If you want to get a fit and toned body, the best type of workout you can do is not cardio training.
It might sound strange at first sight, but it’s true.
Despite every thing you can see on women’s magazines or on TV, cardio training is not what will make your body look fit and sexy, with great form.
Sure, cardio will help you burn fat, to some degree.
It helps you increase the calorie deficit you’ll have created thanks to a proper diet.
How do you lose weight:
As you might have understood, in order to burn fat, you must create a calorie deficit, by eating less and moving more, so that your body is forced to draw on its reserves to remain functional.
But what exactly are those reserves?
That’s where it gets interesting.
The two main energetic reserves your body can use to stay functional when in a calorie deficit are fat… and muscles.
When following a diet or a program to improve your shape, the key is to lose fat, not muscles.
The key is to cause your body to tap exclusively into fat. Because if you do it wrong, you can easily lead your body to tap into muscle and not fat. This is the worst case scenario.
You lose muscles that gave you a great shape and you slow down your metabolism (which means that in order to lose fat, you’ll have to eat even less than before, because your body will need a bit less energy to remain functional, since it’ll have less muscles).
That’s one of the reasons why so many people regain weight after they stop their diet. They get it wrong, lose a lot of muscle during their diet, then regain all the fat they have lost (+ a little extra) when they get back to their previous way of eating.
On the other hand, some people get it right and manage to lose fat without losing muscle (and even while gaining muscle).
They build a great shape, while losing fat. By the time their diet reach its end, they have built a toned and sexy body.
Now, you’re probably wondering:
What kind of workout can I do in order to achieve such results?
Well, as you might guess, it’s not cardio.
Running for hours on a treadmill or a running machine won’t help you build the body of your dreams.
The best kind of workout you can do to achieve those results is…
Weightlifting workout.
Here’s why:
Lifting weight forces your body to put its muscles into action. These workouts create a need for your body: maintaining muscle mass, and even increase it.
Lifting weight while in a calorie deficit is going to cause your body to spare muscle mass and tap (nearly) exclusively into fat.
As a result, your metabolism is not going to slow down, as it would if you were doing exclusively cardio-training.
When you do too much cardio, your body is going to want to lose muscle (so that it can be lighter and thus expend less energy) and store fat (so that it has some reserves).
That’s why so many women end with a skinny-fat body after their diet or their program to lose weight. Sure they lost weight, but mostly consisting of muscles.
On the contrary, women who include weightlifting into their program and limit cardio manage to lose fat while maintaining muscle mass.
And as you can guess, the results are completely different.
Weightlifting allows you to burn fat as well as maintaining muscle mass at the same time.
You even burn a little bit of fat the day after your workout, since your body needs more energy in order to repair its muscles.
So the next time a friend of yours tells you that she’s going to run an hour or so in order to lose fat, you’ll know what to tell her.