Excercise Differently

I'm sure you've noticed that when you go to the gym everyone always seems to race for the treadmills, stationary bikes and elliptical trainers. It seems like everyone wants a cardiovascular aerobic workout. After all, the more you sweat the more fat you burn right? Well, in a way, yes. Cardiovascular training burns a lot of calories. In fact it burns more calories than strength training or other exercises like pilates or yoga. But when it comes to weight control, aerobic exercise doesn't quite cut it. Here's why. Cardiovascular exercising builds no muscle. And as we've discussed before adding just a half a kilogram of muscle burns an extra 50 calories per day. Add 2.75kg of muscle and you're burning a whopping 300 more calories per day. Just like a car, your body runs on fuel. When you're doing low intensity cardiovascular exercises like running or jogging, the fuel your body is running on is called glycogen. (The stored form of carbohydrate in the muscles and liver) When you continue for 20 minutes or longer your body runs out and it begins to look for other fuel that it can burn. And the next best thing to burn is protein. Your body actually begins to eat up muscle tissue by converting it to protein and burning it up for fuel. So by burning protein you're not only losing the opportunity to be burning fat, you're also depleting your body of fat burning muscle. Less muscle mass equals slower metabolism which in turn makes it more difficult to lose weight. But weight, there's more. A study was conducted to see the amount of calories burned when strength training and doing cardiovascular aerobic exercises. The study concluded that during the exercises the aerobic burned far more calories than the strength training. Although weight lifters didn't burn as many calories during the exercises, Their bodies kept burning up fat for the next 48 hours compared to the 30-60 minutes for cardiovascular. After the weigh lifters were done there bodies were burning calories for 2 days! and the aerobic guys only for another 30 - 60 minutes! This phenomenon is known as afterburn. Thats why part of our plan will be to add fat burning muscle to our bodies. Like I said before, you don't have to worry. You're not going to turn into one of those gigantic WWF wrestlers. Just adding a couple of kilograms of muscle can make a huge difference!