Building Muscle For Fitness

This is a routine myth that folks understand. When I started lifting weights my friends all said “but when you cease lifting weights all the muscle you have put on will turn to fat and you will look horrible.”

The fact is muscle can’t turn into fat and fat can’t turn into muscle! So their fears were totally ungrounded. One or two of them said they would never lift weights because they didn’t comprehend that this myth is totally untrue.

One of my friends told me the instance of a popular body builder who stopped exercising and lifting weights and months later his body appeared totally different: he was about three times as fat and had a lot barely muscle than he had previously.

Now what my friend thought was that because he had stopped exercising, all the muscle he had built up had turned into fat. Now this is not even entirely possible! Your body put away fat for time periods when there’s will be a meals shortage and this depends on how much energy it needs, how much you gorge etc..

Your body builds up muscle totally interdependently of the fat collection process: your body repairs the muscle tissue that you have taken advantage of when lifting weights and doing other anaerobic trainings and the muscle evolves. There is no way fat can turn into muscle and vice verse. What then had truly happened with the body builder? Because he was not exercising he lost much of the muscle that he had recently.

In losing the muscle his body demanded a lot fewer calories every day to function. He however did not properly adjust his gorging habits for the change in his metabolic rate (bear in mind to maintain every pound of muscle you will demand another 50 calories a day).

So he began putting away a lot of meals as fat. Hence to those unaware of how the body really works it looked like his muscle had turned into fat. Lifting weights and Building up muscle does not help you lose fat This is another familiar myth; folks understand to burn off fat you should concentrate all your labors on cardio.

Don’t forget this though: The SINGLE most important thing to do to prevent later fat gains is to make sure you keep all your muscle intact (or to increase it!). If your cutting your calories (which you must do very moderately to lose fat and prevent the starvation response) and not lifting weights it is out of the question to keep all your muscle intact.

Don’t forget that muscle is important in keeping your metabolism revving like a well oiled engine.

A loss of muscle even if you have adjusted your eating sensibly so as not to invoke the starvation response will impact your metabolism, meaning rebound weight gain will be more likely. Therefore to maximize your metabolism and decrease the chance of later weight gain lifting weights is an ideal solution to not only build some attractive muscles but also to keep the fat off for good. Another positive result of lifting weights is that your metabolism is raised for a full 24 hours after you have ended. This happens with cardio but for only 3-4 hours: basically weight lifting is crucial to a lean body!

Many folks (mainly women) wrongly assume that if they start lifting weights they will immediately start looking like they could present oneself on the front of body building magazine: they worry that they will look too big. Now there are many reasons why this fear is ungrounded:

1. For women, muscle gain is difficult because they have very little of the muscle building bodily chemical testosterone; they have as much as 10 times less than men. For this reason if you are women and interested about looking big it is highly improbable.

If you do start assuming your muscles are bigger than you like, start lowering the amount you are lifting and upping the number of reps. Also muscle is very dense, so if anything having gained muscle and lost fat you will look reduced than you did before.

2. Most of these bodybuilders spend most of their time lifting weights, taking steroids and other muscle enhancing drugs and are very genetically gifted. It would be very improbable even if you followed exactly what they did to replicate their success because you do not share their great genetics.

It is improbable that you share their great genetics; you would already be in great shape with very little energy: as your reading this I will assume that is not the case.

3. To put on a lot of muscle takes a lot of meals. To put on muscle you must be taking in a lot of energy (especially protein) to rebuild the damaged muscles after you have worked out. For this reason unless you are new to lifting weights it is very difficult to both lose fat and build muscle.

For this reason body builders have two seasons; one season (the off season) where they gorge like horses to put on as much muscle as entirely possible! And a season prior to contests (contest season) where they strip all the fat that they have put on during the off season. This is one of the draw backs of the off season; to productively build a lot of muscle they must suffer also gains in fat, this is inevitable.

In the time of the contest season male bodybuilders and fitness models can get down to 4 % -6 % body fat and female body builder and fitness models down to 8 % -12 % body fat.

While the rest of the world is getting fatter on low calorie starvation the body builders do the same things year in year out to get lean and fat free.

They utilize the correct nutrition, weight exercising and cardio to rev their metabolism and hold onto all their hard earned muscle they have put on during the off season.

To study all the fat burning mysteries of the world’s best body builders and fitness models you MUST read ‘Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle.

Tom Venuto is encouraged more details are available on the website by following the link to read more and see a video review. Feed The Muscle