Lift
Weights To Lose Fat
Author: Tom Venuto
Publisher: Fitness Renaissance
Most people believe that if your goal is fat loss, you
should start with aerobic workouts and lose the body fat
first before adding weight training. That is a big mistake
and here's why: Obviously, weight training is the chief
element in developing strength and muscle mass. What few
people realize is that weight training can also increase
fat loss dramatically, so by skipping the strength training
in favor of aerobic-only training, you are not increasing
your fat loss - you are slowing it down!"
Weight training is anaerobic and therefore burns primarily
carbohydrates (sugar) during the workout. Cardiovascular
exercises such as jogging, cycling, step classes, or stairclimbing
are aerobic and therefore burn primarily fat during the
workout. So it seems logical to focus on aerobic training
for fat loss. What you're missing if you skip the weight
training is the benefits that accrue after the workouts.
Something interesting happens "beneath the surface"
when you lift weights. Intense, progressive weight training
increases your lean body mass - aerobic training does not.
Excessive aerobics combined with low calorie dieting or
aerobic training without weight lifting can even cause muscle
loss. If you lose lean body mass, your metabolism slows
down, and this makes it easier to gain fat and harder to
lose it. If you increase your lean body mass, you increase
your basal metabolic rate, and fat loss becomes easier.
Best of all, you increase metabolism and fat burning even
when you're not working out...
Weight training provides an additional short term increase
in metabolic rate after the workout, called "excess
post exercise oxygen consuption" or EPOC for short.
It's a myth that "all exercise" keeps you burning
calories for hours after the workout. Only high intensity
exercise increases post workout energy expenditure substantially
and weight training has the greatest effect of all. (High
intensity cardio also has a high EPOC, but thats the subect
of another article). This explains why bodybuilders, who
train with weights religiously and have extremely high muscle
to fat ratios, can stay lean year round without doing much
aerobic work.
|
