Teaching you how to achieve superior health, leanness and performance.
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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May 20th, 2008 Milan
Is your weight loss program right?
Here is my check list for you, to find out if you are on right track.
A desirable weight loss program:
- provides at least 1200 calories per day for normal adults to meet their normal nutritional requirements
- includes balanced nutrition – foods acceptable to the dieter from the viewpoints of sociocultural background, usual habits, taste, cost, and ease in acquisition and preparation
- provides a negative calorie balance (not to exceed 500 to 1000 calories per day), resulting in gradual weight loss of no more than 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram) per week, without metabolic abnormalities
- eliminates dieting habits that contribute to improper nutrition
- includes an endurance exercise program of at least 3 sessions per week, 20 – 45 minutes per session, at a minimum of 60% of maximum heart rate
- Includes an resistance exercise program of at least 2 sessions per week, where all major muscle parts are exercised intensively – multi joint, core exercises to provide a muscle development
- provides for new eating and physical activity habits that can be continued for life to maintain the achieved lower body weight
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March 25th, 2008 Milan
When you start with exercise program and you resistance train, gaining weight is possible, you gain muscle and muscle weighs more than fat.
For beginners, you will notice some weight gain at the beginning of a work out cycle because of the dramatic increase of lean muscle mass, but these will later decrease as your body settles into it’s new frame and you stay active and follow your exercise program.
The important thing is the improvement of your body composition and health.
For example, when I stop working out, I will lose about 10 pounds in a month not doing anything. But I will lose muscle mass, which is not good. I will probably gain that weight back if I don’t exercise for a long period of time, but it will be fat.
The point is, you want to gain healthy muscle mass, which makes your body a very efficient calorie burning machine. And when you gain that active muscle mass weight in the beginning of your workout cycle, that will increase your metabolism and those muscle engines will burn that fat your body stores.
How far you can go with this is up to you. Combination of both consistent and intensive – resistance training and cardiovascular exercise and proper nutrition will dramatically increase your body’s potential to burn the energy that is being stored.
Read also: Why fad diets don’t work
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March 23rd, 2008 Milan
People are usually looking to achieve fat reduction, not a muscle reduction.
You could be 120 pounds and look completely out of shape while someone who is 150 pounds and has significantly lower body fat will have a much leaner physique and a healthier body composition.
Optimal combination of three key factors each dependent on the other to lose fat and gain lean muscle mass will contribute to your search for perfect body:
1. Nutrition – regulate the energy that goes to your body
2. Cardiovascular Exercise - increase the amount of energy burned
3. Resistance Training - build active muscle mass and develop muscular endurance
Imagine you are on a healthy balanced diet of wholesome foods and the energy you consume is 2000 calories a day. Since you do not exercise, I will assume that your body’s metabolic rate , the rate at which your body expends the energy at rest or sleep, is 1500 calories. That means that you accumulate 500 calories every day minus your daily activity.
Now, let’s add the resistance training. When you build some muscle mass, it will increase your body’s potential energy use to, let say 1700 calories (1 pound of muscle needs about 50 calories/day just to maintain it) + you burn another 200 calories while you work out. Already you decreased the energy you accumulate from 500 calories per day to 100 calories.
Finally, lets add the cardiovascular exercise assuming an expenditure of 300 calories on treadmill or any other cardio exercise. You are now loosing 200 calories every day.
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February 11th, 2008 Milan
Building just a few pounds of muscle in your body helps you get rid of fat much faster, then only by dieting.
Muscle exponentially speeds up the fat busting process:
1 pound of muscle requires your body to burn up to 50 extra calories a day just to maintain that muscle.
Now think about what happens if you add a mere 6 pounds of muscle over the course of a diet program.
It will take your body up to 300 extra calories a day just to feed that muscle; essentially, you’ll burn of an extra pound of fat every ten days without doing a thing.
When you combine exercise with the foods that most promote muscle growth, the ones that keep you full, and the ones that give your body a well-balanced supply of nutrients, you will be exactly where you want to be:
You will turn your fat into muscle.
Build in a little additional muscle every week – through eating the right foods (lean protein, high fiber diet) and doing muscle building, fat burning exercise plan (workout plan consisted of multi core exercises with combination of cardiovascular exercises), and you’ll have invested in a lean and strong body that can last a lifetime, because your new muscle will continually break down fat to stay alive.
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