Thursday,
September 08, 2005
Did you
know that strength training
is crucial for successfully losing weight and keeping it off? I'm talking about
weight-bearing exercise. It doesn't have to be a huge, hulking workout where
you're trying to look like Arnold
Schwarzenegger in his prime, it just has to be
some basic strength training.
Why is strength training
important for losing weight? Because a lot of people try to
starve themselves into weight loss. They think it's all about
controlling calories. Unfortunately, a lot of dieticians and nutritionists
don't really understand strength training, and they also think that it's just
about calories. Calories in, calories out. If you have
a calorie deficit, you're going to lose weight, if you consume extra calories,
you'll gain body fat. While
that's true, it's only part of the picture. Sure, you need a calorie deficit to
lose weight, but how does your body actually use calories? It's your lean body
mass, that muscle mass
underneath your body fat, that burns calories 24/7,
allowing you to actually eat more calories without gaining weight.
Let's say you happen to
be quite obese and you have a high percentage of body fat. I used to be in that
situation; I know what it feels like. Underneath that body fat you actually
have a very strong skeleton and strong muscles. Your
body has built up those muscles in order to carry all of that extra body fat
when you move your body. Just the very act of standing up, walking across a
parking lot, going up a flight of stairs or lifting your arms requires more
effort when you're overweight,
especially if you're obese. So the heavier you are, the stronger your muscles
have to be just to allow you to do basic, everyday things.
Now this can actually
work to your advantage -- if you manage to keep all of that muscle mass and bone density in place while
you are losing body fat, then you can maintain the high metabolism that's
associated with that lean body mass even while you are dropping body fat. But
if you starve yourself, you're going to lose all the muscle resources you
already have. It's a mistake a lot of people make. They try to lose body fat by
starving themselves, and as the body fat vanishes from their body, their muscle
mass also disappears. Why would the body get rid of muscle mass? Because, frankly, it doesn't need it.
You see,
the body is an adaptive system. It will adapt to whatever loads you place on
it. So if you are a heavier person and you're carrying around body fat, then
your body will adapt by creating stronger muscles to lift your body. It's
almost like doing a leg press every time you get up out of the chair. If you
weigh 300 lbs you're doing a 300 lb leg press, you see? Now if you were to drop
150 lbs of body fat and end up at 150 lbs, your body wouldn't need the same amount
of leg muscle to lift you. It would eliminate those leg muscles through
catabolic action.
While it eliminates this
muscle mass, your metabolism begins to slow. Remember, it's the lean body mass
that's burning calories day in and day out, even when you're doing nothing. If
you reduce that muscle mass by allowing it to go away (by not challenging your
muscles), then your metabolism is going to slow. A lot of people end up at a
place where they've lost the body fat and they're lighter, but it's suddenly so
much easier to put on body fat. They don't have the muscle mass they once did,
they're not automatically burning calories, and if they overeat just a little
bit, they'll start packing on the body fat again.
The
solution to all of this, the strategy I want to focus on here, is to engage in
strength training while you are losing body fat. If you do this, then you
will be able to maintain the muscle mass that you already have underneath your
body fat while you are in the process of losing the fat. This will leave
you with a greater proportion of lean body mass to body fat, meaning that you
will be slimmer, yet you'll have the muscles that you had when you were
overweight.
If you get rid of enough
body fat in this way, then those muscles may begin to show -- if you're a man.
If you're a woman, don't worry. You're never going to bulk up. A lot of women
are mistakenly afraid of strength training. They think that if they pump a few
weights they're going to turn into Lou Ferrigno
overnight. They think they're going to have this competition muscle-bound body
from lifting a couple of weights. Believe me, that is not the case at all. Most
of those bodybuilding women are using steroids, and they've trained for years,
even decades, just to produce that kind of muscle mass. Women are not built to
puts on lots of muscle mass, so don't be afraid that you'll bulk up. Women who
are afraid of exercising because they think it's going to make them look bigger
have it all wrong.
Let's
take a moment to cover that myth here. Let's say you're a woman and you have
more body fat than you want. You're trying to decide, "Should I engage in
strength training as part of my weight loss program?" Some women say,
"No, because I'll bulk up and it'll make me look fatter." That's a
complete myth; it's totally false.
