Muscle up to lose weight!

Hey all. I just wanted to share a really informative article on the benefits of strength training. I love strength training, and I find it much more enjoyable than cardio! I have cut and pasted it below in case there are any problems with the link.




INCREASING your lean muscle mass can help speed up your body’s fat-burning ability and could be your key to permanent weight loss. By Linda Drummond

Evidence continues to accumulate on the benefits of adding some type of resistance or strength training to your workouts. With benefits that spread across the health spectrum, researchers now believe strength training can play a vital role in long-term weight loss. 

Miriam Nelson, author of Strong Women Stay Slim (Bantam Books) and a researcher at Tufts University in the US, found that women who followed a weight-loss diet combined with weight-training exercises lost 44 per cent more fat than women who only followed the diet.

“Researchers have discovered something disturbing: when women diet, at least 25 to 30 per cent of the weight they shed isn’t fat, but water, muscle, bone and other lean tissue,” Nelson says.
But strength training can help us to lose excess fat rather than vital tissue.

Muscle up
Melbourne-based exercise physiologist Trent Malcolm says: “People on low-kilojoule crash diets slow their metabolic rate and their lean muscle mass will deteriorate. Losing weight on these low-kilojoule diets can also exaggerate the sagging and softness of the skin when it’s not filled out with lean muscle mass.”

Kerry Warnholtz says she’s noticed a huge difference since she started weight training with a program devised by Ideal Bodies Online in July 2008.

“Your strength and energy increases and, after about six weeks, you start to see some muscle definition and lose body fat.”

Malcolm says metabolism is, for the most part, determined by our body’s lean muscle mass. “One kilogram of muscle will burn about 627 to 1465 kilojoules per day, while 1kg of fat only burns about 20 to 40 kilojoules per day.”

So it makes sense to try to not only preserve lean muscle mass, but increase it.

“It takes a while for your metabolism to kick in, but when it does it’s like a freight train,” says Warnholtz, who lost more than 15kg and reshaped her body to become leaner at 40 than she was at 20. Now that she’s reached her ideal weight, Warnholtz says her metabolism works well. Even after indulging, she says it’s easy to get back on track again.

After the age of 20, our lean muscle mass starts to deteriorate. Without training we can lose between 2.2 and 3.2kg of lean muscle every 10 years. Without lean muscle, our skin can sag and the texture appear less defined. You don’t need to build large muscles. As little as 1.4kg of lean muscle can increase your resting metabolism by about seven per cent.

Whether you want to build or maintain your lean muscle mass, it’s important to train smart, Malcolm says. Spot-training isn’t effective. You need to work large muscle groups with moderate weight to see success. “The most important thing is the intensity,” Malcolm says. “Use as much energy as possible with multiple body parts. Toning is more about losing body fat than building muscles.”

Body benefits
Michael Cunico, New South Wales fitness manager at Fitness First, says we need to move beyond the number on the scales and think about the change in clothing size and other benefits of developing lean muscle mass.

“Strength training doesn’t need any equipment; simple body-weight training can be extremely beneficial in building lean muscle,” Cunico says.

During any workout you burn fat, but with strength training you elevate your metabolism and continue to burn fat for up to 39 hours afterwards. So if you do some form of strength training every second day, you can knock your metabolism into high gear.

Strength training can also help create stronger bones, prevent injuries, increase balance, flexibility and mobility, and it has mental health benefits too.
Find a strength-training program that suits you. Perform some body-weight exercises after your walk (try squats, lunges, tricep dips, push-ups and the plank), take up Pilates, hit the gym for a circuit or Pump class, or ask an exercise physiologist to help you devise a plan.

Myths dismissed
• Women who lift weights get bulky muscles. Genetics has a role in building muscles, says Trent Malcolm. “Females don’t have the levels of hormones required for significant muscle mass.”
• When I stop training my muscles will turn to fat. Fat and muscle are different tissues, Malcolm says. “When you stop training muscles, they will reduce in size and tone. So keep working them.”
• To build lean muscle, use small weights and do lots of repetitions. “Low-intensity training and isolating muscles won’t burn fat,” says Malcom. “Increase the intensity and use moderately heavy weights.”