Lifting weights to lose fat - Questions and Answers ( 1st part )
July 7, 2008
Fundamentals of lifting weights to lose fat
Shouldn’t I lose all the fat first, then start weight training later?
No! If you diet without weight training, you’re almost always going to lose muscle. If you lose muscle, your resting metabolic rate will decrease. If your resting metabolic rate decreases, you burn fewer calories. If you burn fewer calories, you lose less fat and eventually plateau.
What if I don’t have time to do cardio and lift weights? Can I just do cardio?
If you’re expecting to give you some secret abbreviated routine, like “12 minutes a day to a better body” or some nonsense like what you read in the magazine ads these days, you’ve come to the wrong place. It’s time for someone to cut through the crap and tell the truth about how much effort it takes to develop a great physique.
If you’re a recreational lifter looking to lose a few pounds and “firm up”, your time commitment for weight training might be as little as three days a week for thirty
minutes a session. If you’re aspiring to become a bodybuilder or fitness competitor, or just look like one, the time commitment will be substantially more. You don’t get a body like Miss Fitness Olympia or Monica Brant from just “minutes a day” in the gym. Physiques of that caliber come from many hours spent in the gym – sometimes even two training sessions a day before competitions.
Do I have to join a gym or health club?
You can train anywhere you want. The major benefit of home training is convenience. If the time saving and convenience benefits of training at home help you
stick to your training program better, then by all means, work out at home. However, the more advanced you become, the more you’ll benefit from joining a health club.
What if I don’t want to get “bulky” or look like a bodybuilder?
It’s obvious that many people think building muscle mass is easy. Gaining muscle is far from easy. It’s a long, difficult process for everyone except the most genetically gifted. It’s even more difficult for women, who have less of the muscle-building hormone, testosterone.
This fear of “getting too big” usually comes from seeing pictures of professional bodybuilders in the magazines. Almost 100% of professional bodybuilders take steroids and other anabolic drugs to get abnormally large muscle mass. If you’ve ever seen pictures of female bodybuilders with massive, masculine-looking muscles (and faces), the odds are good that they were using steroids, male hormones, or other muscle enhancing drugs.