When you have a high
percentage of body fat, that body fat is stored not only in the tissues that
are obvious -- such as your hips and your midsection, your arms and legs and so
on -- it's also stored intramuscularly, which means it's stored within the
muscles of your body. It's sort of like the marbling of beef from a cow. If you
slice a muscle from a cow, there's some fat inside the muscle -- that is the
same kind of fat that's in our muscles when we have a high percentage of body
fat.
That fat takes up a lot
of space in the muscle, so it actually makes the muscle look bigger, because
there's fat inside. When you start losing body fat, even if you're engaged in strength
training, that intramuscular fat will begin to vanish. So even if your muscle
mass begins to grow -- which, again, is very difficult for women to accomplish
-- your overall muscle size is probably going to be smaller when you're at a
lower percentage of body fat. The net change in your muscle size is going to be
almost nothing, unless you really start to do strength training on a regular
basis for a period of a year or two, and then you might actually begin to put
on a little bit more muscle.
So with
that crazy myth covered, let's get back to the main point here, which is that
engaging in strength training will conserve the muscle mass you have now. Now
here's why this is so important. It's very easy for your body to shed useless
muscle. So if you're not using a muscle, your body will get rid of it over a
few months. It's gone. But to gain that muscle back -- now that takes some
effort! That could take months or years of strength training. It is much harder
for your body to engage in anabolic reactions (to build muscle mass) than it is
for your body to catabolize and get rid of muscles.
So, if you decide you're going to starve yourself while you lose weight and get
down to the minimum weight possible, and afterwards you engage in strength
training, then you're going to find that it's a much more difficult process to
gain lean body mass than it was to slim away what you had to begin with.
Building lean body mass is a huge challenge.
It's also important to
note that when people talk about weight loss, they throw that term around
without really understanding what it means. Everybody says "I want to lose
weight," but they don't really mean that. They mean they want to lose body
fat; they don't want to just lose weight. A limb amputation will cause you
to lose weight, but that's not what people have in mind! People want to lose
body fat. So be careful what you wish for -- and don't use that bathroom scale
as a measure of your progress. There are a number of reasons why.
One is if you just starve
yourself and you start losing lean body mass, then that counts as weight loss.
But you've done yourself no good whatsoever, because now you've actually
lowered your metabolism. The scale says, "Hey! You lost another three pounds!"
But it could be 2 lbs of fat and 1 lb of muscle, and that's not a good
situation to be in. You want to lose maybe 2.9 lbs of fat and 0.1 lbs of
muscle, or maybe 3 lbs of fat and no muscle. But to do that, you've got to
challenge your muscular system through some weight bearing exercise.
The other
thing to keep in mind when you're using the bathroom scale is that when you
first start limiting your calories, your body is going to start burning through
its glycogen stores. Glycogen is basically a fuel stored in your body. It
stores sugars together with water and locks them up in the tissues and organs
of your body like an energy battery, ready for you to use at a future time.
There's water locked in
with those calories. That water weighs a lot. So when you start restricting
your calories, the first thing your body burns is this extra storage of energy,
this extra glycogen. And the glycogen causes you, as it's burned, to shed
water. You might look at the scale and think, gee, I lost 5 lbs, but you really
lost no body fat whatsoever. It was just water, because your body released
glycogen. What usually happens to people when their glycogen store has reached
zero is they get really hungry, they think they're in a starvation panic, and
then they overeat. Their glycogen stores fill right back up, they gain the 5
lbs back, and usually they overate to such an extent that they store another
half a pound of body fat or so. Now they're half a pound heavier than when they
began and they lost no body fat whatsoever. It was just a game of glycogen and
water storage they saw reflected on the bathroom scale.
So ignore
the bathroom scale. It is not useful for telling you how successful you are in
losing body fat. I don't use one at all. The only measure you should use is a
"fat scale" or a caliper. A caliper is the best way to measure body
fat. Body fat calipers measure the thickness of body fat in key locations
around your body. For men, one location is on the upper pectoral area, another
is the midsection and the third is on the top of the quadriceps of the leg. For
women it's the back of the arm, the midsection and along the hip.
