Exercising to lose weight generally focuses on fat-burning, aerobic activities. Exercising for fitness can carry a number of other connotations, such as cardiovascular strength, muscular endurance or flexibility. Combining weight loss and fitness exercises will help you shed pounds and provide improved health for a total lifestyle benefit.
Always consult a physician before starting any exercise program.
Aerobic Exercise
Aerobic exercises can include jogging, cycling, skating; calisthenics such as skipping rope, boxing movements, jumping jacks or skipping in place; swimming, rowing, dancing or going up and down stairs; or can be done using a variety of exercise machines, such as treadmills, stationary bikes or ellipticals.
Aerobic exercise is generally defined as moderate-intensity activity done over a sustained period of time (as opposed to high-intensity sprinting or stop-and-start tennis). For a weight-loss program, the American Heart Association's recommended 30 minutes of moderately intense activity, five days per week, is a good guideline. If your goal is primarily heart health, the association's recommendation of 20 minutes of vigorously intense workouts, three times per week, would be fine.
Muscle Building
Muscle-building exercises include body-weight exercises such as push-ups, chin-ups, pull-ups, dips, squats, lunges, running hills and stairs, and sit-ups; and movements performed against weights, such as bench presses, rowing, bicep curls, deadlifts, squats, tricep extensions, chest extensions and flys.
Resistance exercise damages muscles, which then repair and grow larger, so alternating workouts (upper body one day, lower body the next) and muscle groups during a workout (one arm exercise, then one chest exercise, then one shoulder exercise) helps facilitate maximum growth.
During an aerobic workout, the more resistance you add, the more muscle you will build, which will help you burn more calories when you are not working out, since a pound of muscle burns more calories than a pound of fat. Using dumbbells in conjunction with aerobic activity, or increasing incline or resistance settings on exercise machines, will enhance muscle building.
Anaerobic Exercise
Interval training activities include tennis, weight lifting, sprinting, or many of the aforementioned aerobic exercises if done in a start-and-stop fashion to attain the benefits of interval training.
Anaerobic exercise, such as tennis, offers additional health benefits over the more fitness-oriented (i.e., fat and calorie burning) aerobic exercises, because of the increased number of recovery periods. For example, during a tennis match, the ball is only in play about 15 minutes of every hour. This means the body is repairing and regenerating itself 75 percent of the time you are "playing" tennis -- something that doesn't happen during an aerobic workout.
Flexibility
Stretching (or flexibility) exercises come in two basic types: static and dynamic. Static stretches are the traditional stretch-and-hold exercises and include standing and sitting toe touches; pulling the foot back to the buttock and holding; touching your back and pushing the elbow slightly back; pushing your elbow to your opposite shoulder; held side and forward lunges; pushing your wrist down, with your palm facing you; clasping your hands behind your back and raising toward your shoulders; and leg lifts while lying on your back. Dynamic stretches include arm swings, jumping jacks, high-knee steps, high-step trunk rotations, butt kicks and arm circles.
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