WHETHER YOU WANT TO LOSE FAT, gain muscle, or do both, strength training should be the core of your conditioning. Aerobic activity, on the other hand, is inefficient and ineffective no matter your goal. It is a myth that doing prolonged steady state training—usually maintaining a target heart rate for 30 to 60 minutes—like aerobics or “cardio” is the best way to burn calories and achieve cardiovascular health. Ever plod along on a treadmill that tells you the number of calories burned? You might go 45 minutes before you hit 300 calories. Well, guess what? That’s 300 total calories burned in that time, and not 300 calories above what your baseline metabolism would have burned anyway, even while at rest. That’s the reason the exercise machine asks your weight: To calculate your baseline metabolic rate. The average male burns 105 calories at rest in 45 minutes. Those 195 extra calories that the exercise actually burned—only 195 calories more than if you had been taking a nap—can be undone by half a plain bagel in half a minute. And aerobic exercise typically spurns your appetite enough to more than offset those few actual calories burned.
Posted on: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 11:55:14 +0000
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