However, you've got to
learn how to use a caliper correctly if you want it to be an accurate indicator
of fat loss success. I just
mention it as a tool for people who are really serious about losing fat. People
who use bathroom scales to figure out how much weight they've lost are just
playing a silly game of deception -- the bathroom scale is useless. I mean, you
could lose bone mass and
you'd still look like you were having lots of progress on the bathroom scale.
How do you lose bone
mass? Easy: you stop engaging in exercise, stop walking, stop
running. If you do all that (which I'm not recommending, by the way), then you
would start to lose bone
mineral density, and that would be reflected as weight loss. When you
say you want to lose weight, be careful what you ask for. Your body has a
number of ways to lose weight that have nothing whatsoever to do with losing
body fat or enhancing your overall state of health.
Now let's
get back to the main point, strength training and why it is so important. So
far, I hope I've explained the idea that underneath your body fat you have a
strong musculoskeletal system. There's a lot of muscle mass and good, strong
bones underneath all of that body fat. If you find a strategy to conserve that,
even while you're losing body fat, then you can have a much more successful
weight loss experience and end up with a strong skeleton and
strong muscles at the end of your regimen as well.
The way to do that is to
engage in basic weight-bearing strength training while you are pursuing a diet.
And it turns out that you don't have to go crazy on this. I am not suggesting
that you go to the gym and start pumping iron on the bench press, 50 reps a
day, or that you exhaust your body with crazy workouts. It turns out that you
don't even need to stress your body very much to maintain the current muscle
mass that you have.
In fact,
there's a system of strength training called static contraction training that
is outstanding for maintaining current muscle mass and even enhancing it if you
choose to go that far. The best thing is that it takes very little time. How
much time am I talking about? You'll be amazed to hear this, but literally,
it's true: 15 seconds per muscle group per week. Only 15 seconds per muscle. If
you engage that muscle for 15 seconds with high
intensity contraction, then your body gets the signal that, hey, it
needs that muscle. It needs to keep it around. And your body decides NOT to let
that muscle go. It just keeps it, because it figures you need it.
Remember, your body has a
lot of wisdom, and it's trying to conserve calories. The body wants to get rid
of muscles it doesn't need, and in order to keep those muscles, you have to
prove to your body that you need them. Now the thing is,
your body doesn't know why you need them. It could be that you're engaged in
some kind of competition, it could be that you need to
lift heavy things to survive. Your body doesn't really know the reason why. You
can essentially fool your body by engaging in strength training, giving it the
message that it needs to hold on to those muscles in order to survive. So in as
little as 15 seconds per muscle group, you can tell your body to hold on to
your muscle mass. That's a 15 second bicep curl, for example, or a 15 second
chest press, or a 15 second leg curl…you get the idea.
To learn more on this, I
suggest you get a book called Power
Factor Training by John Little and Pete Sisco. Check out that book. It gives you the lowdown on how
to do this. It's positioned at bodybuilders, but it's actually the underground
secret book of strength training for people who are 50 years and older. Senior
citizens benefit from this tremendously. There are also many golfers who use
this system to greatly increase their range and golf swing.
Women are additionally
benefiting from this system -- when you're dealing with the potential for osteoporosis when you get up
in your years, bone density becomes crucial for your overall health. There is
no better way in the world to make sure you have strong bone density than to
engage in high intensity, short duration strength training exercises. Static
contraction training is, in my view, the very best system of exercise for
maintaining not just muscle mass, but also bone mineral density. You will also
strengthen your ligaments and tendons.
The key is, as with all
forms of exercise, to be sure to work with a qualified health professional
before attempting this, especially some of the more high intensity exercises.
You may want to ease your way into it and check with your naturopath, doctor or
physical therapist to make sure you're ready for this. You don't want to injure
yourself -- that would set you back weeks. So take it a little bit at a time.
Remember, your body will adapt slowly, so ease into it slowly. By doing all of
this, you'll be able to conserve the incredible muscle mass that you have
underneath that body fat right now.
