How Should A Morbidly Obese Person Start An Exercise Program?

Losing excess pounds is all about expending more calories than you consume, and exercise is a good way to create a daily calorie deficit while also strengthening the heart, lungs, and other parts of the body. Unfortunately, if you are morbidly obese, it may be very difficult to move around consistently without pain or—at least—feeling winded. Here are a couple of tips for starting an exercise program that will put you on the road towards good health:

Start With Interval Walking

Walking is one of the easiest and best exercises anyone can do. It's a low-impact exercise that generally doesn't require any special equipment, but can be quite the calorie burner for larger people. For instance, a 300-pound person will burn eight calories per minute walking 3 miles per hour, and the heavier you are, the more calories you'll burn because of the extra effort required to move the extra weight.

Depending on your size, it may be a struggle just to get across the room, much less speed walk around a running track at 3 miles per hour. That's quite alright. You can still enjoy the calorie burning benefits of walking without putting too much stress on your body by doing interval walking. Essentially, you'll walk for a few minutes and then rest for a few minutes and keep doing that until you reach your goal time.

If you want to walk 30 minutes per day, you would walk five minutes, rest five minutes and repeat until you got your time, for example.

Although walking produces the best results when you do it all at once, you'll still enjoy some benefits by doing it this way. You'll burn the same amount of calories, and you'll strengthen your muscles and joints. Be sure to check with your doctor to make sure it's safe for you to move around, however, Excess weight puts extra stress on the heart, and your doctor may restrict your movements until you've lost a sufficient amount of pounds.

Start Weight Training

Another thing you can do that will put minimum strain on your heart is to start weight training. There are a couple of reasons you want to do this. First, building muscle is critical to your weight loss journey. Muscle weighs more than fat, and the more muscle you have, the more calories you'll lose just sitting around because your body will need to burn more energy to maintain the muscle mass.

Second, building muscle can help mitigate the amount of loose skin you may develop after losing a lot of weight. The skin stretches to cover the extra fat stored in the body, but it doesn't always snap back right away once that fat is gone. The muscle you build will take up some of the space that was once occupied by the fat, reducing the amount of loose skin on your body.

In the beginning, you may want to start weight training using just your body weight or one or two-pound weights to avoid overstraining your muscles. Once you feel stronger, you can build up from there.

For more tips on exercising when you're morbidly obese or help develop a custom exercise program, contact a personal trainer. Contact local fitness programs for more information and assistance.