WeightLossDietSecrets

While good eating habits and aerobic exercise are an important part of optimum health, there’s no better way to transform your body than through strength training routines. Many forget about their muscles when this should be a major consideration.

Losing muscle is a bad thing. Did you know that the more muscle you have the more calories you will burn on any given day? Muscle tissue is very active and it burns a lot of calories.

Lean muscle mass burns through 35-50 calories per pound of muscle every single day. If you have 6 pounds of lean muscle, that muscle will burn about 300 calories a day. If you have 10 pounds of lean muscle mass, then your muscles burn about 500 calories a day. Can you see why adding lean muscle is the best way to lose fat?

Consider This - If you lose 16 pounds by following a reduced calorie diet, then you lose four pounds of muscle (on low-calorie diets, about 25 percent of the weight loss may be muscle). You would be burning 140 less calories per day (35 calories per pound of muscle) translating into 4200 less calories burned per month.

Since there are 3500 calories in a pound of fat, you would gain more than one pound of fat per month just from the muscle mass that you lost! Don’t diet! Eat well, Exercise! Be fair and honest to yourself!

Strength Training Routines Basics

As you get the weight off you want to reveal a well toned, shapely body, and you can accomplish that with good strength training routines. In contrast to what most people think, strength training is as important, and perhaps more important to successful fat loss than aerobic exercise. This is because of the amount of calories that are burned when you aren’t exercising.

One study found that a three-month basic strength-training program resulted in the participants gaining three pound of muscle and losing four pounds of fat, while increasing their normal calorie consumption by 15%, that is 370 more calories per day. (Campbell, W., Crim, M., Young, V. and Evans, W. (1994). Increased energy requirements and changes in body composition with resistance training in older adults. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 60: 167-175.)

Strength Training vs Aerobic Exercise

Depending on the intensity of the exercise, combined with your weight, an aerobic workout will burn about 300 calories per hour. If the exercise is strenuous enough (which is unlikely if you’re a beginner) your Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) will be elevated temporarily for a few hours afterwards.

Strength training in comparison, elevates your RMR permanently. Your RMR accounts for 60 to 75 percent of your daily calorie expenditure, so even a modest increase will help burn off more fat, and you will burn calories, even while sleeping.

Read more, to understand RMR and Metabolism

Benefits Of Strength Training Routines

Apart from being the quickest and most effective way to reshape your body, strength training offers many other benefits, making it a pillar to overall health and fitness:

• Strength training reduces body fat significantly.
• Helps raise your metabolism. Muscle burns more calories than fat, so the more muscle you have, the more calories you’ll burn all day long.
• Develops and strengthens bones, reducing the risk of osteoporosis - especially important for women.
• Helps to combat cardiovascular disease and high blood pressure.
• Increases energy levels, mood and overall sense of well-being.
• Increase your confidence and self-esteem, and helps the body fight stress.
• Helps promote better, healthier sleep. Zzzzzzzz.
• Increases stamina, makes you stronger and increases muscular endurance.
• Helps you avoid injuries.
• Improve coordination, balance and flexibility.

Getting Started With Strength Training Routines

First of all: It is much simpler than you think!

Strength training for the obese is the same as strength training for slender people. The difference comes in the starting point. It’s important to talk with your doctor, get the go ahead to workout, and then create a routine that you feel suits you best. Take one step at a time and before you know it, you will have taken your life in your own hands.

Don’t think that you need to workout in a gym for two hours to strength train. You only need to do this type of exercise for about 20-30 minutes 3 times a week to get significant results.

Strength Training Coaches At Your Local Gym

Whether you are into joining a gym, or wanting to do it at home, either way you need guidance from a personal trainer. By visiting your local gym, a personal trainer can help you out, and show you a number of things that can help you for a start. When you do start out by exercising in a gym, you have the benefit of starting with machines so you have more stabilization for the movements.

Strength Training At Home

You may also find a good strength training routines by looking online. You don’t have to lay down on a weight bench to get the benefits of a good strength training exercise program. Getting hold of a decent program on the internet is sometimes tricky, you simply don’t know who you can trust, but having a look around the Editor’s Choices on this site is as easy as ABC, and they are featured here with good reason.

You may need to add a simple weight routine to your exercise program to get the results you are looking for. This could be done with your own bodyweight, or with a simple set of dumbells.

How Much Strength Training is Enough

By strength training for as little as 20-30 minutes 3 days a week, you will start feeling and seeing the benefits in just a few short weeks.

Strength training provides many benefits that cardio exercise and diet alone cannot provide. Whether you are striving for weight loss and reshaping your body, or an optimal state of health and fitness is what you are aiming for, strength training should be a part of your weekly workout regimen to ensure a complete fitness package. You won’t regret it!

Strength Training For Women?

You may not have thought about strength training exercise because you are a woman. Many women don’t give it a second thought because they think a strength training exercise will give them a manly torso and hulking arms. You don’t have to worry about this, and this is no reason to avoid the weights. You will not bulk up like a man unless you take something to aid in this. The most that will happen is that you will lose weight faster, have a more toned body, and you will look amazing at the end of your weight loss journey. That doesn’t sound so bad now does it?

Increased muscle mass doesn’t mean that a woman’s body will bulk up, which is a very popular myth among women. What it does mean is that your body requires more energy to maintain this new muscle, burning more calories throughout the day, even while at rest. What it also means is since muscle takes up less space than fat, you will have a more toned physique. A good example of this is if you replace the fat on your upper arms with muscle, your upper arms will get much smaller.

The basic way strength training works in toning and sculpting a woman’s body is that strength training causes change in the body by overloading your muscles and stimulating muscle growth, which then forces your muscles to respond and develop. Regular and consistent strength training will increase muscle mass.

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