Many times, when one begins a new fat loss regime; they focus on
dieting (hopefully intelligent dieting, not fad diets or very low
calorie diets) and hopefully an exercise regime. Most of the
time, to accomplish fat loss, people seem to believe that aerobic
(aka. cardio) training in addition to a moderate reduction in
calories is the best course of action to accomplish this. The
main goal is to create a caloric deficit through these methods so
that the body must use fat stores to make up for the deficit,
therefore accomplishing fat loss. However, many times people run
into a plateau that is caused by the lowering of the metabolism
due to muscle loss because of the new diet and exercise regime.
This lowering of the metabolism is known as the starvation
response. You've experienced this if you've ever tried to lose
fat before and eventually, even though you may have tried very
hard, you seemed to not be able to lose anymore fat.
Aerobic training is the chief way you will burn fat during
exercise, and will greatly help to avoid the starvation response
compared to changing the diet alone (dieting only, without any
exercise will cause it to a much greater degree - but that is the
subject for another article - you can find more information at
http://www.weight-loss-resources.com). However, dieting and
training aerobically can still eat away some of your muscle
anyway - unless you know what you're doing. When one weight
trains in addition to cardio and intelligent dieting, the body
signals a response to keep muscle. Because muscle is one of the
major factors that dictates your metabolism at rest, keeping
muscle will help you to steer clear of the dreaded starvation
response.
In my opinion, the weight lifting part of your exercise program
should be the core - it is the meat. While aerobic training is
like the steak sauce that goes along with your meat. Cardio is
not totally necessary, but it will increase your rate of fat loss
in comparison to dieting and weight lifting alone. Weight
lifting will increase your muscle mass (cardio does not), which
increases your resting metabolism, which helps you to create a
healthy caloric deficit. One pound of muscle will burn an
additional 35 to 50 calories per day. So, simply gaining 4
pounds of muscle is approximately equivalent to walking for an
hour each day. Also, during a weight lifting workout, you are
burning calories anyway - don't think that lifting weights does
not use up your energy. Another spiffy benefit of weight training
is its effect on the body after the workout. This is known as
the glowing effect or EPOC - which stands for exercise post
oxygen consumption. Essentially, your body must recover from the
muscle tears you just imposed upon it, and that requires calories
too.
One thing that strict dieting and aerobic exercise can do is
cause people to lose so much fat and muscle (as stated before),
that a skinny, yet unhealthy and unattractive look is created.
In the sense of attractiveness, skinny may look better than fat,
but when you have a low body fat percentage and also a healthy
dose of muscle tone (male or female), you feel and look much more
attractive and healthier (the healthier you look, the more
attractive you look) to the opposite sex.
It seems that one reason that many women avoid weight training is
for fear that they will become "bulky". More than likely, this
belief was created after seeing some overly (and sometimes manly)
muscular fitness models on T.V. and in magazines. Well, 99% of
those women probably take some sort of hormone or steroid
compound; otherwise they wouldn't look as manly as they do. They
also follow extremely strict diet and training regimes to attain
that level of fitness. However, if you are a woman you probably
aren’t going to be doing or taking the things those people do.
Even if you really wanted to, you would have trouble looking like
that. Weight training will not do that to you - even if it did,
you can easily stop or turn your weight training regime into a
maintenance phase. You are in total control of how muscular you
want to become.
If you're goal is fat loss, remember to incorporate weight
training into your exercise regime along with cardio and
intelligent dieting. The combination of these three things is
the key to achieving your goals and sculpting your body without
hitting plateaus. You have nothing to lose by weight training
except the fat. You can find more information on achieving your
weight loss goals at http://www.weight-loss-resources.com.
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