If your goal is fast weight loss, you can use exercise machines, equipment, classes and staff services to customize your workout and maximize the calories you burn. Diversify your workout to keep it interesting and challenging. Combine exercises that raise your heart rate, build your muscle mass and increase your flexibility. If you have medical concerns, discuss your weight loss plan with your doctor first.
Cardiovascular Exercise
Emphasize cardiovascular exercise in your weight-loss workout. You burn the most calories doing intense aerobic exercise that raises your heart rate for a sustained period. Burn more than 600 calories per hour running on a treadmill, kickboxing, climbing a stair treadmill, using an elliptical trainer, doing a high-impact aerobics class or skipping rope. If you burn 600 calories every day, you lose up to 6 lb. per month.
Interval Training
Working out at a more intense level raises your heart rate higher, burning more calories. Interval training operates on the principle that, once you raise your heart rate, it stays higher even if you reduce your pace. Therefore, if you sprint, jump rope or do another intense cardiovascular activity for about 30 seconds, you maintain a higher heart rate for the next five minutes, allowing you to recover and then sprint again. Incorporate interval training into your gym workout on cardiovascular machines or pick up your intensity every few minutes during exercise class.
Resistance Training
Set up a circuit training program of resistance machines at your gym to target your leg, chest, back, shoulder and arm muscles. In addition, doing crunches on a slant board with strengthen your core. These activities do not burn calories as quickly as aerobic workouts, but they do shift your body composition from fat to lean muscle mass. You raise your resting metabolism and your body burns more calories throughout the day.
Combination Workouts
Some workouts provide the benefits of strengthening, aerobic and flexibility gym workouts. Power yoga, hot yoga and Bikram yoga involve every muscle group and an intense pace. Boot camp and circuit training classes, usually led by a personal trainer, alternate between calisthenics like burpees, pushups and jumping jacks and challenges such as lifting weights. You might also use equipment such as a stationary cycle or rowing machine.
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