One of the MAJOR benefits of exercise is on metabolism.
It can help speed up your metabolism or even help you to slow it down.
Metabolism is the way your body converts food into energy and eliminates waste.
The faster your metabolism, the faster your body will burn energy. (That means that the energy can not store as fat in your body). The slower your metabolism, the slower your body will burn your energy and can result in your body storing the energy as fat.
Cardiovascular exercises (running, swimming, aerobics…) stimulates your metabolism. It helps your body to burn calories.
Side note: Please take note that burning calories and burning fat are different. When we burn calories, we prevent them to store as fat but we are not burning existing fat in the body.
However when we do weight training and increase our muscle mass, we start burning those exciting fats.
1Kg of muscle mass increase your basal metabolic rate (BMR) by up to 100 calories per day. Basal Metabolic Rate is the number of calories your body burn while performing basic life sustaining function. That is why we want our BMR to be high if your goal is to lose weight. Basically, the higher your lean muscle mass, the faster your body will burn calories while doing normal life.
That is why it is important for ladies to also build LEAN muscle. I’m not talking about becoming a body builder or muscular. You can rest in the fact that for woman to look like men, and to build men-like muscles, you need male hormones. If you do not add testosterone to your body, you can not bulk up.
Exercise requires your muscles to burn even more calories. A high intensity strength training session will cause your basal metabolic rate (BMR) to speed up for up to 4 days after training. Its called the ‘after burn effect).
In other words, doing strength training has a much bigger effect on increasing your metabolism then cardio.
So if your goal is to lose weight… Stop running crazy amounts of time and add weight training to your routine.
Annerita Maritz
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