How Body Building Boosts Metabolism

Although aerobic exercise like walking, jogging and swimming is helpful to the metabolism, the best way to boost it is through body building.  The weight lifting exercises that are part of body building trigger your body to keep burning fat long after you have stopped exercising. This means that even as you are sitting, reading or napping your body’s muscles will continue to burn calories and help speed up your overall weight loss.

Body Building Is Not Just For Men

Traditionally the realm of body building was thought to belong to men who want to bulk up and appear manly. This is s stereotype that no longer applies as women also discover the fat burning benefits of anaerobic exercise programs such as weight lifting and Pilates. Pilates which uses a system of counterbalances and pulleys to streamline the body is particularly useful for women.

Today’s weight lifting equipment is also now designed for both sexes to use and most gyms have full circuit training available, including weight lifting machines and the pulleys and boards that are part of Pilates.

The Benefits of Body Building

Aside from building muscular strength body building also creates stamina and increases endurance. This enables you to exercise more often and for a longer time which in turn also helps you increase your metabolism’s ability to burn fat .

It can also help your body metabolize fats, eliminate fibroids and dead tissue, increase circulation and help with motor control and balance. Body building should also be considered to be an important part of any anti-aging regime because it also prevents muscle wasting.

Bodybuilding also has psychological benefits. Those who have more muscle tend to be more confident and have higher self-esteem. They accomplish more because they look and the feel better.

Bodybuilding also keeps you young because it helps you build stronger bones and prevent bone thinning diseases like osteoporosis. You will feel strong and fit because you have become more active and mobile. Many older muscle builders find their lower back pain also disappears as they build core strength.and their abdominal muscles are able to help the spine support their weight.

Body Building is More Than Just a Hobby

For years body building has an image of being almost a fetish rather than a real health return, guaranteed to build you up so that you can get even with that bully kicking sand on the beach.  Nowadays body building is seen more of a way of helping you live longer and optimize your health.  The activity is so much more than bout modeling shiny hard muscles with popped out veins. 

The bottom line is that the more body  building that you do, the more energy you will have and the more efficiently your metabolism will work.  Body building also helps you shed excess fat so that there is a lot less of you to carry around, which means that you become a lean, mean and efficient human being with lots of strength and more resistance against disease. 

If you practice bodybuilding you are also no longer exhausted by daily tasks like climbing stairs, shoveling snow or carrying groceries. Everything becomes so much easier.

Body building is also recommended as part of a Healthy and Active Lifestyle maintenance or weight loss program because when you lose this weight this way, you do not lose muscle and bone.  When you diet there is always the risk that you will burn tissue and bone rather than your stubborn reserves of fat.

Ideally you should mix up a program of aerobic exercise with anaerobic exercise to optimize your health as part of a Healthy and Active Lifestyle choice.

For more information about the Healthy & Active Program please visit our website at www.healthy-active.com. You may also call us in Toronto at (41) 440-2217 and ask for Adrienne Wright Bulow or Dr. Michael Rahman or email us at adrienne@healthy-active.com.

Understanding Calorie Afterburn

For years, people were taught that the more sweat, the more calories you will lose. This is not exactly true, especially if the exercises you are doing are not effective at raising your basal metabolism. Your basal metabolism is a measure of how many calories you are burning when your body is at rest or just doing ordinary things such as sitting at a computer or watching television.

The truth is that when it comes to overall calorie burning, aerobic exercise is a little bit overrated. This is because aerobic exercise builds very little muscle.  Muscle is a key component of burning calories. That is because muscle burns up to an additional fifty calories a day just to keep that muscle in operation. Even if you can manage to add six pounds of muscles, you will find yourself burning an additional 300 calories a day even when your body is at rest.

Low Intensity Aerobics Can Rob The Body of Protein

Most people prefer to do low intensity aerobics rather than anaerobic exercises such as Pilates or weight –lifting. However, it is not that great of an ideal to do a long stint of low intensity aerobic exercise simply because aerobic exercises like biking, running and jogging require a great deal breath and cell respiration. As you continue to do the low-intensity exercise, your body calls upon glycogen (the stored form of carbohydrate in your muscles and the liver) to operate.  It only takes about twenty minutes of low intensity exercise to deplete your glycogen store. To keep going your body turns to the next readily available source of energy in your body, which is the protein in your muscles.  Your body will then burn about 5 to 6 grams of protein for every half hour of ongoing aerobic exercise.

The problem with this approach to exercise is that you are losing protein, rather than fat as you exercise and also diminishing your muscle mass.  This will ultimately slow you down, make you hungry and make it harder for you to lose weight.

The Principle of  Calorie Afterburn

Although it is true that you lose more calories while doing aerobic exercise then you do lifting weights but only during the exercise period, you need to take the calorie afterburn that is possible after each.  The metabolic effect of aerobics only lasts about thirty to sixty minutes whereas the effects of weight training lasts as long as 48 hours. That is two days more of an opportunity for your body to burn off additional fat.

The message here is that aerobic exercise essentially only really burns calories at the time of the workout while strength training is the “gift that keeps on giving”. You will continue to burn calories after you leave the gym, while you eat dinner, while you watch television, while you are in bed and all the next day.  This is why it is recommended that you do circuit training that involves a bit of both styles of exercise in order to lose as much weight as possible.

For more information about the Healthy & Active Program please visit our website at www.healthy-active.com. You may also call us in Toronto at (41)440-2217 and ask for Adrienne Wright Bulow or Dr. Micheal Rahman or email us at adrienne@healthy-active.com.