In India, most women have only one fitness goal – WEIGHT LOSS.
From my experience as a fitness coach, most young girls/women have similar goals – flat stomach or that thigh gap or those toned arms.
One of the biggest mistake women make in their fitness pursuit is that they are chasing “weight loss” when they really should be chasing “fat loss”.
Young girls and women have a very clear picture of their fitness targets. But, too many women are misinformed about the CORRECT way of achieving those targets.
KEY: CARDIO will not get you to your goals fast.
Losing WEIGHT by purely starving yourself and doing exhaustive cardio workouts, but neither is good for your overall well being, nor is it the most effective means of burning fat.
Let’s break it down. When you do any form of CARDIO exercise. Running, jogging, even some hipster cardio exercise like some form of dance or martial arts, you’re burning calories. You’re burning off the fat that is stored in your body and using it for energy.
So it is burning fat but, keep in mind that the fat burns only WHILE you’re doing that particular exercise. Once you go home, your body enters a period of rest and things are normal.
Now let’s consider what happens to your body during and after WEIGHT TRAINING. So weight training is like any other EXERCISE. In order to go through with it you need to exert your body. You need to spend calories.
While you’ve undergone resistance training, while you’ve done squats or push ups or a bicep curl, your muscles are made to fight against that resistance. In doing so, your muscles undergo a number of minute tears.
After your exercise, when you go home, and you’re resting, these tears in your muscles are repaired by your body. In order to repair them, your body spends calories, and continues to burn fat even when you’re on your couch, watching TV and even when you’re asleep.
SIMPLE CARDIO – Burn calories only while you exercise.
RESISTANCE TRAINING – You’re burning calories while you exercise AND you’re burning calories even after the exercise, while you’re chilling at home.
The added advantage of resistance training is the lean muscle you put on in the long term. The more muscle you put on, as a woman, the more fat you’ll burn.
The other big issue I’ve seen in India, is that many women are afraid to take up weight training because they think they’ll end up looking like a “bulked up bodybuilder”. They don’t wanna get “Bulky”. You need to know that these overly bulky women have taken a LOT of steroid injections to make their bodies turn into THAT.
Many of them have used testosterone, the male hormone. The testosterone is what makes those women bulky and it’s also what makes mens’ muscles bigger.
Rest assured you won’t become like that UNLESS you take testosterone injections. As a woman, your natural biological make up will make you look beautiful always, it will make you look “girly”, unless YOU mess around with it.
Priyanka chopra, Bipasha Basu, Alia Bhatt. All these women lift weights and have been lifting weights for a long time. They aren’t bulky by any means.
If you still aren’t convinced about this, I urge you to at least try it out for a couple of months. Go to a good gym, get a good trainer, see the results for yourself. As a woman, especially if you’re someone who has never tried resistance training, you owe it to your body to give it a shot. You have only one body, its time to maximize its potential.
THIS IS THE FASTEST WAY TO BURN FAT.
Great! Thank you for your informative article on exercise. keep it up.