Strength Training for Fat Loss
Thursday, May 29th, 2008Cardio alone won’t guarantee a six-pack and a firm butt. Learn how to lose that stubborn fat and sculpt your body.
Most of us want to lose a little bit of body fat, and we’ve been conditioned into believing that cardiovascular exercise is the best way: the harder we go, the more calories we burn. However, while we’re exercising we should not obsess over how many calories we are expending. Instead, our goal should be to train our bodies to burn a higher number of calories all the time, even when we are at rest.
When you work out, your body’s metabolic rate (a measure of its efficiency in maintaining basic life processes like breathing, digestion, etc) raises. When you finish training, there is a flow-on effect, where your metabolism — your body’s engine room — stays elevated for some time. Over a period of time as you train regularly, you progressively condition your metabolism to operate faster, even when you are not working out, which means you burn more calories continually and keep body fat under control.
Running will make you sweat and it is valuable cardiovascular exercise, but it expends a disappointing 75 calories per kilometer on average and doesn’t stimulate significant muscle development. Strength training doesn’t burn a high amount of calories either while you’re performing it. But when you push a muscle to failure, you set off a cascade of physiological changes. As the muscle recovers over the next two days — when you feel like an old person, temporarily — it will thicken, and the new muscle tissue will demand sustenance (i.e., a higher expenditure of calories). By the time you add on three pounds, or a mere 1.37 kg of lean muscle, your body would have required an extra 9000 calories a month just to break even.
Alongside this, if you can hold your diet steady you will be vaporizing body fat. Yes, I can hear you thinking, “I have to put on weight in the form of muscle to lose fat?” Well, kind of. But don’t forget to factor in your 1.37kg of muscle, which takes some time to build, but will be demanding your metabolism to work faster and virtually eat away at the fat. So, in effect, you add muscle to take away fat. Muscle weighs heavier than fat, and in theory, if you gain muscle and stay the same on the scale it suggests that you have lost significantly more fat than the muscle you have gained.