Skip to main content

Cardio does not help in body fat reduction?

I found this very interesting article: http://www.biologiclabs.com/advice/details.asp?article_id=23

If you read it and take everything to heart then you will never do cardio again! I like how he debunks the claim that cardio reduces fat %. I agree with almost everything he has to say. I like his simple equation which relates food, muscle, weight and fat.
  • Food determines your weight
  • Strength determines your lean mass
  • The difference is fat
If you eat more, you will gain weight. Now if you increase strength proportionally then you will keep the same body fat. At the end of the day you have less body fat % yet you weight more and have more strength. Although putting this principle into practice is not easy. Because you cannot exactly measure how much to eat so that you just gain muscle and not fat (with excess calories). Similarly you cannot be eating less than what is required otherwise you will not see the best strength gains and your recovery and metabolism slows down too.

Many people attribute losing weight to looking lean. They are completely 2 different things. Looking lean means having a low body fat %. You could loose weight by getting rid of all the muscle. You will look thinner and smaller, but definitely not stronger or leaner, let alone healthier. You will look soft and rounded and your skin sags with the fat it is holding.

So to close:

body weight = muscle weight + fat weight
fat weight = body weight - muscle weight
fat weight = food intake - strength

To reduce fat either increase strength or reduce food intake. I prefer to increase strength please :)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stats for Oct 2009

So it has been a month since I started bulking up. How am I doing so far? Here are the raw numbers Exercises Squats: 170 lbs, 8 reps Deadlifts: 185 lbs, 10 reps Bench Press: 110 lbs, 4 reps Pull ups: Body weight + 25 lbs, 7 reps Overhead Press: 75 lbs, 6 reps I am doing well in all exercises except bench press. The exercise that is already closest to my goal for end of december is my pull-ups. I can already do 7 reps with 25 lbs hanging off my waist! You can check out my previous post for the goals I have set. Body weight and fat Weight: 120.8 lbs Fat %: 12.2% I am able to add weight as expected. But my body fat % shot up too much. My goal for end of december was to weight 125 lbs at 12% body fat. But I am already over the limit for my body fat %. So I have to lower it and at the same time increase my weight. Very unlikely. I might have to revise my goals, but I will see how it goes and hope to make better predictions for my next bulking phase. It is not at all easy to ke...
12 comments
Read more

Strong Lifts 5x5 log

I started strongs lifts on Februry 23, 2009 and ended it about 3 months later on May 13, 2009. Here are the logs of my workouts by day and weight lifted. All the weights are in lbs. The cells marked with a blue background indicate that I could not do 5x5 and so I had to repeat those weights. As you can see I had some good progress overall. I never did squats and now I know what those are and how much I can squat. Bench press has always been my weakest workout. I could not go over the 100 lb weight (even today). For push-ups I used a weighing scale below my hands and checked how much weight gets exerted on it when I try to do a push-up. The scales showed 70 lb (I weight 120 lb). So I am not lifting my full body weight when I am doing push-ups. I was able to do 3 sets of 5 reps each. Then for my next push-up day I kept a 5 lb plate on my back and did my push-ups. If I was able to do 3x5 then for the next time I added another 5 lb plate and so on. That is how I got those numbers for m...
2 comments
Read more

Chin ups and Pull ups

When I first started P90X I could barely do a couple of chin-ups. But in P90X video I see people doing 15 and 20 reps and that is not just in the first set. They consistently do as many chin-ups in every set. I used to question whether I can ever be so strong. I always hated my chin-up days. Not anymore. How did I do it? I just kept doing them even though I could only get 2 or 3. When I could not do any more I used to do negatives. For this I would jump to the chin-up bar so that I am in the top most position. Then I slowly came down. I kept doing it for all the sets where I could not get even 1 rep. Coming down slow is the key. I kept doing as many negative reps as I could get without hurting myself. The next time I did chin-ups I could get 1 or 2 extra reps! That worked very well. I later found another trick that helped me get more energy. The trick is to tighten the abs as I am doing chin-ups. This helped me do a few more reps. I am not doing negatives any more because now I can...
Post a Comment
Read more