Health

Exercise and Fat Reduction

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Fat Reduction

Losing a few extra pounds can also help lower your blood pressure and reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease. Two-thirds of overweight people with high blood pressure could bring their blood pressure down to normal simply by losing some of their excess weight. Losing excess weight also helps lower elevated levels of triglycerides (fat) in the blood. Triglycerides are linked to heart disease and related cardiovascular conditions.

You can be trim and slender but still unfit from an aerobic point of view. Conversely, you can be in great aerobic shape even if you are overweight. No matter how much you weigh, you can attain great benefits to your heart, cardiovascular system, and muscle tissue from aerobic exercise. Being aerobically fit actually helps minimize some of the risks of being overweight. So don't wait to lose weight before you begin an aerobic exercise program.

Spot-reducing exercises such as sit-ups and leg lifts will tone the muscles under the fat, but they will not eliminate fat itself. Only aerobic exercise can stimulate the release of fat from your fat cells. Here's how it works. Let's say you get on a stationary bicycle and begin peddling. As your heart beat speeds up, your nervous system releases adrenaline. Adrenaline triggers the breakdown of fat in your fat cells everywhere in your body, not just in the muscles you are exercising. Individual fat molecules escape from your fat cells and enter the bloodstream, where they circulate through your body. The exercising muscles (including the heart and respiratory muscles) pick up the circulating fat molecules and burn them to generate energy. The longer the aerobic exercise continues, the more fat is released and burned.

After the Exercise Stops

For a long time after you stop exercising, your muscles continue to pick up and burn the fat already in your bloodstream. However, your tissues will stop releasing fat molecules into your bloodstream very rapidly because your demand for energy decreases.

Several factors affect how long you burn fat after exercise. Most significantly, the longer the exercise session, the more fat will be released from your fat cells and therefore the more fat is burned after exercise. Ideally, you should build up until you are doing a 45 minutes workout at each session. A 45-minute session also significantly depletes the carbohydrate stores in your muscles and liver. Your body will be so busy rebuilding these stores that most of your tissue cells will continue to burn fat as their primary fuel even when you are at rest.

Resisted weight training exercises (such as bench press, Nautilus®, barbell, and dumbbell exercises) encourage fat breakdown after aerobic exercise is over because they tremendously deplete your muscles' carbohydrate stores. While your body is rebuilding its stores, your cells continue to burn fat. Weight training also has other benefits, including increasing your strength, improving your posture, and helping to prevent the weakening of your musculo-skeletal system. If you do not maintain the strength and flexibility of your muscles, you can more easily develop sprains, strains, and wear- and-tear damage over your lifetime.

Also, muscles are more metabolically active than fat tissues so they consume large amounts of energy even when they are resting. Therefore, the more muscular you are, the more calories you will burn at rest. You will have a faster metabolic rate.

If you are just beginning an aerobic exercise program, then you probably won't want to start with resisted weight training right away. However, when you become more experienced and fitter, ask a fitness instructor at a local health club to draw you up a starter program. With all the new sophisticated equipment available, resistance training can be safe for also everyone. I would also suggest that you read my article on this site called "Building A Stronger Body".

Despite the many ways in which aerobic exercise helps you burn fat, you must realize that no exercise program alone can reverse the dangerous impact of a high-fat diet. A healthy diet and a good aerobic exercise program must work together to maintain health and prevent the biologic changes that hasten the onset of heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis, adult-onset diabetes and other degenerative conditions.

 Dr. James Meschino D.C., M.S., N.D.

References:

Exercise Physiology. McArdle, Katch and Katch, 1986, Lea and Febiger, Philadelphia.