How to Exercise to Lose Fat and Maintain Muscle
If you read mainstream fitness magazines, stop. They will have you believe that using their fat-burning workouts, you can drop lots of fat and build lots of muscle at the same time. The truth is quite different.
Forget fitness, and turn on the logic.
Let’s say it takes you 2000 calories per day just to maintain your weight. Do you need more calories or less calories than 2000 to gain weight (muscle)? More, of course. And do you need more calories or less calories than 2000 to lose weight (ideally fat)? Less, of course. Can you have both more calories and less calories at the same time? No, that’s not possible. So the lesson is don’t try to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time. It actually can be done, but that approach is rather unconventional and would require a separate article (or book) in itself. For now, let’s focus on maintaining muscle while losing fat.
Let’s get one thing straight: by far, the majority of your fat loss efforts will come from nutrition and not exercise. I would go so far as to say that 70-90% of the fat loss puzzle is nutrition. I won’t delve into what is good nutrition, but I just want you to accept that no matter how good your exercise program is, if you’re not eating in a way that supports your fat loss efforts, you won’t get anywhere.
With that out of the way, let’s focus on exercise.
When it comes to fat loss, there are 2 forms of exercise that make sense.
First, you can do moderate-high sets (3-6+) with high repetitions (15-20) with several exercises. Contrary to fitness folklore, high repetitions don’t tone you up or “shape the muscle” (whatever that means) and low repetitions don’t make you bulky. The reason for the high repetitions is that glycogen depletion (AKA “sugar-burning”) happens optimally between 40 and 70 seconds. When you lift for 15-20 repetitions, you tend to fall in that range.
You might be asking yourself “I want to burn fat, why are you telling me to do sugar-burning workouts?” The reason for that is that your body basically has 2 primary fuel sources it burns just to stay alive: sugar (aka carbohydrates/glucose/glycogen) and fat. Take away one fuel source (sugar) and you’re only left with one other fuel source to burn: fat.
Another approach is to do low repetitions (4-6) for moderate-high sets (3-6). If you are more advanced at weight training, the first approach (high repetitions) will not help you maintain muscle (if you’re a beginner, it will), but it will burn sugar. This approach will help you maintain muscle due to the greater levels of tension that you will need to generate to move heavier weights.
If you have more than 1 year of intelligent and consistent weight training experience, you will need to combine both methods.
If you have not exercised for more than 2 months or you don’t have 1 year of intelligent and consistent weight training experience, you can just use the first method.
You might be asking yourself “where does cardio fit in all this?”
Cardio can certainly help you in your fat loss efforts, but a word of warning. If you are losing weight strictly by dieting, as much as 45% of the weight that you lose will be muscle. If you are doing a diet in addition to cardio and no weight training, you are losing even more muscle than that. Muscle is precious in that it helps you keep up your metabolism, reduces your risk for diabetes (sugar is burned in muscle) and osteoporosis.
Initially, you don’t have to do any cardio, and after you reach a plateau (when you stop improving), you can add 20-40 minutes of cardio 3 times per week (in addition to the weight training).
Eventually, you will plateau with this approach as well, at which point do not increase your cardio, but switch to interval training (doing a period of hard work followed by a period of lighter work).
There you have it. This is how you can lose fat but maintain muscle.
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