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Why weight loss requires strength training, even in women and seniors
Women need strength training, too. Let’s take a moment to cover that myth here. Let’s say you’re a woman and you have more body fat than you want. You’re trying to decide, ‘Should I engage in strength training as part of my weight loss program?’ Some women say, ‘No, because I’ll bulk up and it’ll make me look fatter.’ That’s a complete myth; it’s totally false.
When you have a high percentage of body fat, that body fat is stored not only in the tissues that are obvious — such as your hips and your midsection, your arms and legs and so on — it’s also stored intramuscularly, which means it’s stored within the muscles of your body. It’s sort of like the marbling of beef from a cow. If you slice a muscle from a cow, there’s some fat inside the muscle — that is the same kind of fat that’s in our muscles when we have a high percentage of body fat.
That fat takes up a lot of space in the muscle, so it actually makes the muscle look bigger, because there’s fat inside. When you start losing body fat, even if you’re engaged in strength training, that intramuscular fat will begin to vanish. So even if your muscle mass begins to grow — which, again, is very difficult for women to accomplish — your overall muscle size is probably going to be smaller when you’re at a lower percentage of body fat. The net change in your muscle size is going to be almost nothing, unless you really start to do strength training on a regular basis for a period of a year or two, and then you might actually begin to put on a little bit more muscle.
Saturday, August 27, 2005 by: Mike Adams.
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