subject: Our Muscles Are Vital To Weight Loss And Health [print this page] If you have gained weight and become larger in your body size it may be because you have allowed your fat burning tissue - your muscle tissue to become weak and flabby. This is easy to do now-a-days as there are simply no longer many opportunities in our daily lives to use our muscles.
With all of our appliances, gadgets, cars and gizmos in our technology driven world there is little need for manual 'work' so our muscles lose their tone and burn less fuel. Yes, you can guess what happens to the excess calories, it goes right on to your tummy, backside and wherever else our body decides to store it.
As our clothes become tighter we wonder what we can do to fix this problem and what people normally do is to cut back on their food intake thinking they are eating too much. But it is not so much an eating too much food problem as an under-muscled problem. Our fat burning mechanism has simply changed our body into a fat storing one when is should be a fat burning one.
Our muscle tissue makes up approximately 50 percent of our body weight and is the mechanism that drives our metabolism and the rate we burn fuel. So any loss of this highly active tissue through inactivity means a big drop in our fuel and fat burning rate. This is what takes a slim trim body and changes it into a heavier larger one.
So the solution is simple - tone up those muscles and there is only one way to do this - proper strength training exercise. No other type of exercise can increase the metabolic rate like directly working the muscles against a resistance. A major benefit that strength training offers over any other fat loss tool is the ability to increase lean muscle weight while at the same time losing body fat.
Toning up your muscles is the very best way to control body weight because it causes a double reducing effect. First, strength training is vigorous if you put some effort into it a significant number of calories are burned during a session. But the most important benefit comes in secondly with an increase in resting metabolism. More calories will be burned at a higher rate all day and night long - regardless of whether you are active or not.
For the longest time people have associated strength training exercise with the sport of bodybuilding or weightlifting. Yet most of us do not have the genetic ability to develop relatively large muscles, only a very small percentage of men and women do.
On the contrary, those people who do not get enough muscle building and maintaining activity should be concerned about losing too much muscle tissue and gaining too much fat tissue in their adult years.
Your muscle tissue and its health is everything as you get older. A strong body also means strong systems and processes and this also means the immune system which is the body's protection from disease.
You may get away with weak, un-toned muscles and lost muscle tissue when you are young but from 30 years onwards it is critical to health and longevity. Neglect the health and condition of your muscular system at your own peril.
