Are Aerobics the Best Way to Gain Weight and Build Muscle?

101 14
It's a common misconception that aerobic exercise is required in order to gain weight and build muscle: walking, running, jogging, or other cardio exercises. This obviously will have some effect; experience has shown that aerobic exercise by itself is not sufficient. While it's true that you burn off calories when training aerobically, as with any activity, you don't burn off as many calories as you might think, and you create a lot less muscle.

If you jog for about thirty minutes, you will, on average, burn off around 300 calories, depending upon how much you weight and your age. That's equivalent to burning off the caloric intake of having eaten two bananas. It does not, however, compensate for downing the 600 calories that are present in a large fast-food cheeseburger. It's obvious that aerobics is not a significant way to burn off significant calories, or how to gain weight and build muscle fast.

This is not, however, an attempt to diminish the value of aerobic exercises. They have been shown to play an important part in preventing cardiovascular problems, diabetes, and some cancers. Aerobic training offers many excellent health benefits. They are not, as experience has shown, the most effective way to get rid of excess calories and unwanted body fat or to gain weight and build muscle. Why is this the case?

The amount of effort required to burn off body fat using aerobics makes it inefficient as a fat-burning workout, but it may have other negative effects by causing a loss in muscle mass. Heavy aerobic exercise, especially when coupled with a lower calorie diet, significantly increases your chances of burning off muscle. Not really a goal when you're trying to gain weight and build muscle fast.

Intense aerobic exercise burns off both carbohydrates and fats. When cardio exercises are intense enough, the body begins to burn off more carbohydrates than fats to a point where the carbohydrates are consumed to a degree that the body begins to manufacture carbohydrates from protein. This process is called catabolism, and will inevitably result in the loss of muscle mass. Losing muscle mass is not the manner in which you want to lose weight.

No matter how you lose weight, the lower numbers on your bathroom scale will look encouraging, but will not be beneficial to your body or your overall health. Let's face it, if lower scale weight is the goal in itself, limb amputation would be an most efficient weight loss method. More seriously, though, when you lose muscle mass, you lessen your ability to exercise properly to burn calories.

If you cannot efficiently burn off calories, due to a loss of muscle mass, you will become more prone to regaining body fat. Any associate reduction of calorie intake will make this situation worse. Adding extra protein to your diet won't help because it will go directly into meeting the energy needs of the body. This conundrum needn't actually occur in practice. There is a way to effectively lose weight safely using weight training, resistance training, or strength training.

It is not difficult to convince men to use weights to lose weight and build muscle. Women, however, resist this type of workout for fear of becoming to muscular; too masculine. This fear is unfounded. Weight training reduces body fat long before it builds muscle. The male body builders that you see in magazines have achieved these bodies after years of intensive training, many with the help of anabolic steroids and prohormones. They are also provided by nature with much larger amounts of testosterone than women.

If you're a woman, are not taking steroids or testosterone supplements, weight bearing workouts will simply enable you to lose body fat, build toning muscle mass, and have you fit and trim without reducing your femininity. It will, in fact, enhance it.
Subscribe to our newsletter
Sign up here to get the latest news, updates and special offers delivered directly to your inbox.
You can unsubscribe at any time

Leave A Reply

Your email address will not be published.