The science we’ve been told is simple. If you take in less calories than you burn, you’ll loose weight. So, eating less than you burn, or burning more than you take in via exercise – or combining both – is the typical route we all try to take to loose weight. And, it works…for awhile. But, this type of program is hard to maintain for the long term. Is there a better way? Yes – if you want to loose fat fast – and keep it off, try a heavy weight lifting program while actually eating more food.
Here’s why. The more muscle you have, the more energy, i.e. fuel it takes to maintain that muscle. But, more muscle means a faster, fuel-burning metabolism, that burns fat. So what you’re doing for your fitness program is not a fat-burning program, but a muscle-retention program. You want to keep muscle – and add muscle, to improve your body’s fat burning engine!
What ends up happening when you reduce your caloric intake during your exercise program, is you do burn fat in the short term – but you also end up loosing muscle. So, if you’ve been trying to loose weight with a low-calorie / high-cardio program, this is why you loose fat in the short term, but may end up putting it back in in the long term.
So, if you’re focusing on what you eat, rather than how your workout program should work with your diet, you’re missing the exercise part. And, you may also miss out on both short term and long term benefits, such as improved cardiac function, improved muscle metabolism, improved metabolic flexibility, increased resting metabolic rate, decreased resting heart rate, improved heart rate variability, lower stress, increased bone density!
Which is why a heavy lifting weights is important to your program. Cardio programs, and/or low weight / high rep weight lifting programs tend to be great for building endurance, and should be a part of your overall exercise program. But the addition of lifting heavier weights with lower reps, helps you build muscle and keep existing muscle – which is important to keeping your fat-burning engine running at full speed.
And, when it comes to your diet – a higher protein, reasonable carb & fat diet should be designed to provide you not only the fuel to give you energy for your workouts, but the higher protein (i.e. 20-20 grams of protein per serving) serves to help your muscles recover and build during your first post workout recovery.
Thinking of putting a home gym together to do weight training in your own home? For more information about buying your own home gym, or any new fitness equipment for your Phoenix area home, contact Fitness 4 Home Superstore today and we’ll be happy to match you up with the perfect piece of exercise apparatus – cardio, strength, core or flexibility.
