What is the best exercise for long term Fat Loss?

The answer to long term fat loss and weight maintenance lies in resistance training. Not only is this type of training really important to prevent against conditions such as osteoporosis and postural dysfunction, but it is quite simply, the only way to ensure that you develop a body that is metabolically active throughout the day (not just when exercising).

Resistance Training will help you:

• Increase strength
• Improve sexual function
• Maintain or even increase bone mass as you age
• Increase metabolic rate
• Improve muscular agility, which is proven to help prevent incontinence
• Reduce the risk of heart disease
• Increase flexibility and balance
• Improve functional movement for everyday living
• It’s also both your best anti-aging tool and the best non-surgical alternative for remedying back problems

Perform a resistance training programme anywhere from three to six days a week. You could choose to combine upper and lower body in one session, or you could opt for specific muscle groups in each session.

Don’t train if you’re still sore from your last session, as your growth (and benefit) happens in the recovery period, not the training period. Therefore rest is absolutely vital to a good training programme.

Warming up and stretching

Make sure you warm up well and don’t stretch out (at the end of the session) the muscles you worked during the session. If, for example, you have just done a session that specifically targeted the chest, triceps and shoulders, you won’t want to decrease blood flow to the area by stretching these muscle groups (blood flow is important for nutrition delivery and waste removal).  Rather, it’d be better to do a long, slow cool-down after your training session to ensure that blood flow remains optimal for waste removal.

In an ideal world, stretching would be done as a session on its own (after a good warm up), concentrating specifically on the muscles you know to be habitually too tight, or overworked.  If you can’t manage to do a stand-alone stretching session, simply stretch those muscles you have not just worked (but that are tight), since you’ll be warm from your workout.

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Tanya Wyatt

Owner at The Happy Body

Tanya started out as a professional ballet dancer. Swopping her pointe shoes for takkies, she decided being a hip hop dancer was way cooler, so chopped off her bun and joined a street dance company. For many years, she also taught dance and fitness classes in Cape Town before deciding that nutrition and lifestyle coaching was the way to help people change their state of health for the better. So, while writing two health and fitness books, she moved to London to study and began her ‘real life’ – that as a health and lifestyle coach. She’s been in private practice for 10 years now, is a mom of a 7-year old pig-tailed ball of energy, writes for various national and local health publications and is a health presenter when the occasion arises. Oh – and once a dancer, always a dancer – she’s also taken up ballet pole dancing 🙂 Click here to contact Tanya.

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