What Are The Best Exercises To Use to Lose Weight Quickly?

If you want to lose weight and keep the weight off, you need to focus on two major things, your nutrition, and an exercise program. In this article, let’s focus on what exercise is best for losing weight.

While almost any exercise is better than no exercise at all, there are exercises and workout routines that are much more effective than others. The better the workouts are, the faster your progress and the more likely you’ll stick to the exercise program. This way, you’ll not only lose the weight you want to lose, but you’ll also be able to keep that weight off for the long run.

When trying to lose weight, exercises need to accomplish two things; they need to burn calories and build muscle. Or at least, not lose muscle.

Everyone is extremely busy, so when it comes to losing weight, exercises that burn a lot of calories are important. Would you slightly burn 100 calories in a 20-minute workout or 200 calories in a 20-minute workout?

So what are the best exercises to lose weight?

For time-efficient workouts that maximize calorie burn, you’ll want to focus on exercises that use the most, and the biggest, muscles and do them with intensity.

While things, like walking and riding a stationary bike, are great for beginners, can help you lose weight, and are good for you regarding health, they aren’t the best exercises for losing weight.

Bodyweight exercises are done in intense circuit style workouts, as well as some more traditional barbell, dumbbell and kettlebell exercises, that work the entire body are the best exercises for losing weight.

Here are some of the best exercises to lose weight:

Bodyweight squats (can also be done with dumbbells, barbells or kettlebells)
Push Ups
Lunges
Kettlebell (or Dumbbell) Swings
Kettlebell (or Dumbbell) Snatches
Jump Rope
Burpees (with and without the push up)
Jumping Jacks
Skater Hops
Mountain Climbers

Exercises like bodyweight squats, lunges and push-ups have a lot of variety, allowing you to make the exercise easier or harder depending on your fit or strong you are. Push-ups include regular push-ups, hands close together, explosive (push your hands off the ground), clap push-ups (push your hands off the ground and clap), Spiderman pushups, T-push ups and more!

Bodyweight squats include regular squats, tuck jumps, 180-degree jump squats and more.

There is a lot of variety with bodyweight exercises and when done combined with density training or interval training, will burn a ton of calories while also making sure you don’t lose muscle.

When only doing traditional cardio like walking, the stationary bike or the treadmill, a good percentage of the weight you lose will be muscle. This slows down your metabolism, which makes it tougher to keep losing weight or to keep off the weight you’ve already lost. It’s important to perform exercises that keep you from losing muscle mass.

There are a couple of ways to do the workouts and get the most out of them. You can perform a workout for time, such as 20 minutes. In this case, you are trying to complete more in that 20 minutes than you had previously done.

Or you can perform the workout until it’s finished while trying to improve on your time (finish the workout faster).

Let’s look at the most straightforward workout using both examples. Let’s say you are going to perform kettlebell swings.

Using the first option, you decide to do as many kettlebell swings as possible in 12 minutes. Rest whenever you need to.

For the second option, you’d pick some repetitions and then complete them, and keep track of your time. Using the kettlebell swing again, maybe you decide to do 200 repetitions. Rest when needed and complete the workout as fast as you can.

While you can’t improve every single workout, you want to try and improve over time. In the first example, let’s say you get 127 repetitions in the 12 minutes. Eventually, you want to try and beat that number. At some point, it will be challenging to get more repetitions. You can either make the workout a little longer or use a heavier kettlebell next time.

Using multiple exercises, it might look like this:

10 Bodyweight Squats
10 Push Ups
25 Jumping Jacks
10 Kettlebell Swings
10 Alternate Forward Lunges (per leg)

Complete five rounds of the above, rest when needed and go for time.

Stick with the above exercises and these two types of training styles, and you’ll be well on your way to losing all the weight you want.