How Much Exercise to Lose Weight

For general health, experts recommend exercising for a minimum of 20 minutes, 3 times per week. However, if you want to lose weight, you’ll probably have to kick it up a notch.

Just how much do you need to increase physical activity to lose weight? That will vary from person to person. First, consider how active you are in your normal routine. Do you run around after small children all day? Do you have an active job that involves a lot of walking or heavy lifting? If so, you may not need to add a significant amount of exercise to your current routine because you’re probably already burning a fair amount of calories each day.

However, if your daily routine involves a lot of sitting or standing in one place, you may not be burning enough calories to lose weight at a decent pace.

Ideally, most people will want to both reduce their caloric intake and increase their physical activity so that they are eating less and moving more. As a general guideline, aim for 30 minutes of cardio exercise 5 times per week. Combined with a healthy, low-calorie diet, this is usually enough to result in a one or two pound weight loss per week.

If you find that you are losing weight more slowly than that, you may need to increase your workout time, or further reduce your caloric intake – but be careful that you don’t reduce it too low or you may halt your body’s fat-burning process.

You may also want to consider adding in a few sessions of resistance training per week to build lean muscle. The more lean muscle you have on your body, the more calories you’ll burn – even while your body is at rest.

The ideal workout routine for weight loss would be 2.5 to 3 hours of cardio exercise and 1.5 to 2 hours of resistance training each week. As long as your caloric intake is moderate, that should be enough physical activity to result in steady, healthy weight loss.