Fitness and Nutrition Station

First and foremost you are not going to lose weight if you are eating more calories than what you burn with the planned fat loss activity – weights, weights plus cardio, or cardio alone.

That said, to most effectively lose weight you must do both – weight lifting and cardio exercise. Here is why:

If you only do cardio without weights you burn fat, but there is nothing to protect your muscles in this game. You don’t use them, the body gets rid of some of them – it uses them for energy to supply your body with additional calories when needed. You slow down your metabolism so much, you spiral down and ulitmately you plateau.

From this point on you need to do one of the following three things: increase the cardio duration, further decrease the calories, or both simultaneously. Your metabolism slows down again, due to the fact that you contunue losing muscle tissue along with the fat… And if you remember muscles are the burner that uses fat for energy, so less muscles, less fat burnt and less calories needed to sustain your daily activities and cardio, too.

So, clearly doing only cardio for fat loss is not the answer!

Let’s examine the case where you lift weights only. In this case you generally use less calories (if your workout is not crazy long) compared to a good cardio session. Some of these calories come from fat, some from carbohyrdates. Not enough calories are burned to provide for a good fat loss process.

So, lifting weights is effective at burning fat, but the process is very slow. It could be somewhat axelerated if you make your weight sessions resample cardio or high intensity intervals cardio. But again, you will need more calories burned.

Finally, weights and cardio together. By lifting weights not only do you burn calories and provide calorie deficit toward your fat loss goal, but you also send a message to your body that you need the muscles as big as they are. And if you can recall, each pound of muscle burns about 30 Calories a day, just like this resting and doing nothing.

So, the answer is both – weights and cardio. The weights will maintain your muscles, thus maintaining the total size of tissue that burns fat, and the cardio will make this tissue use a lot of fat during a short period of time. Now, if you choose to do high intensity intervals (HIIT) instead of steady cardio you will ultimately end up burning more calories. HIIT elevates your calorie expenditure for hours after you’re done with the exercise.

My presonal choice – heavy, but short weight lifting sessions and HIIT cardio that is twice as short as a normal steady cario session… all this in combination with a well-crafted meal plan, ensuring that I’m very slightly calorie deficient. There!

If you don’t know how to calculate your calories and put together your meals, and even if you need suggestions for fat loss and muscle building routines to go along with your perfect meal plan simply use my FitNA tool – it does all this for you… and a lot more… and it’s totally FREE! Just go to http://www.ivannikolov.com/membersite and create a free account if you don’t already have one.

I was just reading an article about the damages in the muscle during an eccentric muscle contraction compared to concentric contraction. I’ve known for a long time that eccentric contractions cause a lot greater micro damages in the working muscle.

I also knew why that happens – because during the eccentric (negative) phase of the rep the weight is pulling in the opposite direction of the contraction or shortening of the muscle fiber. What I didn’t know is how to explain it more scientifically.

It sounds like this: during the concentric (the positive) phase of the rep the force decreases while the speed increases. In the case of the eccentric contraction (the negative part of the rep) the force increases while the speed increases. In other words the faster you move the weight during the eccentric (negative) part of the rep the more muscle damage you cause – that is more of the contracting filaments get micro damaged.

Later on when the body goes on to repair the damaged parts of the muscle fiber, a positive adaptation  occurs – the body re-builds the damaged parts of the muscle cell, making them stronger by increasing the number of contracting filaments. That’s how we grow.

One of my members asked about Russian Lunges the other day. He said he’s been doing forward and reverse (backward) lunges, but he didn’t know what Russian lunges are and how to do them.

So, I thought I’d post here quiclkly a short description if you happen to wonder the same thing (I’d much rather talk about Bulgarian (split) squats since I am Bulgarian, but… hey in the name of the sport of bodybuilding…).

Russian lunge execution:

Step with one of your legs about 3 feet in front of the other. Lower your body like in normal lunge. Rapidly push yourself up until both of your legs are in the air. Quickly switch legs so that when you land the opposite leg is in front of the leg you started with. Repeat.

Oh, well, Bulgarian explaining Russian lunges… I really hope I make sense.. If not, I count on your imagination.