Carbohydrate-Guide

If you believe that aerobic exercise is superior in this regard, then you are among 99% of the population - and you are, oops, wrong. What Kind of Exercise Should You Do? This is one of the more basic questions concerning exercise, and yet most people have it wrong. Of the two categories of exercise, aerobic exercise and resistance exercise:

Which is more effective for reducing body fat?

If you believe that aerobic exercise is superior in this regard, then you are among 99% of the population - and you are, oops, wrong.

Aerobic exercise, because it promotes cardiovascular health, is a critical component of any fitness program. In terms of fat loss, however, aerobic exercise ranks second. Progressive resistance training is your most effective tool for shedding excess body fat, and keeping it off permanently.

The notion that treadmills and stairmasters are the best means of reducing body fat and that weight training is beneficial solely toward the objective of building muscle, is a time-honored and unfortunate misconception. At the core of this false belief is the fact that, as explained above, aerobic exercise engages a bioenergetic pathway that is conducive to fat burning; whereas resistance exercise engages the anaerobic pathway, which entails the burning of fuel sources other than fat.

In other words, aerobic exercise burns more fat than resistance exercise, while you are exercising.

But that is not the end of the story - it’s the beginning.

The greater portion of fat loss benefits accrue between not during exercise sessions. The hormonal and metabolic forces set into motion as a result of your motions in the gym can have an effect for many hours after your workout ends.

Both aerobic and resistance exercise raise metabolic rate for a period of time after exercise ceases. But studies show that resistance exercise is substantially more powerful in this regard, with post-exercise metabolic elevation persisting for 15 hours and sometimes for as long as 24 or even 48 hours after a resistance training session ends. Intensity is the key factor accounting for why weight training outdistances endurance training as a metabolic stimulus.

Evidence suggests that duration is linearly, whereas intensity is exponentially, related to post-exercise metabolic elevation. The practical import is that:

1) Higher-intensity/lower-duration exercise will burn more calories after the workout than will lower-intensity/higher-duration exercise, even where the amount of calories burned during the workout is equivalent.

2) Two, more intense training sessions of lesser duration will burn more calories overall (during + after) than will one less intense training session of greater duration.

The extensive post-exercise metabolIc elevation that prevails in the wake of an intense resistance training session stems from the fact that if done properly, resistance training initiates a restoration/recovery process in which depleted energy compounds, like glycogen and creatine phosphate, are replenished and muscle tissue is repaired and rebuilt. Anabolic and catabolic hormones orchestrate this energy-intensive recovery process. “Energy-intensive” means requires additional energy (calories) = higher metabolic rate. But resistance training does not stop there.

Not only does resistance training increase your overall metabolic rate, but it can also increase the percentage of fat burned relative to sugar. How can resistance training accomplish this? By prompting the release of growth hormone, which shifts your metabolism into a fat-burning mode.

A well-designed resistance training program is a potent stimulator of growth hormone (whereas a poorly designed one can suppress growth hormone). In men, resistance training can also increase testosterone levels; and testosterone, like growth hormone, is a lipolytic (fat-mobilizing) hormone.

Aerobic exercise, too, can positively influence hormone levels, but not nearly as effectively as resistance training. The post-exercise metabolic increase and the hormonal enhancement effects are the short-term-fat-Ioss benefits of resistance exercise. The long-term benefits are even more impressive.

In addition to giving your body shape and firmness, muscle is intimately involved in fat burning. At the cellular level, muscle is the locus of fat burning. Specifically, muscle cells contain structures called mitochondria, which are tiny organic furnaces that produce energy from fatty acids and glucose. And a direct relationship exists between muscle mass and metabolic rate.

Therefore, the more muscle tissue you have, the more calories you burn, even at rest.

Muscle is vital, dynamic tissue churning with busy activity: protein synthesis, glycolysis, and fatty acid oxidation are just a few of the activities that regularly go on inside muscle cells.

Fat, on the other hand, is basically inert - it just sits there. Per ounce, muscle takes-up less space and uses-up more calories.

Muscle enhances the functional ability of the body; fat diminishes the functional ability of the body by burdening it with dead weight. Muscle tissue possesses an extensive capillary network allowing the heart to pump blood through the muscles with relative ease; adipose tissue is much less vascular and thus taxes the heart.

As you can see, muscle is “high-maintenance tissue,” requiring a steady supply of energy (calories) and oxygenated blood. By contrast, fat is “low-maintenance tissue,” requiring less energy and less blood. Not only does muscle “cost” more energy to maintain than fat, but muscle contributes less energy to your survival.

In other words, whereas fat is an excellent energy source, muscle is a poor energy source. Muscle must be broken down to its constituent amino acids, and the amino acids must be converted to glucose - and after all that work, glucose yields less than half as much energy as does fat. This explains why, when under duress, the body readily jettisons muscle. Faced with the potentially life-threatening calorie restriction (which is how your body perceives it), the body eagerly unloads “energy-costly” muscle.

The point is not that you should dispense with aerobic exercise - quite the contrary.

• Cardiovascular fitness is essential to good health, and aerobic exercise promotes cardiovascular fitness.

• Furthermore, endurance training enhances the body’s capacity to use fat for fuel93.94.9s.96.97 by positively altering the function of fat-burning enzymes, called lipases.

• Thus, aerobic training and resistance training work together synergistically.

• By combining aerobic training with resistance training, you multiply the benefits of each, while avoiding the muscle loss associated with high volume aerobic-only exercise.

• And, by applying the principles of hormonally-intelligent exercise, you can achieve optimal results from only 2-4 hours total, per week.

• Is a couple of hours a week - out of 119 waking hours - too much to ask when the rewards are a stronger, sexier, healthier, more energized, better functioning body?

The lack of appreciation of the remarkable anti-aging, health, and fat loss benefits of resistance training is due, in large part, to the tardiness of health authorities in endorsing resistance training (there are still many benighted health authorities and doctors who have yet to awaken to its many benefits).

Among its benefits, resistance training not only builds muscle, but bone too. The importance of weight-bearing exercise for the skeletal system became evident when America sent men into space. Without gravity, astronauts rapidly lost bone mass.

Efforts to prevent bone loss by having astronauts pedal exercycles while in orbit met with failure; despite being young and exceptionally healthy, the astronauts’ bones disintegrated. This illustrated the need for weight stress in maintaining skeletal health.

Unfortunately, aerobic exercise performed on Earth also fails to maintain bone mass.

The Take Home:

For effective fat loss start a resistance weight training program.