weight loss

Strength training can have a positive role in fat loss. If one goes on a diet with significant caloric restriction the body's response of self preservation is accomplished by lowering it basal metabolic rate. The body does this by catabolizing lean body mass. The weight loss will be both fat and muscle. If one strength trains the body receives the message that lean body tissue is vital to survive the demands placed on it. Rather than losing lean body mass the body preserves it and adds to it.

From Men's Health magazine article 5 Reasons You're Not Losing Weight:

Strength training helps you burn calories four ways:

1. Calories burned after the exercise stops. Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption (EPOC) occurs after the workout. After running your body replenishes sugar stores. Strength training produces a larger post-exercise calorie demand as the body replaces sugar and rebuilds muscle as a result of the micro-trauma that has been imposed on the muscles.

2. Added muscle burns additional calories. Muscle is metabolically expensive to maintain and will require calories 24/7.

3. The workout itself. All forms of exercise burn calories, but not really as much as people think. Those who exercise with lesser intensity will burn less calories that those who exercise with more intensity.

A May 3, 2007 New York Times article, A Healthy Mix of Rest and Motion, suggests that for at least one workout a week it pays to alternate short bursts of high-intensity exercise with easy-does-it recovery. This type of high intensity interval training comes in many forms.

From Men's Health magazine article 5 Reasons You're Not Losing Weight:

1. You Eat Fat-Free Foods

2. You (Still) Don't Eat Breakfast

From this NYT article, The Claim: Lack of Sleep Increases Weight:

Strength training helps you burn calories four ways:

Number thirteen in a series about what clients have to say about their workouts.

From this Science Daily article comes this interesting headline: Obesity epidemic may threaten mitten industry.

Researchers found that fat people generate more heat. Thermograms (see picture) found that obese people dissipate more heat than normal through the hands and less heat than normal through the torso. They speculate that the feet would be another area for venting excess heat.

A quote:

Instances of changing conventional wisdom abound.

From the International Journal of Obesity study, Individual variability following 12 weeks of supervised exercise: identification and characterization of compensation for exercise-induced weight loss the details:

* 35 subjects exercised five times a week for 12 weeks
* The average weight lost was 8.2 pounds.
* The best subject lost 32.3 pounds
* The worst subject gained 3.74 pounds