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"How do you burn fat?"

EXERCISE MELTS BODY FAT

If you want to reduce your body fat, focus on increasing the amount of exercise you get rather than decreasing your food intake. A recent national study was done using two groups of sedentary men, one group in their 20's and the other over age 65. A lot was learned from this accumulated data and it is interesting to note that there was a significant relationship between lack of physical activity and fat. Not surprisingly, the most sedentary men had the most body fat.

These studies have also indicated that the governments current recommended daily allowance for calories does not correlate with the body's actual energy needs. For example, although 2400 calories have been calculated for older men, they in fact burned an average of 2800 calories daily.

The leading experts now recommend that people who want to lose weight start increasing their physical activity. Just being more active in general (such as climbing the stairs instead of taking the elevator, moving around instead of sitting still, sitting up instead of lying down as well as showing some excitement and enthusiasm instead of boredom), are things that more effectively burns calories and reduces body fat. Everyone seems to have lost sight of the value of being active. Consider this, a half-hour aerobic workout accounts for far less energy expenditure than our minute-to-minute movement in the office or at home.

People who diet without exercising often get fatter with time. Although your weight may initially drop while dieting, such weight loss consists mostly of water and muscle. When the weight returns, it comes back as fat. To avoid getting fatter over time, increase your metabolism by exercising regularly.

By Tom Venuto

Ken Kinakin recently wrote a book called “Optimal Muscle Training,” which is all about biomechanics, anatomy, muscle testing, resistance training technique, and injury prevention. I consider it groundbreaking, because Kikakin did something rarely seen in the mainstream fitness literature: Rather than making sweeping generalizations about exercise safety or usefulness, he analyzed 125 popular weight training techniques and rated them according to risk and benefit.

Understanding risks and benefits enhances your training experience by giving you clearer distinctions, providing you with more choices and helping you make better decisions. For example, some exercises have low risk and high benefit, making them excellent choices for almost anyone. Others have high risk and low benefit, which usually indicates a poor technique best avoided. There are also exercises with high risk and high benefit, which means the exercise, while risky, could have high value to advanced trainees under certain circumstances.

Here’s an example: If you asked a typical personal trainer at a health club whether it was okay to perform squats with your heels elevated on a board or wedge, 99% of them would cringe and scream, “That’s terrible for you! You’ll blow out your knees! NEVER do squats with your heels elevated – always do them flat footed.” This is a typical “good or bad” judgement, which neglects to acknowledge the risk to benefit ratio.

The risk is greater stress on the knees. The benefits include greater quad development, less hip involvement, more emphasis placed on the medialis portion of the quadriceps, a more comfortable position for those who lack flexibility, and a more upright torso with less stress on the lower back.

So what does all this have to do with losing fat? Well, I see the same phenomenon among fitness professionals and practitioners alike when it comes to judging the usefulness of fat loss techniques (training or dietary), especially today with the anti-aerobics pendulum having swung all the way to the right.

Many people take an all or none attitude, such as “You should NEVER do cardio on an empty stomach because that causes you to lose muscle” or, “cardio is completely worthless,” or “Low carb diets don’t work because they deplete your glycogen and kill your energy so you can’t train hard. Always eat plenty of carbs.”

A better approach would be to analyze each nutrition or training technique according to its risk to benefit ratio (rather than focusing only on risks, and denying that any benefits exist). Just like all strength training activities carry a risk, so do most fat loss techniques. What makes an exercise or nutrition technique woCanada

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