The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that all American adults get at least 150 minutes of exercise every week, with 300 minutes recommended for even greater health benefits. Meeting these recommendations can provide a wide range of benefits for your body, including a reduced risk for diseases ranging from heart disease to some forms of cancer. However, one of the leading reasons for getting enough exercise is achieving and maintaining a healthy weight.
Types of Exercise
Exercise can be broken down into two main types -- aerobic and strength training. Aerobic exercise consists of movements that raise your heart rate, such as running, walking, jogging, hiking, swimming and biking. Strength-training exercises specifically target and engage your muscles to build and strengthen them. Strength training can involve free weights, resistance exercises like push-ups and pull-ups, and the use of machines. Both types of exercise have their own contributions to the weight-loss process.
Aerobic Weight Benefits
Aerobic exercises help you lose weight through the amount of calories you burn during the activity. Aerobic exercise increases the consumption of energy by your muscles. To create more energy, your body needs additional oxygen, which is provided through an increase in both your heart rate and breathing rate. This oxygen helps unlock -- or "burn" -- the potential energy in calories you have either consumed through your diet or from fat storage in your body. The more calories you burn, the greater your chances for weight loss.
Strength-Training Weight Benefits
Like aerobic activity, strength training also increases the energy need for your muscles, resulting in calorie burning -- although typically at a slower rate than aerobic exercise. However, the more you strength train your muscles, the more efficient your body becomes at burning calories, according to MayoClinic.com. This can result in greater weight loss. Muscle gains also help increase your stamina, allowing you to do exercise over greater periods of time, resulting in the ability to burn even more calories.
The Process
When you burn more calories through exercise than you consume through the food you eat, you create a calorie deficit. A 3,500-calorie deficit equals approximately one pound of lost fat. A calorie deficit forces your body to turn to other sources of calories to create energy, more specifically the fat storage within the cells of your adipose tissue. To release this energy, your body creates hormones that activate a process called lipolysis. This process breaks the fat down using lipases into smaller usable components for energy creation. The making of energy releases heat, water and carbon dioxide. The heat is used to maintain your body temperature, the water is eliminated from the body through your urine and sweat, and the carbon dioxide is exhaled from your lungs. The removal of these products from your body results in weight loss that can be seen on your scale.
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