Aerobic Exercise

The primary benefit from aerobic exercise related to successful weight loss is additional number of calories expended with each session. For example, waking burns approximately 5 calories per minute, where jogging/running burns approximately 10 calories per minute. If you're exercising aerobically for 30 min. per day, you're expending an additional 150-300 calories. Remember you need to burn an excess of 500 calories per day in order to lose 1 pound of fat (3,500 calories) per week.

If you are exercising in efforts to lose weight and do not see a difference, then you may be eating more than you realize, or not burning as many calories as you may think. Exercise alone may not elicit weight loss if you are "making up" the calories you've burned. This is a common mistake. For example one may think that after walking for 30 minutes, enough calories have been burned to make up for a McDonald's Big Mac when in actuality only about 150 calories are burned compared to the 597 calories in the Big Mac. To ensure that you are not overeating, implement a nutrition plan to see optimal results from your weight loss efforts.

Strength Training

While aerobic exercise helps to burn more calories during the time you are actually exercising, strength training helps to increase the number of calories you are burning 24 hours a day. This is because strength training helps to increase lean body tissue (primarily muscle) and research has shown that higher levels of lean body tissue corresponds with higher metabolic rates (the number of calories burned per day).

Remember: Adding muscle does not necessarily mean getting bigger. Since muscle is more dense than fat tissue (meaning it will take up less space), even if you stayed at the same body weight, by replacing some of the fat tissue with muscle, you would still be smaller in size. So, if you combine added muscle with weight loss, you would see even more dramatic results as far as change in size.

Here is an example to help give you a visual picture of how a person who has more muscle could be smaller than someone with less muscle. Imagine a bag of 100lbs of bricks compared to a bag of 100lbs of feathers. Which bag do you think would be smaller? Because bricks are more dense than feathers (similar to how muscle is more dense than fat), the bag of bricks would be much smaller than the bag of feathers even though both bags weighed exactly 100lbs. Although, this example is more extreme than the differences in density of muscle compared to fat tissue, it helps you to understand the concept.