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Originally Posted by Silly Sally
Thank you.
I was afraid of that: that I might be wasting time adding too much muscle now when I've still got 25 stubborn pounds to lose. Honestly, it's all very inexact, though, isn't it? I mean, I trained SS cardio for a year (training for a half marathon) and lost nothing, except muscle. (How can a person run 20 - 25 mpw and still be fat? Baffling.)
The answer must lie somewhere in the middle, much like NRL4W's program utilizing only 2 days ever-increasing resistance training per week, with 4 days cardio and a conscious nutrition program...?
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Ever heard of Charles Polquin's
fat aerobic instructor syndrome? It's an interesting concept that apparenty holds true for most of us genetically average folks. Basically, if you do nothing but endurance training - and lots of it - your body starts to get effecient at storing fat and burning muscle. Gram-per-gram, fat has more energy than glycogen or muscle... so it's - once again - a survivial thing.... also, muscle significantly increases your metabolic rate - so your body sees the muscle as a liability and the fat as a great energy reserve for someone imposing heavy endurance-training requirements on themselves.
It's important to include plenty of resistance training in any workout plan - bulking up, or cutting. In fact, if you are doing a lot of cardio trying to lose weight, I would cut it in half and increase your time spent under the weights - but shorten your rest intervals so your dripping in sweat just as you would when you do cardio (assuming you are not one of those mislead into long sessions at level 2
). I do a lot of giant sets as part of my cutting plan (three exercises worked back-to-back, no rest).
Diet is always going to be your limiting factor - you cannot make up for poor food selections with more cardio... as you know, your metabolism is more complicated than that. You have to eat for fat loss, as well as train for it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Silly Sally
Your experience and willingness to share is much appreciated.
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Thanks, teaching is one of the best ways to keep learning!
