How to Lose Weight With a Fitness Ball

Many people who want to improve their health try to lose weight. In addition to losing weight, you will likely need to tone your muscles. By using a fitness ball, you can strengthen muscles groups including the core muscles and the upper body. If you combine a fitness ball with an overall fitness regimen, you will lose weight, increase your energy and improve your appearance.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Plan Your Exercise Routine

1. Assess your current eating and exercise habits. By taking stock of the amount and type of food that you consume each day, you can determine whether you need to alter your diet to lose weight. If you reduce the number of calories you consume each day and work out with a fitness ball, you can begin to lose weight and tone your body.
2. Identify the parts of your body that you want to tone. In the process of losing weight, you can also use a fitness ball to engage in exercise that will strengthen particular parts of the body. In addition to losing weight, you can gain a leaner appearance, increase your endurance and increase your strength.

Improve Your Health with a Fitness Ball

3. Begin a cardiovascular exercise program. Cardiovascular exercise burns calories as fuel, ultimately reducing the number of calories that can be stored as fat or using existing stores of fat. This will raise your heart rate so that you continue to burn calories when you engage in exercises with a fitness ball.
4. Engage in specific exercises with your fitness ball based on the parts of your body that you want to target. Fitness balls are commonly used to work the core abdominal and back muscles. You can also use them to target the legs, chest, shoulders and arms.
5. Increase the difficulty of your fitness ball exercises. You can add free weights, increase the number of repetitions or increase the number of sets based on your fitness goals. As your workouts become more rigorous, you will continue to burn calories and lose weight.
6. Give your body time to heal itself. You may want to take at least 1 day off each week from using a fitness ball to lose weight. Alternatively, you can exercise different parts of your body on different days to provide each muscle group the rest that it needs.

Tips & Warnings

• Using a fitness ball for strength training following a cardiovascular workout will make your routine more effective than performing strength training and aerobic exercises in isolation.