The Quickest Ways To Lose Weight At The Gym

Exercise is a great way lose weight, but there are so many different methods and techniques that it can be hard to tell which are best. Making use of highly efficient and effective exercise techniques can accelerate your fat loss and keep your gym time to a minimum.

Running

Despite its simplicity, running is an excellent way to lose weight. This form of cardiovascular exercise requires no equipment other than a pair of shoes and, perhaps, a treadmill. You'll find that running is highly efficient at burning calories. According to NutriStrategy's exercise expenditure tool, running 10 minute miles burns around 700 calories per hour. Bumping up your speed and running six minute miles burns more than 1,100 calories per hour.

Rowing

Most gyms have rowing machines, and there's no mystery as to why. Rowing is another great form of cardiovascular exercise that can burn a lot of calories in a short period of time. As with running, your effort level makes a difference. According to NutriStrategy, rowing with "light effort" burns around 500 calories per hour, while "very vigorous effort" burns about 850 calories per hour.

Weight Training with Compound Exercises

Compound exercises are those that work more than one muscle group at a time. For example, the bench press is a compound exercise because it works your chest, shoulders and triceps. This is more effective than a triceps kickback, which works only your triceps.
Because of the number of muscles worked, compound exercises burn more calories than isolation exercises. In addition, Bodybuilding.com notes that compound exercises release higher levels of growth hormone and testosterone, which aid in muscle growth. This is important because adding muscle mass burns calories. Adding five pounds of muscle mass can burn an extra 250 calories per day, says Dr. M. Doug McGuff.

Super Sets

As professional fitness competitor Brigitte Brodski notes, supersetting is a highly intense, efficient workout technique for weight loss. To perform a super set, do one set of one exercise, followed immediately by a set of an exercise that works a different muscle group, with no break between. Because you're not resting between lifts, you will burn more calories and stimulate a variety of muscle groups.

Lift Heavy Weights

While many think that lifting big weights is a great way to get big, it's not. A study from the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise actually found that performing the same workout using heavier weights and fewer repetitions was a better weight loss strategy than doing the workout with lighter weights and more repetitions. According to the research, the rate of post-exercise calorie burning from the heavy weight workout was nearly double that of the lighter weight workout.