Muscles and Metabolism Aerobic activity is great for your heart and lungs. For many, it can be a meditative way to clear the mind, blow off stress and get in touch with nature. For others, it’s a challenging and invigorating competitive sport. But as a tool for getting leaner, aerobic exercise by itself is a mediocre strategy. Here’s the problem: To lose weight, you must burn more calories than you eat. Stay in a calorie-deprived state long enough, and your body begins to burn through its own tissues for fuel. Presto! The number on the scale goes down. You can make that number drop through aerobic exercise and calorie restriction. But what most bathroom scales won’t tell you is how much of the weight you lose is in the form of fat, and how much of it is muscle. And losing muscle mass can sabotage your weight-loss efforts. Muscle contraction is a primary engine of fat loss, explains Stella: The more muscle mass you have to contract, the more calories you can burn. In addition, strength-training workouts that take large muscle groups to a state of burn will increase the release of hormones that aid in reducing body fat. So anyone who wants to lose fat should make every effort to hang on to, and even gain, as much lean muscle mass as possible. The best way to do that is resistance training, which will help you hold on to your muscle tissue while you lose fat. You might even gain some muscle while you’re restricting your calories, as long as you’re getting enough protein. (Stella recommends a gram of protein per pound of lean body weight per day, which requires an individual to know his or her body fat percentage.) In turn, this extra muscle keeps your metabolism humming, even as restricted food intake threatens to slow it down.
Posted on: Sat, 05 Oct 2013 10:12:32 +0000
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