Lose Weight With Weight Work
By Ariyan Samarbakhsh
Are you fed-up of grueling treadmill sessions? Hate those sweaty sessions on a cross-trainer? Bored of cancelling jogs because of bad weather? Well the good news is that you don’t need to do cardio to lose weight and get a defined, toned body. You can burn more calories and build more muscle by doing weights – as opposed to long feet dragging cardio sessions.
When you put stress upon a muscle the muscle is torn. This signals to the body’s hormone system that growth hormones, like testosterone, are needed to repair the damaged muscle. Testosterone burns fat and builds muscle simultaneously. If you were to spend the same amount of time doing cardio, all you’re doing is burning fat through your aerobic and anaerobic energy systems, which produce little growth hormones. This is why someone who is looking to shed some weight should be lifting weights and not wasting away their time on a treadmill or even worse, a cross trainer.
The bigger the muscle, the more testosterone is released. By doing compound (main) exercises like Squats, Chest Press, Pull Ups and Deadlifts, you are working major muscles, sometimes simultaneously, which produces great amounts of growth hormone, which in turn builds muscle and burns fat.
By doing weights, you increase lean muscle mass which raises your metabolism which burns energy (calories) while you rest. The more lean muscle tissue you have, the more fat you burn.
This applies to both men and women! There is a common misconception that women will get ‘huge’ by doing weights and this is why they avoid free weights in general and much prefer to spend their time on a cardio machine.
This is complete and utter rubbish!
Women have far less testosterone than men, which makes it twice as hard to build ‘big’ muscles. However this doesn’t mean that weight work isn’t beneficial for them. All the perks of doing weights still apply to women; they just don’t build as much muscle, or lift as heavy a weight. The basic principles of weight work still apply. You still need to lift enough weight to fatigue the muscle to indicate to the body that the muscle needs more growth hormone to repair.
The whole idea of muscle growth is that we put the muscle under increased stress so that it indicates to the body that it needs to get bigger to cope with the new stress. The appropriate weight program combined with an appropriate diet will ensure that the body becomes more efficient to cope with the new stresses placed upon it.