The other
benefit to doing this is that strength training will greatly increase the speed
of your weight loss effort. It will double the
effectiveness of any weight loss program you're on. Losing weight by calorie
restriction alone is very, very difficult. In fact, personally, I've never been
able to do that. The only way I've been able to lose body fat (I lost over 50
lbs of body fat, and I've kept it off for several years now) is to engage in
exercise that includes both a strength training component and a cardiovascular
component. My belief is that you cannot keep weight off just by modifying your
diet alone, unless you happen to be extremely gifted with just the right genes
that don't ever turn on the hunger signal for you. If you're
in that situation, good for you. But you should probably think about
exercising anyway, because of the other cardiovascular health and
brain chemistry benefits that are derived from frequent exercise.
Now, some
people say "Well, I can't join a gym, I can't exercise, I don't want to go
to that website and look up static contraction training, I don't want to do
that, I don't want to pump weights. What do I do instead?" There's a great
solution for people who don't want to pump weights, and I understand a lot of
women are in this situation, nothing wrong with that. You can be very strong
without pumping weights if you follow Pilates.
Pilates is a form of body
movement and flexibility training that was pioneered by Joseph Pilates almost
100 years ago. The guy was well ahead of his time. This is a system that I
definitely follow today. The movements require a lot of strength, but not so
much that you can't get started. There are simple ways to get started with
Pilates on a mat that would greatly boost your muscle mass and your overall strength
-- especially your abdominal strength and your lower back strength. And then,
as you gain comfort with that, you can move up to the more advanced movements
in Pilates.
And you can even get
Pilates equipment, which is rather affordable. The best place for that (in fact
we're going to do a review on some of these machines later) is Pilates.com,
which is the website of a manufacturer of Pilates
equipment. They have outstanding equipment -- 5 stars all the way. This company
is great! They even have an affordable home version of this Pilates equipment
that runs only a couple of hundred dollars. Well worth the investment.
What does this Pilates
system do for you? It will give you strength training all over your body -- in
your hips, adduction and abduction muscles, abdominal muscles, lower back,
traps, biceps, triceps, chest, upper body, lower body and especially in your
midsection. It will do all of this for you -- I should say with you -- without
using any weights. So you don't have to set up a bench press with 200 lbs and
see how many reps you can bang out. Pilates can be done in a more artful way.
It is a form of body movement that can be very yoga-like if you choose, or it
can be done with more power. This is why both men and women find Pilates to be
a fantastic system of strength training. I know a lot of people in the
performing arts community who rely on Pilates to maintain core strength and
flexibility throughout their body, including in their arms, legs and neck
muscles.
I've got
to mention this too: If you engage in Pilates, you may experience one of the
benefits that almost everybody experiences when they do this for a couple of
months: their joint pain begins to disappear. People always complain
about their joint pain, it seems. When I'm at the gym, I hear guys in their 40s
-- they're only 45 years old! -- and they're
complaining and whining about how much everything hurts. They say, "Oh,
wait 'til you're my age, everything's gonna
hurt!" And I respond with, "I don't think so!" I've experienced
chronic pain, and I know what that feels like. But now I do Pilates and engage
in outstanding nutrition (see related ebook on nutrition) and the pain is gone.
The body is designed to
be healthy, it's not supposed to hurt. If you feed
your body right and if you use and mobilize all those joints, they will not
hurt, even to the age of 100. There's no reason why we can't live to 100 in a
state of perfect health with outstanding cognitive function, free of chronic
pain. But to do that, you have to use it. I firmly believe in the concept of
"use it or lose it." If you're not using those joints, then you're
going to lose their range of motion.
Just ask any physical
therapist, they will tell you much the same. You have to have range of motion
in order to be free of pain. The difficulty is that as we get older, we tend to
stop using all of those muscles and joints in their full range of motion. A lot
of people who say that chronic pain is related to aging are really confusing
cause and effect. It's not related to aging, it's related to the number of
years that they've stopped using their body.
For example, take a person
who is a dancer or someone engaged in yoga, Pilates or flexibility
well into their 80s or 90s, and they won't have joint pain. If aging causes
joint pain, then how is it that these people have no pain? The answer is
because they keep mobilizing those joints, they keep using their body. They
engage in Tai Chi or other gentle body movements. And they are free from pain.
