The cornerstone of bodybuilding is the age-old fight against fat and muscle building. What role does metabolism play in this process? On specialized forums, you can often find posts from novice athletes in which they complain of being overweight, although they eat only twice a day, and the diet contains few calories. Despite all their efforts in the gym, there are no results.
Today we will take a look at what bodybuilding has to do with fat, muscle, and metabolism. You should be aware that the elimination of body fat depends entirely on your nutritional program. Often a person consumes those foods that should not be.
Less often, the problem may lie in malnutrition, as strange as it may sound. However, this happens very rarely. To create a lean figure and subsequently maintain body weight, it is necessary to speed up the metabolism. Simply put, metabolism is nothing more than metabolism. With a high metabolism, fats are burned very quickly.
In turn, with a slowed down metabolism, body fat will increase. The metabolic rate directly depends on the amount of fat in the body, in other words, the more fat, the slower the metabolic processes. First, you need to find the most effective way to reduce fat mass in order to speed up your metabolism. After that, it will be easier to maintain body weight.
If you are already visiting the gym, then you have chosen the right path and the first step in the fight against fats has been taken. Strength training increases muscle mass, which also helps to speed up metabolism. Muscle fibers are an active tissue that requires energy to maintain their performance. And it should be remembered that this requires a lot of energy. But fats only take up space in the body and slow down metabolic processes.
How to Exercise to Burn Fat?
Once you started strength training, you started building your body by speeding up your metabolism. However, beginners often find that muscle strength grows and fat does not go away. This is probably due to the fact that you are using a type of training aimed at developing strength indicators, rather than gaining muscle mass.
If during your classes you work with weights that allow you to perform no more than six repetitions, then first of all you will develop strength. To gain mass, you should perform 8 to 12 repetitions in each exercise. It is this kind of training that improves blood flow, which in turn stimulates the growth of muscle fibers. If you are faced with the task of eliminating excess fat, then you should take more approaches that burn the maximum number of calories. You can also use cardio training to fight fat. In many strength sports forums, users have reported the harm that aerobic exercise can cause to the muscles. This is completely true, and you need to find such a balance so that fats are burned faster without losing muscle mass.
If you have a lot of fat mass, then you should have a lot of cardio, at least 5 workouts per week. The best option would be to combine training at a calm pace with interval classes. Fats will be burned in both cases, but at high intensity this process is more active.
If you previously had four strength training sessions in your training program, then five cardio should be added to them. This will help you burn fat, build muscle, and avoid overtraining. It is important to remember that the body must recover and it takes a certain amount of time.
Use cardio after strength training. You can simply walk on the treadmill at a calm pace for at least half an hour. This requires a sufficiently large slope on the track. If cardio is used immediately after strength training, then fat will be burned faster, since there is no longer any glycogen left in the muscles.
With four days of exercise per week, you still have recovery days that should also be used for aerobic training. It is important that they are more intense than on strength training days. During this period, you must combine high and low tempo work, thereby achieving a high intensity of the entire activity.
For example, you can run for half a minute, and then walk at a calm pace for 60 seconds. Another version of the lesson - two minutes of running are replaced by two minutes of calm walking. It is enough to carry out such exercises for half an hour, and you will burn a lot of calories.
The Right Nutrition Program for Burning Fat
It's time to pay attention to your nutrition too. You need to eat at the right time using the right foods. You need to eat more often within the same calorie intake per day. A large number of calories are spent on the digestion of food by the body, and the more often you eat, the more energy will be expended.
Sugar levels in the body are equally important in the fight against fat. If you do not eat for several hours, then the glucose level in the blood decreases. The lower it becomes, the stronger the splash will be with the next meal. This is very bad, since the body reacts to a sharp increase in sugar by releasing insulin. As a result, a large number of calories turn into body fat.
If you eat small amounts of food every three hours, your sugar level will be constant. For example, your weight is 100 kilograms and during the day you need to consume about 200 grams of protein compounds. Eat foods containing protein six times a day, so that with each meal you get 30-35 grams of protein.
Also, after training, you need complex carbohydrates. Forget about simple sugars like fruit juice, refined foods and soda. Eat whole grains, oatmeal, brown rice, broccoli, and legumes. On average, you should consume about 180 grams of carbohydrates per day.
Since you are using strength training, you need to be careful with low-carb eating programs as it takes a lot of energy to work in the gym.
For information on how to speed up your metabolism to gain muscle mass, see here:
