How Does The Amount Of Time Spent Exercising Affect Weight Loss?

In general, the amount of time spent exercising should have a positive effect on your weight-loss efforts. Statistically, you should lose about twice as much weight bicycling for one hour as you lose bicycling for 30 minutes. However, exercising too much increases your risk of fatigue, injury and poor performance. Proper eating, training and sleep can help you exercise and lose weight.

Weight Loss

The American College of Sports Medicine recommends three to five 20- to 60-minute aerobic workouts per week to improve your fitness. An aerobic workout can consist of any exercise that continuously increases your heart rate to an exercise heart rate for more than a few minutes. A light exercise rate is about half of your heart's maximum rate, which is 220 beats per minute minus your age in years. Bicycling, jogging, walking and swimming are aerobic workouts. Bicycling 13 mph for 60 minutes burns 563 calories if you weigh 155 lb. and 690 calories if you weigh 190 lb., according to a state of Wisconsin study. Bicycling 13 mph for 30 minutes burns 298 calories if you're 155 lb., according to a "Harvard Heart Letter" report. Burning 3,500 calories is equal to burning 1 lb.

Warning

When you exercise is crucial for strength training exercises. You can exercise your heart muscles aerobically every day, but you need to rest your skeletal muscles for 48 hours because they need to recover from exercising, reports The Merck Manuals Online Medical Library. Exercising sooner can cause an injury. Weightlifting or doing weight-resistance exercises such as pushups for 60 minutes instead of 30 minutes on a particular day approximately doubles your weight loss, but strength training for 30 minutes on consecutive days instead of for 30 minutes one day and resting the next day probably won't double your weight loss because your second workout will likely be unproductive at best and, at worst, can jeopardize your ability to exercise the injured muscles for days or weeks.

Eating

Doubling your exercise time won't double your weight loss if your performance is substandard. People often try to maximize their weight loss by eating fewer calories, a measurement of energy, but they can become too fatigued to maximize their performance. "Swim, Bike, Run" estimates that 155-lb. people who want to bicycle 13 mph for an hour need 419 more calories than they eat daily. Eating fewer calories could result in, for example, you bicycling 13 mph for 30 minutes and bicycling 10 mph for 30 minutes. Bicycling 10 mph burns 141 fewer calories per hour than bicycling 13 mph if you're 155 lb., according to Wisconsin Department of Health and Family Services. Consequently, doubling your exercise time won't double your weight loss.

Recommendations

You should train properly if you want the extra time spent exercising to pay off in weight loss. Exercise expert Dr. Kenneth Cooper recommends warming up for three to five minutes before your primary exercise. He wrote that stretching will "help you protect both your musculoskeletal and cardiovascular systems." In addition, Dianne Hales, the author of the textbook "An Invitation to Health," recommends sleeping seven to eight hours daily to improve your energy and weight-loss efforts.