The importance of combining nutrition and exercise for weight management
There are a number of key elements to achieving weight management goals. The major two are correct nutrition and relevant exercise. Weight loss is achieved by consuming fewer calories than your body uses and weight gain is achieved by consuming a greater number of calories than your body uses, but what role does exercise play? For weight loss, the primary purpose of exercise is widely assumed to be to burn calories, but are we able to get greater benefits from our exercise?The answer to this is YES! The type of training you do can improve your body’s ability to burn fat. The human body can only burn fat when both carbohydrates and oxygen are present and so if you are aiming to lose weight, you need to encourage your body to store carbohydrates (in the muscles) and use oxygen more effectively. This is an excellent argument for why low carbohydrate diets are not ideal, because if there are no carbohydrates present in your body, then lean muscle mass is broken down to replace them. In order to promote the adaptations I have discussed, enabling your body to use greater proportions of fat for energy, your cardiovascular exercise should be done at a relatively high intensity (at lease 70% of your maximum heart rate - providing you have a reasonable cardiovascular fitness base to begin with!). This will promote an increase in the number of mitochondria within the muscles, enabling greater uptake and utilisation of oxygen. For fat loss, resistance exercises should be done with repetition ranges of 15 and above, as this will improve the endurance capacity of the muscle. The muscle will once again produce greater numbers of mitochondria in order to reduce lactic acid production, hence improving the muscles ability to use oxygen. For weight gain, the purpose of exercise is to ensure that the mass gained is lean tissue mass and not fat mass, so how is this reflected in the type of exercises performed? Cardiovascular exercise should be done at a lower intensity, with the objective being to raise the body’s core temperature and prepare the joints and muscles for exercise, without burning excessive read more
