Is Jogging the Best Exercise to Lose Weight Quickly?

Is Jogging the Best Exercise to Lose Weight Quickly?
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Exercise is an important component to any weight loss effort. As you move around, your body uses more calories than if you were to not exercise. Whether you're jogging or participating in other cardiovascular activities, the Department of Health and Human Services recommends that you complete at least two hours and 30 minutes of moderate cardiovascular activity per week to lose weight.

Exercise and Weight Loss

To lose weight, you must overall burn more calories than you consume over a period of time. Exercise is an effective exercise in helping you burn calories, not only while you're participating in the activity, but even afterwards because your metabolism is raised. Every time you exercise, you make efforts towards increasing the total amount of calories you burn and thus creating more of a caloric deficit.

What Makes an Exercise the Best

The exercise that would be considered the best in terms of helping you lose weight is the one in which will burn the most calories per unit of time. There are exercise activities that are more efficient than others and by choosing the activities that burn the most calories, you will maximize your exercise time.

Jogging

According to Mayo Clinic, jogging is one of the best exercises to burn the most calories and thus contribute to your weight loss efforts. A 150 lb person jogging 5 mph will burn about 584 calories per hour. The faster you run equates to more calories burned. That same person will burn about 986 running at 8 mph in an hour. Besides speed, other ways that you can increase the amount of calories that you burn while jogging is to run up hills or stairs. Scattering short sprints throughout your jogging session will also increase how many calories you burn.

Other Exercises

While jogging and running burn the most calories, there are other exercises that are efficient in burning calories. Rollerblading, jumping rope and playing sports like football, basketball and soccer are also high calorie burning activities.

Considerations

Consistently jogging will help you lose weight at the quickest rate. It's important to keep in mind the activities that you enjoy, however. If you hate to jog and that dislike will affect the consistency of your workouts, you may want to incorporate other cardiovascular activities into your regime. Consistency and completing the most cardiovascular exercise is the key to success, so make adjustments to your training if necessary.

References

Article reviewed by Lynda Moultry Belcher Last updated on: Sep 2, 2010

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