I am often asked how much exercise is necessary to actually lose weight and make a difference. This is not a simple question, but I will try to answer it as succinctly as possible.

Firstly, any exercise, even if we are only talking 5/10 mins a day will make a difference. Even if you are not exercising for long enough to burn that many calories, the exercise will have a boosting effect on your metabolism, i.e. you will burn more fat. So some is always better than none.

But if you are looking to make more large-scale changes and do it quickly,  a little more exercise is required. Losing weight is not an exact science, i.e. if you burn 3500 calories a week (1 pound) it doesn’t necessarily mean you will lose that much weight each and every week. But if you stick with it the numbers will balance out over time.

So let’s say the average person burns 500 calories per hour of exercise. It is certainly possible to burn more than this with hard work, but 500 is a good, conservative estimate. And let’s say your post workout calorie burn due to the workout is also 500 calories (this figure is dependent on your metabolism). So all in all that’s 1000 calories an hour.

1 pound of bodyweight is 3500 calories. So on this basis you would need to do 3.5 hours exercise to lose 1 pound per week. And if you did 1 hour every day, that would be a total of 7000 calories, and 2 pounds weight loss. Obviously this loss doesn’t take into account any loss you could be getting from improvements… Read more->