People from all age groups are making their own fitness journey – some want to gain muscle, or even increase their body weight. More often than not, whenever someone is deciding how to begin their fitness journey; it’s with a weight loss goal in mind. Sometimes the best intentions collapse under the pressure to lose weight. Frustrated exercisers all over stop short of their fitness goals – discouraged, because in their eyes, they aren’t “losing enough weight”.
Through my years as a personal trainer, I’ve had countless clients tell me during their overall fitness assessments that they want to lose weight. Nothing wrong with that. Many times, their weight loss goals are tied to somewhat vague directions from a doctor to “exercise more”. It makes sense to want to maintain a healthy body weight; although frequently the numbers on your bathroom scale can be misleading. All weight is not made equally when assessing a person’s overall fitness level.
Many times people are given general guidelines that aren’t tailored to their actual fitness journey. A person who has previously conditioned themselves with weights and resistance training is going to be naturally heavier than the average person. Muscle weighs more than fat so it’s important not to get emotionally tied to the numbers that pop up on your bathroom scale.
In theory, you can absolutely slim-down, shape up, and increase your cardiovascular endurance without necessarily shedding massive weight. Realistically it’s about where you’re beginning your fitness journey. If you’re beginning from a nonathletic background and you’re considered obese; you will certainly see large weight loss numbers once you begin and maintain an active physical fitness regimen.
An athlete who finds themselves considered obese will see weight loss whenever they recommit to their fitness level; however athletic muscle gains will translate into rapid loss of body fat – but not necessarily rapid loss of weight. Consider that muscle weighs more than fat so it’s important to remember your entire fitness journey as you begin to exercise.
The desire to lose weight and make healthier choices is understandable, but it’s important to understand how your body works so that you make smart, safe fitness decisions. The more you understand about yourself the easier it will become to make safe decisions. Countless people are potentially putting themselves in a dangerous situation by wrapping themselves in plastic or “sauna suits” to encourage themselves to sweat profusely.
If you’ve ever watched boxing – you’ve seen that fighters can be 15 pounds heavier between the weigh and fight night; which is about a days time. Boxers dehydrate themselves to make weight; then they replace the fluids and can easily gain 15 pounds in a days time. There’s a difference between losing body fat and losing water weight. You can absolutely sweat yourself into a smaller scale number… for a few hours. Once you rehydrate yourself the weight that you lose in water will return. Exercise that you can sustain in order to lose body fat is great; however, wrapping yourself in plastic in order to overheat yourself and sweat profusely can put you in a dangerous place.
Think of your body as a machine that stores energy and also consumes it. Every day you want to burn more energy than you store. Effectively, calories are the energy that you either store or burn. Keeping in mind that all calories are not the same; the focus of an exerciser who wants to slim down or drop weight should be ensuring that they burn more calories then they consume.
To make this example relate more, let’s say your body machine is a car. Design your workouts to burn the most gas possible every day. Your body’s muscles are the engine, and you want to use the largest muscles in your body to burn the most gas whenever you exercise. The way a V-12 engine would drink more gas than a four-cylinder, is the same way that the larger muscles in your body will burn more calories than the smaller muscles. At whatever pace you’re driven to use your muscles– you can use that exercise load to determine how quickly you achieve your fitness goals. Make sure that you’re not slowing your journey down by using the incorrect blend of aerobic to anaerobic exercises.
There are plenty of exercises to choose from; and learning how your body adapts to the exercises you do will help prevent you from plateauing. The exercises you choose on day one of your weight loss journey may give you the best results for a limited time only. That’s why the walking you began doing as exercise to begin with maybe isn’t paying off the same way it once did.
Along with regular exercise; what you eat and how much of it that you eat is going to determine the ultimate payoff that you get from all the sweat you put in. And while we are talking about sweat; the effort that you put in during exercise and adequate hydration are the ingredients to that glorious sweat. Sauna suits, plastic shirts etc. are fools gold designed to make you sweat by raising your body temperature unnaturally– sometimes dangerously in certain weather conditions.
The truth about weight loss is if you do a workout designed correctly you can absolutely and literally burn fat in your sleep. The recovery mechanism of the human body requires energy consumption. If you’re doing a workout routine that requires maximum effort from your biggest muscle groups – you’re going to require your body to burn way more calories than usual. Even better; if you build your body the right way you can directly manipulate and control the rate that you burn fat. When a boxer weighs in 15 pounds lighter than what he’ll be on fight night, that’s simply 15 pounds in water weight. Dropping water weight is completely different than dropping body fat. Adding 15 pounds of muscle would benefit your weight loss journey much more than dropping 15 pounds of water weight. Interesting how numbers work; right?