By the way, Tai Chi is another outstanding way to get range of motion, but it
won't do quite the same thing for you in terms of muscle mass as Pilates
training or other weight bearing exercises. (Tai Chi has many other energetic
benefits, though, which are beyond the scope of this article.)
The
bottom line is if you are attempting to lose weight, or more specifically to
lose body fat, then engaging in some form of strength training is crucial to
your success. I know there are a lot of books out there that say well, you can
just change your foods, or you can consume this one particular food like
grapefruit or cabbage, or
you can go on the popular low-carb diet. I know some people have success with that,
but I think the vast majority of people don't really meet their weight loss
goals just by changing their foods.
What's missing is that body component,
the strength training, the movement, the flexibility, and also the
cardiovascular training. What I'm suggesting is that you seriously consider
finding a way to get some form of strength training into your life. It could be
as easy as buying a floor mat or a DVD video on Pilates. Those videos are as
little as $15 or $20. So your total investment, including the mat, could be
only $40 or $50. And then you can engage in strength training.
But the catch is that you
actually have to do it -- right? That's the catch. People want a system that
requires no effort. Sure, we all want that. I've even written a book on this
called The 5 Habits of Health
Transformation -- you'll find that at truthpublishing.com - that lists the
5 most effective health strategies that require the least amount of effort. And
people have been downloading that book like crazy! It's been a huge hit,
because people want to know what's going to give them the best results for the
least amount of time or money or effort. I think it's been successful because
everybody's so busy these days; they really want the most effective and high
impact strategies. But the point is, none of this is
going to happen for you automatically. You can't just buy a Pilates video and
gain muscle mass; you actually have to do it.
Some of these Pilates
moves, when you get into the advanced stages of it, are not so easy. You know,
lifting weights, even just for 15 seconds with high intensity, isn't always
easy, either. When I do it, sometimes I feel like I'm about to pass out. It's
such high intensity. When I do a leg press with a 15 second high intensity
static contraction system -- and I'm really not even anywhere near what some of
the founders are -- I'm pushing at least 1500 lbs. I'm out of breath after
that. I'm wiped out. This is hard stuff! It takes effort.
None of it is going to
happen automatically, and if you whip through a strength training routine, and
you don’t feel like you've done any work, then you probably haven't. You're not
going to get any benefit from that. At some point, it's going to require some
effort to get these results. A lot of the information out there that claims you
can lose weight without any effort is just flat out wrong. Certainly, there are
some shortcuts. There are some strategies that can make it a lot easier for
you, no doubt about that. There are some nutritional supplements that
can help -- I agree. But the bottom line is, if you
don't engage the physical body, if you don't do some strength training and some
cardiovascular training, you're not going to get the results you want.
Most
people who are really committed to losing body fat are okay with the effort
part. That hasn't been the problem. The problem has been finding a strategy
that really works. What's a system that works? People tried the Atkins Diet or
the low carb
diet, and for many people that didn't work. People tried the low fat diet
years ago -- well that didn't work, because everybody just loaded up on
carbohydrates and cookies.
People tried all kinds of other things -- they tried stimulants, things that
make you shake all day long because you have a lot of caffeine in your system. And
gee, they found out that didn't work either, because it just made them
hungrier.
So, typically, it's not
the effort that stops people. It's the reliability of the system. Finding out
what really works is the hardest part. Unfortunately, this particular narrative
here isn't about food strategies that work for dieting, although I have many
-- those that I've used and those that I've shared with others have really worked
well. I'll be sharing those in another segment or another book.
But I can tell you that
no system will work without the physical body movement component. You've got to
engage in strength training, you've got to engage in cardiovascular exercise,
even if it's just walking for 5 minutes a day. If you can't walk, even just
lifting your arms for 10 minutes a day, or lifting a 1
lb dumbbell over your head 50 times will benefit you. I don't care what it is,
if you can move something, then you can engage in
cardiovascular exercise. There is no excuse, unless you happen to be paralyzed
from the neck down, in which case obviously you can't engage in strength
training. But for everybody else, there's no excuse. If you can move a limb,
you can do this.
Find
a way to start strength training today, and your body will immediately start
showing results.
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