To lose fat in the fastest manner possible you must concentrate on building lean, healthy muscle. The answer is not performing endless cardiovascular activity. I know that this advice probably flies in the face of what you've read or heard, or even what you feel is intuitively right. After all, doing lots of cardio is the best way to burn calories, right? No! Research shows that strength training gives you the most "bang for the buck" when compared to aerobic exercise. The reasons for this are many.
First, studies have shown that your body's metabolic rate is elevated for a longer period of time after completing a strength-training session, as compared to following an aerobic session. Scientists are not exactly sure why, but they theorize that there are greater metabolic demands made on your body during an intense weight-training session than a comparable aerobic workout. This increased demand causes your body to "ramp up" your metabolic rate to a much higher level and for a longer period of time than a comparable aerobic session.
For this reason alone, you should make exercising with weights your primary objective. But there are more reasons for a focus on weight training. Muscle, for example, is metabolically active. This means that your body must expend additional calories in order to support newly formed muscle tissue. For every 10 lbs of muscle you carry on your body, you have to expend about 350 extra calories each and every single day just to maintain it. This is a very significant statistic! Without performing any extra aerobic activity at all, your body is burning the caloric equivalent of 26 minutes of stair climbing on a Stairmaster. In other words, by having 10 extra pounds of muscle on your body you are burning the same number of calories as if you had completed a strenuous aerobic exercise session that day. The beauty of it is that, in actuality, you didn't do anything at all to burn those calories. The increased calorie-burn happens simply due to the increased lean muscle mass your body is carrying.
This also enables you to eat more food. Because you have a higher metabolic requirement, you also have to eat more nutrients in the form of good proteins, carbohydrates, and healthy fats in order to preserve the muscle you have accumulated on your body. There is absolutely no need to starve yourself in order to lose fat when you concentrate on gaining muscle. You're probably going to like this new way of dieting - "Eat more food and lose more fat." Though it doesn't sound possible, I assure you it is.
If you're a woman, please do not be afraid of the word muscle. Muscle is a key ally in your fat loss efforts. Genetically, there is a limited amount of muscle you can put on your body, irregardless of the women you see in magazines and on television that are so grotesquely muscled they almost look like men. Such women take artificial hormones that give them many times the muscle building potential than if they had trained without taking them. You won't have to worry about looking this way.
WHY AEROBICS ALONE DO NOT WORK
How many of you have seen those aerobic instructors that perform endless hours of daily cardio sessions from teaching their classes yet look as if they never worked out a day in their lives? Do most of these instructors have the type of body you're really looking to emulate? Very few have any kind of muscle tone and some even look overweight. I'm not knocking aerobics or instructors - I am simply pointing out a key fact for you to understand, namely that pure aerobic exercise alone will not give you the sort of sculpted body you are after.
Why do you suppose this is? Shouldn't endless amounts of aerobic exercise result in a lean and trim body? This way of thinking is a fallacy: you do not have to perform endless hours of aerobic exercise in order to get in really good shape. The fact is that aerobic exercise mainly reduces the size of your existing shape; it does little to reshape your body. So, if you start out with a pear-shaped body and do nothing but aerobic exercise as your sole means of exercise, you mainly end up looking like a smaller pear. Aerobic exercise, by itself, does nothing to reshape and sculpt your body like weight training can and will.
In fact, aerobic instructors today have incorporated hand weights and dumbbells into their aerobic instruction classes: they understand that pure aerobic exercise is not sufficient to accomplish the body changes most people seek. The superiority of weight training over aerobic exercise where it comes to changing one's look from pudgy to fit is indisputable. Though most aerobic programs mostly use weights that are too light to really do any good, it is a positive start in the right direction.
For women, weight training is the only type of exercise that will give you firmer, tighter legs, get rid of any cellulite you may have, tighten up and tone your butt and stomach, and broaden your shoulders slightly. For men, weight training can make dramatic differences in your body shape. Men have more of the hormones necessary for building muscle than women do, and as we train and get better at increasing thae forces on our body, our hormone levels increase, literally making you "more of a man." Aerobic exercise can not give you the chiseled abs, muscular arms, broadly defined shoulders, six-pack waist, and ripped legs that weight training will.
Also, too much aerobic exercise can actually diminish the capability to build muscle. Because aerobic exercise and weight training are at different ends of the exercise spectrum, the body develops different adaptive and metabolic mechanisms in response to the type of exercise you do.
Without going into a lengthy discussion of muscle fibers, it is sufficient to say that the types of muscle fibers that aerobic exercise targets do not respond very well to that sort of exercise. By contrast, weight training specifically targets highly responsive muscle cells that and can promote significant and major changes to your body composition - changes that will transform your body.
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