What Kinds of Fat Loss Exercise Can You Do Besides Hitting the Weights at the Gym?

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What kind of fat loss exercise can you do besides lifting weights? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times Best selling Author, celebrity nutrition expert and Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the health expert. CleanCollab from Instagram asks Question what kinds of fat loss exercise can you do besides hitting the weights at the gym? I love classes personally. All right, well the answer is there's more to it than that. I'll be right back with that answer.

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All right, so let's talk exercise and fat loss. And it was very interesting. When I first started studying exercise a gazillion years ago, there was nothing talking about hormones and exercise. Now we know that your body's not a bank account, it's a chemistry lab. And just like food is information, so is exercise. And we want to make sure that the exercise, exercise that we're doing to our body is helping us have a good metabolism all day long. Be better at burning off fat, right? Be better at burning off fat and holding on to muscle, keeping bones strong and not making you stressed out or lower your immune system, especially now. So the type of exercise you do is super important. And exercise can be super therapeutic, amazing or despicable, constructive. So let's make sure, not on my watch, that that is not happening. All right, so I put together four different parts of exercise. It's called my Core 4 plan and is part of my Fast Fitness program. So Shameless Plug, because it is my podcast and is my social media channel. So I get to. And by the way, if you're listening to this on Ask the Health Expert, yes, I'm recording live on Instagram and Facebook, so check me out over there as well. So I put together four different things in my fast fitness program. And here's the deal. We want to just move more all throughout the day. That's where a tracking device like a Fitbit, an Apple watch, et cetera, is awesome for just going, hey, get off your butt and move around. And I think one of the challenges in the pandemic is that we just weren't doing all those daily activities of getting out and running errands and stuff. We were sitting on our butts. So get up off your butt. And so that's the first thing. One of my advices there a piece of advice there is to get a dog. And because they are going to look at you and shame you into walking them. So that's the first thing. Hey, a treadmill, walking, treadmill desk, if you can actually get your hands on one. Now, these are slow, easy activities. That's step one. That's just move more. And if you're doing nothing right now, start there. Just move more and start tracking it. Because what you measure and monitor, you can improve. Next step is high intensity interval training. Now that could be done in classes at the gym. That could be done. I got a peloton. My, my code name is Warrior Mom FL for Warrior Mom, Florida. So I've been doing HIIT classes on there and HIIT classes anywhere from 10 to 60 seconds. In fact, I was looking at some new research that was saying 10 to 20 seconds is actually better. So where you go all out, like thighs burning, lungs burning, and then you recover and generally recover for twice as long. But the fitter you are, the faster you recover. It's a great indicator of fitness. Why do we like to do high intensity interval training to accumulate 4 to 8 total minutes of bursting in these 10 to 60 second bursts? Because it trains your sympathetic nervous system to handle stress better. Who doesn't need that? My gosh. And it also creates this massive oxygen debt. It's the good thing, because you know what that does? It makes your body then have to recover from that, which means more calorie burns after the exercise. You know, we used to say, oh, when you do aerobics, you burn more calories for 24 hours. Well, no, that's not true. But when you do HIIT training, you do increase your caloric expenditure after the fact. Your body's got to recover from all that oxygen depth. So that's the next thing. High intensity interval training, I call it burst of blast fat. I like to use, you know, like I can do the stairs at home, I have an exercise or a peloton. You can do it in the, you could do it in the pool, jumping up and down. So whatever you can do for 10 to 20 to 60 seconds, no longer, and then recover actively and repeat. Okay, next step, resistance training. Now, clean Collab said she likes classes. So you could have a class doing HIIT training. You could have a class that was doing resistance training. For resistance training, I'm looking at something that you're doing say 8 to 12 reps, somewhere in the 20 to 30 second range because that's the best for building muscle. Then you recover for twice as long and repeat. The other thing I look at is doing full body motion. So in my fast fitness program, I show you how to do things with body weights and free weights that you could easily do at home. So, you know, now there's free weights available again, get some so that you don't get stuck if things get closed again. And you do things like push ups and pull ups and bent over rows and squats, things that are active, that are, that are more related to daily life. So that if you're getting something out of the car, you know, you don't throw your back out. So I teach people to do multiple sets in that repetition range of as, as many multi Joint exercises as possible. And I divide them into upper body pushing, upper body, pulling power, core and hips and thighs. So that's the next one. And then the final one is some kind of restorative yoga, stretching, that type of thing, which I was the big resistant person for years. And then here's where I use classes at the gym. That's what I go do a class on. Now, when I've been home, I've been doing them online and which works great, by the way, because now I can do speed yoga 30 minutes instead of an hour. But I find I use classes for things where I wouldn't push myself as hard as I need to. So that's where a peloton is like, I'm loving it. And that's where yoga can be great because you won't quit. So that's where I use classes to try different things. I just recently was at a spa and I got a bunch of training and using one of those ARX trainers. Oh, my gosh. So I learned all sorts of cool things and what a great thing to have at home. Home inexpensive, that you can do. So I look for classes to push me where. Beyond where I would do to expose me to new things. Right. And then for some fun. Because here's the thing, you gotta love what you're doing. Gotta love what you're doing or you probably won't do it. All right, so that's the big takeaway on exercise. Great question. And here's the thing. I've been listening to Mel Robbins Five Second Rule audiobook. And what I would say too is if you're going, oh, gosh, I know I should do, because I did this for years, by the way. I knew I should do yoga, but I don't want to. I would say do Mel Robbins 5 second rule and get your butt over there. Do it. All right, see you next time.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert.

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