How To Burn Fat While SLEEPING

It’s true, dieting helps you lose weight.  In combination with cardiovascular work and strength training, that is!  Most dieters know about the cycle that happens during dieting.  You start a diet, you reach the goal, you resort back to your "old" ways, then the weight comes back - FAST! Without adding other activities that preserve the gains you made through dieting, you find yourself back where you started.

Not a good sign when you want to lose weight and fit in your skinny jeans!

There is another way you can lose weight and keep it off.  Could it be a magic pill?  Or a new dieting breakthrough? No!  Its exercise!

Exercise does so many good things to the body.  You burn extra calories, strengthen your heart, and reduce blood pressure and cholesterol!  But I am not going to bore you with the wonderful benefits of exercise.  What I am going to do is this: show how, incorporating strength training exercise in combination with your diet and cardiovascular work, you can and WILL lose weight and keep it off!

Cardiovascular work helps burn a lot of calories in a short amount of time.  Even just walking you can burn up to 300 calories.  Increase the intensity, and you can expect to burn more!  

The most under used method in weight management is strength training.  Most people associate strength training with big muscles and getting “bulky."  This is not true in all cases.   Constantly this question or comment is heard from women and men at the gym, “I do not want to bulk up so I do not do weights!”  This is absolutely crazy!

Here are some of the benefits of strength training:

Increased Metabolism-Boosting Lean Mass

Yes!  This is a VERY good thing!  The more muscle mass you have, the more calories and energy you burn.  Adding resistance training leads to increased muscle mass, but this muscle burns extra calories at REST! You burn a lot of calories during a workout which can shrink your fat stores, but strength training goes a step further.  Research shows the more lean mass you have, the more calories you burn at rest.

You see, by using oxygen to fuel your cardio workouts, you end up with a “debt” that must be re-paid to the environment.   I won’t bore you every little detail, but here is the basic rundown.  When you work out doing cardio, you use oxygen as a way to make energy.  At the end of the workout, you need to “pay back” the oxygen you used.  How do you do this?  By having increased energy expenditure after your workout.  Result: more calories burned.  Having more muscle, you end up “paying back” your debt longer depending on different factors.  This results in more calories burned. 

Varying the intensity of the workout helps with overall calorie burn.

More Lean Mass Helps With Energy Expenditure, Even At Rest!

Some things are hardwired in us, which helps determine how many calories we need to burn to sustain ourselves during the day.  Basal metabolic rate determines the total number of calories we need to burn to sustain life at total rest.  An example: if your basal metabolic rate is 2,000 calories, then you need 2,000 calories just to function.  Your resting metabolic rate is very similar; but this has more to do with how many calories you need to sustain life without physical activity.   Strength training can directly impact both numbers. 

The more muscle mass you have, the higher your calorie needs become.  Different diets impact how we use energy and how much muscle mass we have.  A calorie-restricting diet leads to weight loss, but a good chunk of the weight loss is loss of muscle.  The result: decreased metabolism due to the loss of metabolism-enhancing lean muscle mass.

Research done by Kraemer et al., showed diet alone induced weight loss; but without the inclusion of strength or cardiovascular training, there was a significant decrease in fat free mass, or muscle tissue.  They also noted a decline in peak power output and strength due, again, to the loss of fat free mass.  

Including strength training not only helps you to lose weight and keep it off after completing a diet, but it also improves your resting metabolic rate.  Research done by Campbell et al., shows including strength training helps maintain muscle mass and increases resting metabolic rate.  Another thing they noticed: in order for the participants to handle the demand for energy with exercise and strength training, they had to eat more, which helped them lose more weight from the increased calories!  How can this be?

When energy expenditure increases, the need to increase calories becomes more apparent in order to keep losing weight. 

Not meeting the energy demand, shifts your body to a protective mechanism similar to if you were starving.   Starvation burns muscle tissue leading to a slower metabolism.   Your body does not want to burn muscle, but will do it if it needs to preserve fat tissue which has more stored energy.

Here are some of the best forms of strength training exercises you can include in your workout and diet program:

• Body weight exercises - great exercises which can be done anywhere and at anytime.  These exercises use your own body as resistance, giving you a complete workout at home or in the office. 

• Resistance bands - these can be purchased at any sporting goods store.  Bands can provide external resistance by looping the band to any solid object like a chair or doorframe.  You can get a full body workout without breaking the bank.

• Selectorized machines - these are the machines you see in most gyms.  A normal routine incorporates large compound exercises while progressing to more smaller, isolation exercises.  These machines target muscle tissue, but they lack the focus on supporting structures, which help in joint stability. 

• Functional equipment - these are exercises which focus on functional movement patterns and movements you do every day.   Functional exercises provide strength and stability, making you stronger at normal tasks you would do throughout the day. 

• Free weight exercises - these exercises utilize external resistance by using bars, dumbbells and plates.  These exercises are great to develop strength and increase muscle size or tone.  They also help support the joints, by adding strength to tendons and ligaments.

Now ladies, do not be worried!  Strength training will not add bulk, but will make you stronger so it is easier to do every day activities.  Adding strength training into your routine helps tone muscles, resulting in increased and sustained calorie expenditure.  Incorporating strength training will increase the size of muscle you have, which equals more calories burned, resulting in more weight lost.