Aerobic Exercise Alone Will Leave You Soft and Flabby…Skinny Fat.
Don’t become Skinny Fat!
I beg you don’t be one of those people who goes from 220 lbs and 30% body fat to 180 lbs and 28 – 30% body fat.
Wouldn’t it be soooo much better to go from 220 and 30% body fat to 195 lbs and 20% body fat?
If you can’t do the math, the ANSWER IS YES!
I get this question all the time. “Do I have to use weights to workout? Can’t I just go running or get on a treadmill and build muscle? Don’t I use muscles when I run?”
Ultimate answer is NO!
No, you will not get toned and build muscle if all you do is aerobic exercise. Aerobic exercise doesn’t deliver enough stress to your tendons, bones, or muscles to elicit the kind of response you need to become toned and build muscle.
Trust me, many of clients fill into that trap before they found me. One of my clients lost 40 lbs, awesome right? Actually no, in her own words, “I lost all that weight but I was still fat and saggy. Plus I felt really weak.”
Does that sound like success to you?
About a quarter of my clients have had gastric bypass surgery and have lost 40 – 100 lbs. And you know what their number one complaint is? That they aren’t toned, that they are still soft, they feel skinny fat, they feel weak like they lost too much muscle.
And guess what? They are absolutely right.
The reason is their caloric deficit was super high, and they didn’t use their muscles so they literally lost them. A simple easy fix to prevent this muscle loss would have been exercising weights. Even if they had just lifted weights twice a week for 30 minutes they would have retained much more muscle and would have looked better, felt stronger, and ultimately been much more happy about their situation.
If all you do is focus on aerobics exercise, to the exclusion of exercising with weights you run a huge risk of becoming skinny fat. skinny fat is a condition where someone might appear skinny on the outside (best base scenario) with clothes on but underneath those clothes and inside their body they are unhealthy and at risk for illness.
Essentially, if you’re losing weight from aerobic exercise and eating correctly you’re losing both muscle and fat.
This cycle ensure that your body is going to use your muscle tissue as fuel and will burn right through it. Unfortunately as you lose more and more muscle, you start to become and weaker and your metabolism starts to slow, plus your start to lose the little definition you once had.
To make matters worse, as you lose more muscle your bones become weaker, because you lost more muscle your bones have to work that much harder which sets you up for hairline fractures. Best case scenario weaker bones are a predecessors to osteoporosis.
Another risk is hidden fat. They did a study in which 800 slim people had an MRI scan to check for hidden fat. Here’s the scary part 45% of those people who had the MRI scan had excess amounts of internal fat, which are undetectable from the quote on quote outside.
This is called visceral fat and it is the most dangerous fat to have. It tends to accumulate around your organs and then begins to release hormones and other secretions that can often lead to disease. Unlike cardiovascular exercise, exercising with weights can greatly reduce the amount of visceral fat as well as help prevent it forming on your organs.
In short, don’t stop resistance training just because spring is here and you are more excited and eager to go outside. There is absolutely no substitute for lifting weights at least two to three times a week. After all your health is on the line.
Go be awesome!
KELLEN LAKE – GO LIFT!
PS – NEED A PLAN? I CAN CREATE ONE FOR YOU 🙂 Click the link and set-up a free consult.
