The Role of Exercise in Fat Loss.
Friday, June 27, 2008 15:08Just a quick note to clear up any confusion -
When on a fat loss program, it’s the diet that causes you to lose fat.
Primarily, exercise (strength training) prevents the loss of muscle tissue while your body is burning fat tissue for energy. If you’re a beginner, you’ll probably even gain muscle while losing fat.
Exercise can contribute towards creating an energy deficit (i.e., burn more calories), but this is at best a secondary role. Exercising in order to burn calories for fat loss purposes is a fool’s game. You haven’t a chance.
Unless, of course, you modify diet accordingly. And if you do modify diet accordingly, then you don’t need to “burn extra calories by exercising.”
So, to summarize:
Exercise to prevent muscle loss. Eat to enable fat loss.
Hope that clears things up.
Tony K (1 comments) says:
June 27th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Great post. Matches my experience exactly.
T
Christopher (14 comments) says:
June 28th, 2008 at 3:23 am
Awesome, succinct way of putting it Eugene. It’s great having you as a source for reliable, dead-on information.
Joe Cannon, MS, CSCS, NSCA-CPT (1 comments) says:
June 28th, 2008 at 9:36 am
Excellent point about nutrition being the bigger part of weight loss programs. As an exercise physiologist myself I know that the easy part is working out - the hard part is standing in front of the fridge at 12AM when nobody is looking.
Joe Cannon, MS, CSCS, NSCA-CPT
My website: http://www.Joe-Cannon.com
Kaiser (4 comments) says:
June 28th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
This goes back to the New York Magazine article we were talking about - thanks for clearing that up for me - and not calling me stupid!
Eugene Thong (22 comments) says:
July 1st, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Tony - Thanks. Your Unified Feed Theory post is genius, BTW.
Dr. Warden - Touche.
Joe - Couldn’t have said it better myself. And boy, have I found myself in that situation more than once.
Kaiser - No prob. *dons Gary Taubes Apologist T-shirt*