Beginner Workout Plan for Weight Loss

Exercising During the Pandemic

Many programs designed for beginners require gym equipment. But, since most of us are stuck at home, it limits our outside lives and makes hitting the gym quite a challenge! Using a beginner workout plan for weight loss that requires little to no equipment is a good idea and will make the transition to regular exercise much easier. All we need to boost our health and start seeing the desired results is around 30 minutes of exercise per day.

This exercise should get your heart rate up and involve some form of resistance training to elicit benefits beyond what regular aerobic exercise offers. In reality, the best beginner workout plan for weight loss will combine aerobic exercise and resistance training to reap the best of both worlds!

The Prerequisite Program

Before you go all out and start an intense workout program, it’s important to get your body ready by increasing your daily movement to “active” levels.

Turn mundane activities into a calorie burner! Walk and bike around more, especially if you only have to travel a mile or two. Go out to your garden and use hand tools instead of machine-powered tools. Play with the kids more and turn the TV off. Stand more during the day, including when you’re scrolling on your phone or laptop.

All of this combined movement and physical activity burns calories and slightly works your aerobic energy pathway to boost your fitness levels for the beginner workout plan for weight loss!

Advancing to the Beginner Workout Plan for Weight Loss

While physical fitness entails a huge range of skills and energy systems, 3 factors need to be addressed in a beginner workout plan for weight loss:

• Flexibility (stretching and mobility)
• Aerobic training (cardio)
• Calisthenics (bodyweight resistance training)

You can create a program that integrates all of this into one 30-minute workout per day. Here’s how each of these factors should be addressed.

Flexibility and Mobility Exercises

Staying at home has naturally caused a lack of physical activity, and flexibility and mobility suffer because of it. While static stretching isn’t particularly effective for most people, active mobility and flexibility training is quite useful and can double as a cardio workout for weight loss if you try hard enough! Yoga, pilates, and simple mobility drills work great to improve flexibility and mobility in muscles and joints and should be practiced daily.

Aerobic Training

You can do low-intensity cardio for hours on end or use high-intensity interval training (HIIT) for similar results in a much shorter time.

HIIT is a mix of all-out exercise and short recovery periods repeated for a specific amount of sets instead of a steady-effort exercise session like jogging.

Calisthenics

Bodyweight strength training is sufficient to elicit the benefits of resistance training in beginners. Squats, push-ups, pull-ups, lunges, and the like are efficient at burning calories and creating demand for repair and recovery within the muscles to build more muscle mass, which burns more calories at rest. Calisthenics are a must-have in this program!

Putting It All Together

For 30 minutes (not including warm-up or cool-down), you can perform a circuit, rotating a mobility drill, cardio exercise, and calisthenics exercise, with timed rest periods. Here is the most basic example:

• Groiners (mobility drill) – 1 minute focusing on the optimal form
• 1-minute rest
• Burpees – 1 minute for max reps
• 1-minute rest
• Lunges – 1 minute for max reps
• 1-minute rest

Repeat this cycle 5 times. You can keep the same exercises or pick different ones each round. Here are some of the most common exercises for each category: Mobility

• Groiners
• Inchworm
• Walking hip openers
• Cat and cow
• Frog stretch
• Downward dog to upward dog

HIIT

• Burpees
• Jumping jacks
• Mountain climbers
• Sprints
• Bounding
• Jump squats

Calisthenics

• Lunges
• Push-ups
• Pull-ups
• Squats
• Crunches
• Nordic hamstring curls

Use variety when you feel the workout becoming tedious, and always strive to make progress. This is a simple design that is great for a weight loss journey.

Key Takeaways:

• The best beginner workout plan for weight loss can be done at home with no equipment.
• It needs to include mobility, HIIT, and resistance training in the form of calisthenics.
• While not required, a circuit-style workout can combine all these factors of physical fitness efficiently and effectively.
• Change exercises up and how you perform them to keep the calorie burn high and boost weight loss.
• Don’t forget that diet is more important than exercise for weight loss. This program will work great if you count calories and macronutrients while implementing an intermittent fasting protocol.