Karenchar on weight-loss-forum had some good advice on losing weight with exercise.
Though she is giving advice regarding rapid weight loss, she qualifies it:
Fast weight loss doesn’t imply that you drop 50 pounds overnight; a few pounds can take months to shed and for obese individuals, it can take years to lose the desired amount of weight.
This rate of weight loss is very realistic. You want to lose fat — not water weight, not lean mass — just fat. And there is a physiologic limit to how fast you can lose fat.
A safe limit is between 1-2 pounds (1/2 – 1 kg) per week. When you have a lot of weight to lose that might seem too slow. You’d like to lose it all today, instantly.
But a pound a week is 50 pounds in a year. And no matter what weight you start at, 50 pounds is a lot of weight to lose. If you can take it off and not gain it back you will have made tremendous progress.
Next she gives advice on exercise choice:
The majority of your workouts should be composed of free-weight or cable exercises. Compared to machines, free-weight and cable movements often require more skill, create muscular balance, and have a greater metabolic cost.
By balancing and stabilizing free-weights or cables you are working more muscles through a greater range of motion resulting in more muscles developed and more calories burned.
Exercise machines can be very beneficial, for a number of reasons. They are easy to use, and the weights can be adjusted by just setting a pin in the weight stack. Therefore workouts can be fast.
But many machines move in only a single plane. And in that case they don’t require you to use your stabilizing muscles. That highlights an advantage of free weights and cables. When you use free weights and cables your stabilizing muscles do come into play, thus improving the results from your workouts.
Use mostly compound (multi-joint and multi-muscle) exercises.
Isolation exercises can be used at the end of a workout to work on a specific weakness, but only do the bare minimum.
Isolation exercise — like curls for the biceps, or calf raises for the calves — are intended to work a single muscle group. This may be fine if you are a championship bodybuilder who needs to have more complete muscle development.
But the average person, especially one that is trying to lose weight, should be more concerned about overall results and using their time and effort to their best advantage. And the best results come from multi-joint exercises and whole body workouts.
Imagine real-life strenuous activities — like chopping wood or stacking bales of hay. Those activities don’t stress a single muscle group. When you chop wood you use the legs, trunk, chest, arms and back. That’s the kind of activity you should emphasize in your workouts.
And then there was this advice, which may answer the question you hear so often, “Why doesn’t exercise work for me?”
Don’t maintain a constant steady pace while you’re on the treadmill or elliptical machine. Numerous studies have shown you’ll burn more calories and more fat if you train in intervals.
Train in intervals? That means to challenge yourself. You can do 30 seconds or a minute of intense exercise, and then a 30 second rest. Or you can adjust the intervals to be longer or shorter, depending on the exercise. For example, if you’re doing sprints, you can sprint for 20 seconds and then jog for 10 seconds.
When you do high intensity intervals you can dramatically improve your results. You lose weight faster and get more benefit from your workout time.
http://weight-loss.fitness.com/weight-loss-media/38744-10-tips-rapid-fat-loss.html
