Football is a great sport for losing weight because it works your muscles and your heart in alternative ways. Playing football builds more muscle mass and burns more fat by recruiting both slow-twitch and fast-twitch muscle fibers. As a cardio workout, playing football burns more calories than typical workouts because you're forced to switch between using your aerobic and anaerobic energy pathways making it a perfect hiit ( high intense interval training) exercise. Unlike some cardio activities, Football builds and preserves muscle, firing up your metabolism instead of encouraging muscle loss.
Burn Calories
Playing football game burns about 263 calories in just half an hour for a 155-pound person. To lose weight, you have to burn more calories than you consume. To be more exact, you have to burn 3,500 calories to lose 1 pound of fat. Therefore, if you play football for an hour three times a week, you can burn an extra 1,500 calories each week, and lose 2 pounds each month from football alone. Because a football game requires you to constantly exert effort at various levels of intensity, it gives you an aerobic and anaerobic workout. By constantly switching between using those energy systems, you burn more calories.
Build Muscle
Playing football works both fast-twitch during explosive movements and slow-twitch muscle fibers during aerobic activity, and working more muscle fibers stimulates more muscle growth. You use every major muscle group for football
, and challenge your lower body in particular, including your glutes, hamstrings, quads and calves. The more muscle mass you have, the higher your metabolism, so by building up your large muscle groups efficiently, you'll burn more fat even off the field.