Is Taekwondo Good For Weight Loss

October 10, 2014

Losing weight is just one of the benefits of Taekwondo training. Any form of physical activity will benefit your health by burning calories, however certain types of exercise encourage your body to continue burning calories long after your exercise session has ended – that’s a great bonus isn’t it?! The aerobic and anaerobic demands of our Taekwondo training in Brisbane deliver an exercise regime ideally suited to losing weight.

In the mid 1970’s, Aerobics changed the way we exercised. It was ‘the’ way to fight flab. However, research shows that perhaps exercising aerobically for an hour or more is not as effective for losing body fat, and gaining lean muscle, than is exercising, anaerobically, for a much shorter time.

Anaerobic means without oxygen. Anaerobic fitness is the ability to deliver higher levels of energy to the muscles than can be supplied through the use of oxygen. It utilises phosphates and sugars within the muscles and bloodstream to provide energy. Anaerobic training allows the body to adapt to high-energy demands and creates a more efficient fuel delivery and waste removal system. Worldwide studies show that exercising anaerobically gets rid of excess body fat fast.

So how does it work? Anaerobic exercise consists of short bursts (30secs) of very high energy exercise that takes the muscle to exhaustion, then a recovery period of about 60 – 90secs (walking) then repeat about 6 to 10 times. When you exercise like this the body targets fat as its source of energy, and how’s this for a bonus – it continues burning fat for up to an hour after you stop training, even if you are lying down resting. Meanwhile, aerobic fitness is good for the cardio vascular system – the heart – and you’d have to be crazy to think that wasn’t important.

So, if you are going to exercise, it makes sense to combine both aerobic and anaerobic activities for best results and that’s what will happen when you join us at our Taekwondo classes in Brisbane. An hour of continuous training, interspersed with fast hard sparring, is just what you are looking for.

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