Walking, The Way Forward For Weight Loss
Written by Stuart Stevens | Monday, 24 April 2006 | There are 0 comments
Many fitness instructors and weight loss professionals say that it better to do low intensity exercise to encourage optimum weight loss compared to high intensity exercise which may just be tiring you out but not being so effective. Recently a team of researchers from a highly respected University in Greece set out to prove just this, with an extensive study that was explained in the International Journal of Sports Medicine.
The researchers studied the effects of exercise on fourteen normal body weight and overweight females and the the women were placed into two different goups. The first group exercised on a treadmill at a medium speed (low intesity) 4 times weekly and the second one were told to exercise at a faster and more high intesity pace 4 times weekly.
Careful monitoring was done on both the groups over a 3 month period and strict adherence to the individual training patterns was kept. The control of the exercise was such that the individual workouts all had a set time so that only 370 calories would be burnt off on each session.
As expected all the women in both groups lost weight over the three month period but the finding clearly pointed to a larger weight loss in the group of women who exercised in the lower intensity workouts. In fact the average weight loss for the first group (low intensity) was seven pounds and for the second group (high intensity) the weight loss was only four pounds on average.
However the results are not so simple because although the women from the high intensity workout group lost less weight they ended up with a greater mass of muscle compared to those people who did the low intensity exercise. So it is possible that the actual fat loss was the same in both groups and that the high intesity workout group merely were replacing fat with muscle.
The researchers at the end of their study merely confirmed what is considered to be best health and fitness regime, namely a combination of low and high intensity cardio workouts and a little strength training on top.
