Playing sports is the best way to lose weight: in fact, physical activity allows you to burn calories and speed up your metabolism even once it’s finished and, together with a little attention to nutrition, it’s undoubtedly the healthiest and most effective method to reach the ideal weight.
Many think that the best sports for losing weight are fitness walking and running, and yet running and walking aren’t the only physical activities that allow you to burn a lot of calories in a short time: in general, and without falling into excesses, the more intense a sport is and involves the muscles of the whole body, the more it will have the ability to trigger the mechanisms of calorie consumption, burning calories with the consequence of an effective loss of weight.
The 10 best sports for weight loss
Here then, based on a person of average height, are the 10 most suitable sports for losing weight.
1. Rowing
Second sport in the ranking of the best sports to practice considering calorie consumption and potential risk of injury, rowing is an endurance activity that involves the upper and lower body in harmonious and powerful movements that combine strength and resistance by accelerating the metabolism.
2. Cross-country skiing
Nordic skiing is one of the best sports for burning calories: not just because it’s practiced in the cold, and the cold naturally increases calorie consumption as we have written here, but also because it involves the muscles of the whole body, from the legs to the arms to the core, in intense cardiovascular activity.
3. Football
Well yes, the much mistreated football also has positive aspects, such as the fact that involving different types of muscle fibers and being a mixed aerobic – anaerobic sport, it inevitably accelerates the metabolism up to burning 500 Kcal per hour.
4. Squash
Squash is a fantastic cardiovascular sport, made up of sprints, braking and maximum intensity: for this reason it has also been proclaimed the best sport to practice considering both the average calorie consumption and thethe potential risk of injury, considering that an hour of play – the average time to rent a squash court – can burn over 700 Kcal. An outdoor alternative? Paddle tennis is now fashionable, which is played in pairs inside a wire mesh cage.
5. Surf
Surfing is a fantastic total body sport that requires strength in the legs, arms and core, as well as stamina and breath both when standing on the board and when reaching out to sea: approximately an hour of surfing allows you to burn about 250 calorieswhich can increase as the intensity increases.
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6. Cycling
Another sport which, like the new one, is walking (or in some respects also jogging) which is suitable for people of all ages: pedaling means involving the biggest and most powerful muscles of the legs, starting from the quadriceps and buttocks and not forgetting the calves, and although the upper body is not involved as in other sports, cycling it is a sport with a very high calorie consumption: if professional cyclists have almost zero fat mass percentages it is because – if practiced with intensity – cycling can burn up to over 1000 Kcal per hour. Ok, this goes for the Pros, but the fact remains that even a nice bike ride is a great way to burn calories.
7. Gymnastics
Don’t be fooled by breaks and recoveries: gymnastics is one of the most intense and demanding sports, and it is no coincidence that gymnasts have one of the most harmonious physiques among sportsmen. Sprints, jumps, acrobatics, and the search for coordination and balance lead to the burning of up to 300 Kcal per hour.
8. Parkour
Runs, jumps, acrobatics and lots of functional movements: Parkour is a sport with a very high level of calorie consumption precisely because it involves all the muscles, requires strength and speed, recruits muscles at a deep level and by combining the characteristics of many sports (running, climbing, explosive jumping, etc) it significantly speeds up the metabolism.
9. Sprint race
Let’s start from an average figure: running allows you to burn 1 Kcal per kg of body weight per kilometer (a 60kg person therefore burns on average 60Kcal every km travelled, therefore more or less every 5-7 minutes of activity). There is a way to increase this calorie burn though, which noon would grow exponentially with increasing time and distances spent running: to practice fast running.
In general, you burn more calories by running 200 meters 10 times at maximum speed, with a little recovery between one “sprint” and the next, than by running at average speed for 2 km: this is because the heart works at higher heart rate levels, the blood circulation is faster, the body temperature rises faster and in essence the basic metabolism is accelerated. For this reason, after the new, fast running is the best way to burn a lot of calories.
10. Swimming
Swimming is not only a sport suitable for people of all ages and all ability levels, it is even if not above all a sport that engages almost every muscle, from the neck to the tips of the toes. If you practice it then trying to increase the speed and permanence in the water a little (for example doing repetitions with a short break between one lap and the next: it has been shown that there is a linear correlation between an increase in speed and an increase in calorie consumption) can lead to burning up to 11 calories per minute , or about 550 Kcal per hour more than those burned by the basic metabolism.
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