When we see summer approaching, fearful of the beaches and the “swimsuit test”, we all work hard to get back in shape. But when this season is far away and winter is approaching, like bears preparing to hibernate, we always tend to put on a few pounds and not particularly keep an eye on the scales. So, almost without realizing it, we can suddenly wake up with several extra pounds on our rump. Kilos that we do not like and that we would like to dispose of.
AN AID IN THE ATTEMPT TO LOSE WEIGHT
Of course, losing weight isn’t easy. It takes time, willpower, and endurance. For this, we tend to seek external help, which can support our motivations. Friends, colleagues, and partners can give us a relevant hand, even if in the end everything still depends on us. But finding fun activities can also be a good help. Eating little and running on a treadmill can be tedious and tedious, but running inside a ball while having fun can be just as useful for the line.
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Sport, in fact, allows you to do good physical exercise without suffering the boredom (and in part the fatigue) of effort. Yes, but what sport to do? Which is more useful for losing weight? Drawing up a definitive ranking is almost impossible because every sport is effective also depending on the commitment you put into it and the area of the body in which you intend to intervene. There are some, however, that ends up involving the whole body and having their effectiveness even if faced at a slow pace. Here they are.
I Swim
To develop and tone the whole body
Let’s start with what our mothers have always presented us as the most complete sport: swimming. And in fact, they weren’t wrong. Even the laziest of swimmers use every single muscle in their body to stay afloat and propel themselves forward, from the neck to the feet. Thus, this activity ends up strengthening the tone of the whole body and improves, among other things, the posture and flexibility of our joints.
The beauty, then, is that you don’t have to be very young to practice it. Of course, if you are overweight, the first laps will be particularly burdensome, but in the long run, you will experience a feeling of well-being, deriving both from muscle tone and from the strengthening of your aerobic capacities.
GRADUALLY INCREASE
To lose weight the most important advice in the pool is to try to increase your pace a little at a time, both by taking less time to complete a lap and by extending the length of the training session. However, we must proceed gradually. Scholars say that if you keep a good pace you can lose up to 11 calories per minute and therefore easily more than 600 per hour, although this estimate also depends on the weight and build of the athlete. In short, a sport to try.
Parkour
Get help from the city
You all knew swimming and our presentation of that sport probably showed you nothing completely new. Parkour, however, maybe that many of you do not know it, because it is a very special and recent activity. In fact, the sport spread for the first time in the 90s, particularly in large French cities, and consists in crossing a city path trying to overcome obstacles by adapting one’s body to the environment.
Said thus it seems something transcendental and ambiguous, but it is actually much simpler than expected. In practice, the “trackers” (because this is what athletes are called) must overcome obstacles – walls, stairs, bottlenecks, architectural barriers of various kinds – by performing jumps, vaulting, somersaults, and climbing. All in the most dynamic way possible, as if they were going through a military training course, with the difference that the obstacles are offered by the city itself.
DOZENS OF DIFFERENT ACTIVITIES
The level of activity for the body is obviously very high because always different movements are required that involve different muscles of the body from time to time. Running is also involved, alternating with jumping, sliding, climbing, and other activities. When done at the highest intensity levels, it is probably the most complete and challenging sport for weight loss.
Cycling
For the legs and more
Let’s go back to more popular and practicable sports at all ages with cycling, an activity that – as we said at the beginning – bears fruit whether you dedicate yourself to it intensively, or practice it in a more mild way. By bicycle, you can go climbing the hills near home but you can also go to work, you can go on a group excursion but also alone. This extreme flexibility has always made it a very popular sport.
On the other hand, pedaling has its undoubted value in everyone’s diet. It allows you to burn calories pretty quickly, but it is also good for your health and improves breathing, stamina, and muscles throughout the body. When it is hard, in fact, we do not push on the pedals only with the legs, but we use the abdominals, the back, the arms with which we attach ourselves to the handlebars, and so on.
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It is clear, however, that it is above all the legs that benefit greatly from this activity. Quadriceps, glutes, hamstrings, and calves will in fact be more and more modeled and sculpted as you intensify this type of training. In general, we can see it as an excellent alternative to jogging: if running around the city scares you or bores you, cycling a few kilometers every day can give you similar benefits but with greater safety and variety.
Squash
When you prefer to play against someone
The top three sports we’ve featured on this list may very well be done solo – although Parkour is best done in the company. Even the last one, cross-country skiing, belongs to the category of individual sports. Some of us, however, need something different, something that stimulates competition and the challenge against the other rather than against ourselves. For people of this genre, squash can be a great solution.
Few of you will have practiced it, but many will have seen it in some American movie or TV series because it enjoys great popularity in the United States. It comes from tennis, which represents a more intense variant from the cardio-muscular point of view, so much so that it allows you to burn calories rather quickly. It is estimated that with half an hour of play it is possible to reach 400 calories burned: and it is no coincidence that precisely because of its excellent performance in a short time it is often practiced in gyms during the break from the office.
THE FIELD AND THE BALL
Compared to other similar sports, squash has no downtime. This means that it requires great physical endurance and good muscle strength; sweating is also notable. It is played indoors, in a fairly small space bordered by walls on which the rubber ball has to bounce. Beginners usually play with a ball that bounces a lot and therefore keeps the pace of the game-high; but as you improve you then move on to less elastic balls, which in any case heat up and increase in speed during the game.
Cross Country Skiing
The constant pace and guaranteed weight loss
Some of the sports we have presented take place indoors, others outdoors but are generally practicable all year round. Cross-country skiing, that is the activity with which we close our list, is instead a typical winter sport and, unless you live in the mountains, you can practice it only in certain weeks of the year, during the holidays that you can enjoy on the Alps.
Don’t think, however, that this is a particularly expensive activity, nor is it forbidden for beginners. Unlike downhill skiing, in fact, you do not have to take into account the cost of the ski lifts, nor do you risk breaking a leg on the first descent. Cross-country skiing is an activity that you can do at the speed you want: you can hire a teacher to teach you the rudiments of the activity, but it is enough to have a friend who has already practiced it to be able to venture into some simple path.
THE BEAUTY OF THE SNOW-CAPPED MOUNTAIN SHOULD NOT BE UNDERESTIMATED
The activity is quite demanding from a physical point of view, so much so that you sweat a lot and burn calories. All this, however, at a constant pace, without too many changes, which allows you to practice this activity even when you are no longer very young. Furthermore, while skiing you can admire the beauty of nature because the cross-country trails often pass through woods and offer breathtaking views.
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