Low-impact exercise is very simply just exercise that doesn’t put a heavy strain your joints. However, you shouldn’t make the mistake of confusing low-impact with low effectiveness. Low-impact exercises, despite not being hard on your muscles, joints, and bones, can still be very effective when it comes to burning calories. As will be explained in this article, you can definitely lose weight while doing low-impact exercise.
What Are Some Examples of Low-Impact Exercises?
There are countless numbers of low impact exercises that could be listed in this section, but for brevity’s sake, only a few of the more popular ones are going to be discussed. Some good examples of low-impact exercises include swimming, water-based exercises, cycling, anything involving an elliptical, Yoga, and aerobics.
As you can see, these are all very good exercises to do if you want to lose weight and best of all, they are low-impact exercises that don’t put unnecessary strain on your body. The main reason being that they don’t require any sort of heavy lifting nor do any of the exercises require a lot of movement. Most of them can be done in place (Yoga, elliptical training, and aerobics), which helps to reduce the impact on the joints and muscles. The only outlier is swimming, but in that case, the water helps reduce the actual impact of the movement on your body.
Can These Low-Impact Exercises Help You Lose Weight?
You already know this, but we want to state once again that yes, you can use low-impact exercise to burn calories in the same way that you can use high-impact exercises to burn calories.
In many ways, low-impact exercises have a few advantages. For example, low-impact exercises tend to be easier to do for longer periods of time because they cause less pain and discomfort. Most people can swim for a lot longer or cycle for a lot longer than they can sprint. So, you can end up going for longer and burning more calories just by doing low-impact exercises.
Also, because low-impact exercises, especially the ones described in this article, put less strain on the body, you can do them for longer and more often without worrying about hurting yourself. You would be surprised at how common injuries are among people who do high-impact exercises. Even when done casually, exercises like weightlifting and sprinting can cause injuries. Nothing stuns your ability to burn weight quite like an injury.