However, being strenuous is not the same that being efficient for losing weight. People use to correlate ‘I’m very tired’ with ‘This is gonna make me lose weight’. And it’s not that simple. Being strenuous means that probably you burnt quite a few calories exercising. But the calories that you burn while you exercise don’t make such a great difference. Actually, that’s what the article you linked several comments before said, and it was right about that.

What makes a difference is that you make your body burn more calories in your daily routines, or when you sleep, or when you sit in the coach. I’m not kidding. The more fit/muscled you are, the more calories you need to do the very same tasks. That’s why humans use to lose muscle when they don’t exercise: if you don’t require that power, muscles waste calories. If you were hunting or gathering your own food, you’d like your body to waste the bare minimum, because that way you will require less food to survive.

Actually, when you’re exercising to lose weight, you’re going against nature: you’re telling your body to build muscles and a fitness state aimed to burn as much calories as possible just standing still. Your body, that evolved in a world where food was scarce, opposes that.

Probably, that’s why running is not very good to lose weight: running was a very common task in prehistory, so it’s logical that human body has evolved to be very efficient in that task: and that means not wasting calories, ergo not losing weight. It makes sense that swimming is better to lose weight, since this task was quite unusual back then, and that means that human body didn’t evolve to be efficient at it.

(As a disclaimer: I’m realizing that it’s a bit more complicated than the rule of thumb I said before. My bad)

That’s pretty funny. Stretching. What a hoot. You are correct that you know nothing about ballet.

Actually, of course, there is stretching in ballet. But it’s a small part of it, although a vital one. Ballet is actually extremely strenuous if you do it at any sort of level other than beginner. Here’s one of many articles about it.

Ever heard of interval training for runners? Probably not. Good thing that all that hiking was not aerobic exercise. You prefer to swim. Great for you. Your experience is called anecdotal. To imply that serious ballet training/practice is “stretching” is a hoot. It seems that they have to work awful hard to make is seem effortless in performance.

My experience is that exercise works, but not every exercise works. It worked for me when I used to do workouts and it worked when I swam every day. That’s what any fitness guide says. Pure aerobic (like running or walking) never worked except when I used to hike (and that was like 10-12 hours in a row walking up and down the mountains).

My experience dovetails with the article, as do my observations. I’m sure it works for some people, but so does almost everything.

My observation is that I never lost an ounce of weight just from exercising, and I’ve done plenty of exercising in my life, exercising of all types. One example is that when I was a dancer I was exercising a great great deal. Didn’t matter. Some dancers are naturally thin but some are not. But a great many of them—and I was one of these—have to starve themselves to be thin.

It is true in particular for women, by the way. And the older one gets the more true it is.

Until, sometimes when people are old, they lose weight from muscle wasting and a generalized loss of the ability to take nourishment from food. That’s a big big problem in the very elderly. But that’s a different story.

For example, in the article you linked, it talks about how inefficient is running several days per week. Well… duh, if you check any resource about exercising, you’ll read that just running is a very BAD idea. Anaerobic exercise (like running) doesn’t build muscle, actually, it can destroy muscle (muscle tissue can be burnt faster than fat), and building some muscle is a key element when it comes to weight loss. Besides that, the set of muscles you exercise is a very small one. Not to say repetitive exercises (like just running) are injury-prone.

You wanna lose weight? Exercise the whole body, build some muscle (not too much if you’re a woman, but a minimum), combine anaerobic and aerobic. Change rhythm (if you run, sprint and stop, and sprint and stop, rinse and repeat). Choose wisely. If you wanna do just one thing, swimming is a very good combination. Running isn’t.

Exercise works. But if you wanna use only a few hours a week, you need to do it wisely. Make some research. It’s not just about doing, it’s what you do and how you do it.

Of course exercise burns calories. But in and of itself it doesn’t often lead to weight loss in the real world. Read the article I linked for some of the explanations.

That doesn’t mean that the exercise itself burns calories. Actually, that’s quite a small portion. What burns calories is the consequences of exercising: human body is designed to use the minimum energy required. If you’re fit, your body is burning more calories during the whole day to keep it. Actually, after going to gym, one of the moments you’re burning more calories is when you sleep, no kidding (that’s why it’s recommended to sleep well when you’re doing workouts).

It’s not the calories you burn exercising, but the additional calories you burn during the day when you’re fit what makes a difference.