March 7th, 2009 Milan
With weight reduction through dieting only, people loose not just fat mass, but a little bit of liver, heart, muscle, and other lean tissue.
Metabolism slows down, when you only diet. And you don’t want your metabolism to slow down while you are dieting. Yes, you loose weight, and than you’ll gain it back.
Your metabolism rate falls with weight loss. Metabolic rate falls, in part, because it’s closely linked to how much muscle and other lean tissue you have.
The only way to counter the slow down in metabolism is to exercise more. And the best way to increase your metabolism is to strength train and build lean muscle. Muscle is natural fat-burning mechanism, it is an active tissue so it consumes energy. 1 pound of muscle requires your body to burn up to 50 extra calories a day just to maintain it.
What doe’s more muscle mean for dieters? More food.
A higher calorie allowance makes it easier to stick to your eating plan – and you get more nutrients too.
Strength training – muscle building will help you maintain the weight loss you worked so hard for. You loose weight permanently. And that’s usually the hardest think to achieve.
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November 2nd, 2008 Milan
Intensive strength training has a bigger effect on metabolism – calorie burn and weight loss than endurance exercise.
Intensity is the most important factor determining post-workout metabolism, so the harder you work in the gym or on the beach the more calories your body will burn afterward.
People who intensively strength train achieve so called – post-workout fat oxidation. “Fat oxidation” is what happens when your body uses oxygen and fat cells to turn into energy.
Yes you burn more calories while you do your aerobic workout for an hour than lifting weights for an hour, but 13 hours after the intensive weight workout, the men and women are burning 20% more fat than they did 13 hours after the aerobic workout.
You would’ve need to burn twice as many calories during your aerobic workout, to reach the level of post-workout fat oxidation achieved by weight lifting.
Even if evidences show, that weight lifting is more effective to loose fat, you shouldn’t forget your aerobic exercise. Aerobic exercise is a part of well balanced exercise program that improves your cardiovascular system and keeps your heart healthy, plus it also burns a lot of calories too.
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July 14th, 2008 Milan
If you ask people in the gym what they want to accomplish with their fitness regimen, most of them would say that they want to lose weight. But they’d be wrong. Most of them want to look better: they want to tone their muscles, fit into a smaller size, which doesn’t always correlate to a drop in pounds.
Most people who say that they want to loose weight really want to increase muscle and reduce fat.
Tracking body composition (fat %) in addition to weight is the best way to do this, since it gives you a more accurate view of your success.
If you are starting a fitness program you may actually gain weight as you develop muscle. This can be very discouraging.
Using body fat measurements can help you see that you are closer to your goal. That helps to keep you motivated!
In addition to body fat, measuring the waist and waist-to-hip ratio provides accurate measure of success.
The goal is to keep yourself from getting stuck in the mindset that the scale is the best way to track your success. It’s not!
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