Burning fat and building muscles
Most people who go to the gym to burn out their extra fat also want to increase their flexibility, build greater muscular strength and endurance, reshape and tone their bodies and add some lean muscle mass to it. Now you must be wondering whether burning fat and building muscles simultaneously is possible at all or not.
Burning of fat and building of muscles involve two different metabolic functions with absolutely contrasting requirements. While muscle building requires you to consume more dietary calories than what you can burn in a day, weight loss requires fewer calories intake than what gets exhausted each day.
There exists a very fine link between losing weight and gaining muscles. In order to develop big powerful muscles, you will need to undertake strength training exercises to improve your muscular strength and endurance. As a result of your training, your muscles start to get stronger and bigger. As your muscles continue to grow strong and big, they would require more nutrients and rest. Muscles are metabolically very active and as you continue to develop more muscle tissues your body's metabolic rate increases and the fat burning process becomes more efficient. As a result, you tend to lose unwanted fat from your body and gain lean muscle mass.
When you are under a weight loss program, your body is in a state of deprivation, as a result of which the carbohydrates, proteins and fats present in the cells of the body get used up for energy production. If you can manage to replenish the proteins and carbohydrates content in your body and allow only the excess fat to be used up for energy production during rigorous workouts, then your body can achieve the desired objective of weight loss as well as muscle building.
For building muscles, you need to maintain your body in a calorie surplus state by consuming more number of calories than your body is able to burn every day. In addition to this, you must also undertake the correct resistance exercises and strength training in order to stimulate the numerous cells involved in the development of muscle tissues.
For best results, every bodybuilder must aim at exerting the muscles a little bit harder than the previous workout session either by increasing the amount of weights used, or by doing more number of repetitions. This is known as taking progressive overloads and helps improve the muscular strength and size.
Muscles can grow faster when you take sufficient rest between subsequent workouts to allow repair, recovery and replenishment of energy supplies to your muscles. Therefore, take at least 2 days rest between subsequent workouts.
If you are aiming at achieving both weight loss and muscle building targets, then you must try to lose as much fat as possible, but you must try to retain your muscle mass. For this, you will need to increase the intensity of your workouts as well as your protein intake drastically (at least 2 gm/kg of body weight). Plan the timing of protein intake in such a way that you consume the recommended level within two hours of completion of a rigorous workout session in order to facilitate the ready availability of proteins for muscle tissue repair.
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Professional fitness instructor, Jason Diggs, gives quality, non-biased reviews on the nets top " how to build muscle " instructional programs. His #1 pick goes to muscle gain truth, a highly acclaimed, extensive muscle building package.
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