes sense to figure out which type will burn the most calories.
However, the relationship between exercise and the calories your body burns is probably one of the most misunderstood subjects in the field of fitness. But if you want to get the most from your workouts, it's worth understanding.
Many people attempt to figure out how many calories a given workout uses (there are numerous charts available to help you do this), then of course consume that many calories straight afterwards!
But whether your step class or swim burns 300 or 400 calories is only one part of the issue - to get the complete picture, there are actually three different issues you need to consider when comparing workouts - how many calories your exercise burns while you're doing it, how long it continues burning calories after you finish your workout, and what long term effect it is having on your metabolism (the rate at which you burn calories). We'll look at each in turn.
