The Best Exercise for Dropping Weight

The best exercise for dropping weight is one that you'll actually do on a regular basis. Adding exercise to poor dietary habits is usually not enough to lose significant weight -- only 1 percent of the members of the National Weight Control Registry, a group of more than 10,000 individuals who have successfully lost an average of 66 pounds and kept it off for five or more years, used exercise solely for weight loss. In addition to dietary changes, the majority of these successful losers used walking as their exercise for weight loss, but almost any cardiovascular exercise can help you burn calories to lose weight and, most importantly, keep it off for the long run.

Go For Cardio

Cardiovascular exercise is any movement done for a sustained period of time that uses the largest muscles of the body to raise the heart rate. Cardio is usually the best option for dropping weight because it burns the most calories per session -- and creating a 3,500-calorie deficit between what you eat and burn results in a pound of weight loss.

Kick It Up

Steady-state cardio -- in which you go along at a consistent pace for an entire workout -- is not the most effective way to drop pounds, however. Alternate drills that involve a minute or two of all-out effort and easy effort for the duration of your workout to encourage your body to burn more fat, advises Stephen A. Boucher of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of New South Wales, in a paper published in the 2011 issue of the "Journal of Obesity."

Lift It

Strength-training workouts are not huge calorie burners, but when you do resistance training twice per week for all the major muscle groups, over time you increase the amount of lean mass on your body. This change in body composition makes you look leaner and can help you burn slightly more calories all day long -- helping you drop pounds in the long run.