Exercise Program for Weight Loss and Increasing Stamina

Carrying extra weight around with you can make you feel incredibly exhausted and out of breath when you shouldn’t be. One of the best things you can do for your general health and wellbeing is to set a goal to reduce fat and increase stamina

You’ll burn fat, gain lean muscle, and experience less fatigue if you maintain a balanced diet and engage in an activity regimen that combines cardio and strength training.

Read more: 3 Best Types of Stamina-Increasing Exercises

When you do cardio exercise, such as brisk walking, running, riding a bike or using the elliptical machine at the gym, your heart rate rises. Your heart works to pump blood and oxygen to your muscles, so they fatigue less easily. Improved blood and oxygen flow mean you can keep going for longer without pooping out.

Just like any other muscle in your body, your heart grows stronger when under stress — the good stress induced by cardio exercise. With regular bouts of cardio, your heart becomes better able to get blood and oxygen to all your different systems. You can breathe and move more easily and for longer periods of time.

Cardio is also essential for fat loss. Fat gain is primarily the result of excess calories from your diet stored as fat. In order to lose the stored fat, you have to burn those calories and create a caloric deficit, meaning you consume fewer calories than you burn each day.

Because you burn calories while you’re doing cardio exercise, you burn stored fat and stay in a caloric deficit, as long as you eat a calorie-controlled diet.

Just as you can train your cardiovascular system to increase stamina, you can also increase muscular stamina, which improves your body’s overall endurance. When you build muscular strength, you’ll find it easier to move and propel yourself forward. It will take less energy and you’ll be less fatigued.

Having more lean muscle mass also improves your metabolism and speeds up weight loss. Your body burns calories building and maintaining muscle. The more muscle you have, the more calories you’ll burn for weight control even when you’re sleeping.

However, there isn’t one particular type of routine you should be doing. Rather, there are several components to a well-rounded program to build stamina and burn fat. They include performing both steady-state and high-intensity interval training and performing resistance training for muscular endurance.

Read more: How to Increase Swimming Stamina

Steady-state cardio is typically done at a moderate pace for 30 minutes or longer. This type of cardio burns calories is easier on the muscles and joints and for many people is enjoyable and provides stress relief.

Interval training also called high-intensity interval training, or HIIT, is a shorter duration workout that involves alternating periods of intense effort with periods of recovery, as explained by the American College of Sports Medicine. For example, on a treadmill after a warm-up, you might alternate one minute of sprinting with one minute of jogging for 15 minutes.

Because of the metabolic adaptations caused by high-intensity cardio, HIIT is more effective at burning stored fat in a shorter amount of time than steady-state cardio. According to another study published in Journal of Diabetes Research in January 2017, HIIT is especially effective at burning belly fat.

However, because HIIT is intense by nature, it places more stress on the body than steady-state cardio so it should not be done every day. Do one to three HIIT workouts per week on non-consecutive days and more moderate-paced steady-state cardio workouts on other days.

Strength is the capacity of your muscles to quickly lift a big weight, such as taking up a large box from the floor and setting it down on a counter. The ability of your muscles to work repeatedly against resistance for a longer period of time, such as while pushing a lawnmower or riding a bike up a steep hill, is known as muscular endurance.

Your stamina will increase with muscular endurance training, as the term suggests. Strength training is crucial for overall functionality and fitness, though.

Exercises for all of your major muscle groups—the chest, shoulders, biceps, triceps, stomach, back, glutes, hamstrings, quadriceps, and calves—performed with lighter weight and more repetitions are included in a resistance training program that targets muscular endurance. Also, make use of these

• Take little to no rest between sets: Keep your heart rate up and challenge your muscles to keep going.

• Work with intense effort: Train your body to perform for longer under stress by giving every workout your all. Do your lifts quickly and powerfully. This will improve strength and power, as well as endurance.

• Do compound exercises: Compound exercises activate more than one muscle group at a time, as opposed to isolation exercises which use a single muscle group, as explained by ExRx.net. Compound exercises are harder to perform, burn more calories while you’re doing them and have greater effects on endurance.

• Change up your routine: Going into the gym and doing the same exercises at the same weight every week won’t improve stamina. Challenge your muscles by increasing the weight, reps and/or sets you perform of each exercise, and every workout or at least every couple of weeks, change the exercises you perform.

Plan to exercise five days a week each week, but switch up your program sometimes to prevent boredom. Although it seems like a lot, combining strength and endurance training will help you be effective.

Choose a few exercises to work each of your major muscle groups, such as pull-ups, push-ups, squats, step-ups, and crunches, to achieve this. Use a weight that allows you to complete one set of each exercise with 10 to 15 repetitions, one after the other, with no more than a 10-second break in between, for a total of five rounds.

Do a few minutes of intense cardio at the end of each round by sprinting, jumping rope, or pedaling quickly on a stationary bike, and then begin the next.