Why Weight

How To Use Your Muscles To Burn Calories

By Kylie Hong

It important it is to get your body physical and aerobically active always. You need strength training, weight lifting, aerobic exercise and flexibility for your total health and fitness.

Many people often believe that doing some form of regular aerobic exercise is all they need to stay fit and strong. We now know that we need to combine weight lifting and aerobic exercise to keep us healthy and fit.

Joe have lost at least 14 kilos and kept them off for five to 10 years. How did he do it? He exercised every day. He burned more 2,800 calories per week, or about 400 calories daily, with exercise. When you do brisk walking it burns 100 calories, and walking was the most popular mode of aerobic exercise, counting for 1,000 calories per week of caloric burned. The other weekly 1,800 calories were burned up in cross-training with other forms of aerobic activities such as biking. Aerobic activity alone is not enough. You need to lift weights.

The truth is that you have to lift weights. You might not have called it strength training but what do you think quickly lifting up your 15 kilo son or daughter away from that hot oven is? You have spent years hoisting children and packing boxes, book bags, briefcases and grocery bags. These activities are much heavier than anyone’s beginning weight workouts.

Muscular strength is so important because it is one of the primary factors involved in boosting your midlife metabolism. Muscles are like a fat burner. They help you burn more calories even when you are at rest and help you stay metabolically warmer. Because muscle is so metabolically active, any loss of muscle tissue reduces your resting metabolic rate. Without regular strength training to build and maintain muscle mass, your body's metabolism cools down over time and burns fewer calories.

Aerobic exercise improves cardiovascular fitness, but it does not keep you from losing muscle tissue. Strength training with weights increases muscle mass and decreases fat.

There are a number of factor that will reduce your muscles mass.

Between the ages of thirty and eighty, the overall strength of your back, arm, and leg muscles can drop as much as 60 percent. This largely reflects a progressive loss of muscle mass at an average rate of 4 percent per decade from ages twenty-five to fifty, and 10 percent per decade thereafter.

As you advance with age, your fitness level will reduce and cause your decrease in strength.

Ageing muscles are also more prone to injury and takes longer time to recover.

Protracted healing lengthens the period of immobility due to pain; if this period is long enough, normal strength may never return. Newly weakened muscle will be more vulnerable to future injury.

Now the good news.

There is also a growing body of research evidence which shows that exercising at a sufficient intensity can increase strength in your muscles just as effectively as in younger individuals. Most heartening of all is research documenting the substantial benefits of training with weights. The bottom line is that it is never too late to improve your muscles. Adding weight lifting to your life make you fit into your clothes better and quicker than if you only did aerobic exercise.

Weight lifting shapes you like nothing else.

Kylie Hong is a fitness enthusiast.You can obtain your exclusive report on Atkins Diet at http://www.healthfitnesssecret.com/atkinsdiet.htmlIf you like to have a mean and lean 6 pack abs, click here: http://www.healthfitnesssecret.com and discover the easy secret.

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posted by Cheryl Levesque @ 10:50 AM