About a month ago, I think I typed in a section from David Zinczenko's book The Abs Diet for Women. It's here somewhere but It would take forever for me to find it so I'm reprinting it here for you. I'll be 47 on 3/31 and I'm at my lowest weight (173) in ages. I did it by cutting my cardio down to nearly nothing and making weight training my number one priority. And I did it after reading this excerpt. Hope this helps:
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Changing the Way You Exercise
by David Zinczenko (The Abs Diet for Women)
Have you ever seen a gym at rush hour? Everyone hovers around the treadmills, elliptical trainers, and stationary bikes. Signs warn you of 20-minute maximums so that the next sweat seeker can have his or her turn. It seems like everyone wants a cardiovascular, aerobic workout. The more you sweat, the more calories you burn, the more weight you lose, right? In a way, yes, the headphone-and-Lycra set is right. Cardiovascular exercise – steady-state endurance exercises, like running, biking, and swimming – burns a lot of calories. In fact, it often burns more than other forms of exercise like strength training or trendier workouts like yoga or Pilates. But when it comes to weight control, aerobic exercise is more overrated than the fall TV lineup. Why? For one reason: Aerobic exercise builds little (if any) muscle, and muscle is the key component of a speedy metabolism. Muscle eats fat; again, add 1 pound of muscle, and your body burns up to an additional 50 calories a day just to keep that muscle alive. Add 6 pounds of muscle, and suddenly you’re burning up to 300 more calories each day just by sitting still.
Here’s the problem with low-intensity aerobic exercise. Just like a car can’t run without gas or a kite can’t fly without wind, a body can’t function without food. It’s the fuel that helps you run, lift, and have sex. Generally, during exercise, your body calls upon glycogen (the stored form of carbohydrate in muscles and the liver), fat, and in some cases protein. When you’re doing low-intensity aerobic exercise like jogging, your body primarily uses fat and glycogen (carbohydrates) for fuel. When it continues at longer periods (20 minutes or more), your body drifts into depletion: You exhaust your first-tier energy sources (your glycogen stores), and your body hunts around for the easiest source of energy it can find – protein. Your body actually begins to eat up muscle tissue, converting the protein stored in your muscles into energy you need to keep going. Once your body reaches that plateau, it burns up 5 to 6 grams of protein for every 30 minutes of ongoing exercise. (That’s roughly the amount of protein you’ll find in a hard-cooked egg.) By burning protein, you’re not only missing an opportunity to burn fat but also losing all-important and powerful muscle. So aerobic exercise actually decreases muscle mass. Decreased muscle mass ultimately slows down your matabolism, making it easier for you to gain weight.
Now here’s an even more shocking fact: When early studies compared cardiovascular exercise to weight training, researchers learned that people who engaged in aerobic activities burned more calories during aerobic exercise than those who tossed around iron. You’d assume, then, that aerobic exercise was the way to go. But that’s not the end of the story.
It turns out that while lifters didn’t burn as many calories during their workouts as the folks who ran or biked, they burned far more calories over the course of the next several hours. This phenomenon is known as the afterburn – the additional calories your body burns off in the hours and days after a workout. When researchers looked at the metabolic increases after exercise, they found that the increased metabolic effect of aerobics lasted only 30 to 60 minutes. The effects of weight training lasted as long as 48 hours. That’s 48 hours during which the body was burning additional fat. Over the long term, both groups lost weight, but those who practiced strength training lost only fat, while the runners and bikers lost muscle mass as well. The message: Aerobic exercise essentially burns only at the time of the workout. Strength training burns calories long after you leave the gym, while you sleep, and maybe all the way until your next workout. Plus, the extra muscle you build through strength training means that in the long term, your body keeps burning calories at rest just to keep that new muscle alive.
That raises a question. What aspect of strength training creates the long afterburn? Most likely, it’s the process of muscle repair. Weight lifting causes your muscle tissues to break down and rebuild themselves at a higher rate than normal. Muscles are always breaking down and breakdown and rebuilding takes a lot of energy and could be what accounts for the long period of calorie burning. In fact, a Finnish study found that protein synthesis (the process that builds bigger muscles) increases 21 percent 3 hours after a workout.
The good news is that you don’t have to lift like a Russian shot-putter to see the results. A recent Ohio University study found that a short but hard workout had the same effect as longer workouts. Using a circuit of three exercises in a row for 31 minutes, the subjects were still burning more calories than normal 38 hours after the workout. (The Abs Diet Workout is designed along similar principles to mimic these results.)
As I said earlier, building muscle increases your metabolism so much that you burn up to 50 calories per day per pound of muscle you have. The more muscle you have, the easier it is for you to lose fat. That’s why one of the components of the plan includes an exercise program that will help you add the muscle you need to burn fat and reshape your body. And it also points to one of the reasons why you should deemphasize cardiovascular, aerobic exercise if you want to lose fat: because it depletes you body’s store of fat-burning muscle.
Now, before you start thinking I’m some sort of antiaerobics fanatic, let me clarify a few things: I run almost daily, and I’ve even completed the New York City Marathon. Aerobic exercise burns calories, helps control stress, and improves your cariovascular fitness. It also helps lower blood pressure and improve your cholesterol profile. If your choice is aerobic exercise or no exercise, for Pete’s sake, get out there and run. But when it comes to long-term weight management, I’ll take gym iron over road rubber any day.
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Now, I don't follow the weight training plan in his book because I do Cathe weight training dvds (can't wait for STS!!!) but the facts about weight training apply regardless.
Don't despair. You just need to rethink your approach and get serious about pumping iron. At first, I just did the 3-day split Gym Style workouts with one of the Core Max routines each week. Got solid results just doing that, though I've excellerated my results since adding one additional leg workout (the Legs part of Butts & Gutts) and increasing my core workouts from one to three times per week (Core Max 1 & 2 and the Gutts part of B&G), which I began doing as an antidote to back pain. And I'm about to change it up again. Try emphasizing weight training (really push it) and you'll be amazed at how fast you can get into your smaller clothes again. Keep us posted and good luck.
