The best and quickest way to get fit and lose weight the faster are by doing the exercises that uses the most muscle. Take for example walking which is a low intensity type of exercise, you need to do a lot of walking to get the same benefits you would get from an exercise that involved more muscles.
Bicycling uses about twice the amount of muscles therefore requires less time to get the same amount of benefits. Jogging is the same way as it requires more muscles that does walking – you leg muscles work harder for speed and balance plus it works your cardiovascular much harder.
Take cross country skiing as it use most all of your muscles – arms, legs, back, thighs, and buttocks.
You only have to do this for 12 minutes compared to 40 minutes of walking to get the same fitness benefit.
Swimming appears to be a total body exercise but it really only requires mostly upper body muscles. It doesn’t use the big muscles in the legs and buttocks. This is probably why it’s not typically recommended as a great exercise for losing weight.
Bicycling uses mostly your leg muscles and when you push yourself you will notice you get that lactic acid buildup which produces a burning sensation. When you are cross country skiing and you try to push yourself you soon notice it’s not just your muscles but you are out of air and your heart is pounding.
This is because it pushes your whole aerobic system into action and your body get on the verge of going into anaerobic exercise because of your heart rate. You will not be able to keep this up for very long.
Lets say that you use a whole body exercise machine one day and then switch to an exercise bike the following day and you exercised at the same heart rate. You would have to exercise on the bike at a higher intensity which would burn more sugar that fat. On the whole body machine you use a lot of muscles but at a lower intensity. Therefore you would burn more fat on the whole body machine as you would the bike.
The key is to do more exercises that use more muscles and do them at a lower intensity. The more muscle you use at a lower intensity the more fat you will burn. Most people want to burn fat than readily accessible sugar in the system.