I have recently learned that there is considerable research that indicates that exercise is most effective for causing weight loss when there are a number of simple exercises that together exercise the whole body.
But that is not the whole story. A routine must be devised in which each exercise is done for a fixed, short period before immediately switching to the next exercise. And that the entire routine must be repeated for a few times to occupy about 15 or 20 minutes. This routine is then followed three times a week.
There are two more significant considerations:
Each exercise must be adjusted for the fitness of the person doing it. For example, someone old and out of shape like me should not try to do ordinary pushups. instead of doing pushups from toes with the body rigid from head to foot I should do pushups from my knees until I have increased my strength and fitness until I can do reguar pushups.
Each exercise should be done as rapidly as possible until rest is required, at which point rest should be maintained until desire to continue returns. For example, I might do five pushups really fast with all my muscles tight and hard before having to rest, and this might take 10 or 15 seconds while my rest period takes more or less for a combined duration of, say 20 seconds so that if the duration for this exercise is 60 seconds the entire cycle can be repeated for a total of three times before moving to the next exercise in the routine.
An effective exercise plan would require four or five individual exercises, each of which can be done several times in a minute or even thirty or forty-five seconds. These exercises would follow one another so that an entire repetition would require five minutes or less. Depending upon the length of each repetition (which is fixed by the exercise plan) the plan might call for three to five repetitions in the total time alloted (fifteen to twenty minutes) for a single day’s exercise.
The exercise plan should be done on alternate days, three times a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday or Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, etc.)
Exercise plans can be constructed from the information obtained by Googling “Free Whole Body Workouts” or something similar.
As with every post I make here, if you chose to “Try this at home” the results, good or bad, are your responsibility. I AM NOT offering advice, just information.
The foregoing is an edited copy of a post on my essentially inactive website, http://CharleysDomain.com, so please do not flag it as plagerism. I wrote it. It's mine. And I have the right to reproduce it here or anywhere.