Exercise and diet - the correlation

I had a friend who was 40 pounds overweight. One day he decided that as motivation to lose the excess pounds he would enter and train for an upcoming race. The poor guy ran for 6 days a week and much to my surprise, he followed his regimen zealously. 6 weeks go by and the guy has maybe shed about 6 pounds from his desired total. He was running faster and farther than he ever could before but the gut was there to stay. So why after so much exercise was he not achieving his goal? First, because the guy would go out with the rest of his friends and munch down on typical guys' night out food: pizza, beer, hot wings and pasta, and second, because steady cardiovascular exercise doesn't burn fat calories the way strength training does.

Muscles use a large amount of calories to keep themselves nourished. They eagerly await those calories that you are ingesting on a daily basis. It isn't too difficult to hypothesize then that the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn. The most important aspect of this is that your muscles don't have to be particularly working out in order to reap the benefits. A bulging Hulk will burn more calories by sitting down and watching TV then your average fat-bellied, couch potato. The reason again, more muscles equals more calorie burning, regardless of what state your body happens to be in.

The best muscles to work out are the ones in your large muscle groups. These include your legs, chest, back, and shoulders. These groups of muscle build up the biggest mass and in the shortest amount of time. An added benefit to working the larger muscles is that your metabolism kicks into high gear. So what exactly are the types of exercises you should be doing? There are 3 groups that you will need to focus on: Circuit Training, Compound Exercises, and High Intensity running.

Circuit training is in read more