That would be a weightlifter/model’s dream come true, wouldn’t it? To work out for about an hour, then go about your life doing other things and still have fat melting off your body. The muscle industry and commercial shows like “The Biggest Loser” have popularized the motif, “no pain, no gain.” Which is true, if you want to effectively lose weight. However, if you want to lose fat, not weight (yes there is a difference), you’ll want to work out as short as possible while maximizing muscular gain. Stop doing cardio and learn how to cut fat the efficient way.
See, the problem with cardio is that once you stop doing it, you stop cutting fat. Also, when you’re doing cardio you can’t help but lose muscle as well. Cardio is akin to long distance running. It’s all aerobic exercise which will strip your body of muscle to fuel the exercise, then turn to the emergency storage, fat. Unless you want to lose all the muscle that you spent forever gaining, then by all means keep on doing cardio. But if you want to keep your muscle and lose fat, you’ll want to do more of what you’re doing to gain muscle. That’s right, by lifting weights, you can get shredded. Sounds crazy but it’s true!
What’s the golden rule of cutting fat? The amount of energy you take in has to be less than the energy you lose from working out, right? Keeping this in mind, cardio does work because you do burn more energy than you take in. The reason why it’s not very efficient is because, like we discussed, our fat loss ends when the workout ends and our muscle density is also compromised. The reason why weight lifting is the way to go is because it’s a very fast way to reach an energy deficit (by pushing your muscles to muscle overload).
In the recovery stage, your muscles are rebuilding themselves and your metabolism will speed up and try and reach a state of equilibrium in your body by turning to your emergency fat storages. This might last for 2 or 3 hours, depending on how intense your work out was. Or it could last a whole 23 hours after a one hour work out. You could be watching TV, reading a book, playing poker with your mates, whatever… you can theoretically lose fat while just chilling essentially.
This does work but of course, you’ll need proper guidance, a well structured work out routine and a dependable meal plan to make sure your body can handle such a dynamic change.
