Q&A for: 23-Jul-05
231. Q:
What is your idea of 'heavy' weights (free weights) for a healthy, moderately active slender female? And do you think using free weights to do squats, bicep curls, kickbacks, lunges etc. etc. are as effective at burning fat as working out with machines?
A:
For me, a heavy weight for any given person in any given exercise is such a weight that that person can only perform the exercise with it 12 or fewer times in good form before hitting muscular failure. In other words, after s/he performs that exercise with that weight 12 or fewer times, s/he would HAVE to rest for at least a few seconds before being able to lift it once more. This definition is pretty much universal across all exercises for both males and females.
If you look at most of the sample training programs in the Articles section, you'll see that most of the sets are recommended to be to-failure with between 6 and 12 reps, which is basically taking a heavy weight (by the above definition) and pushing yourself to the limit in each set. This is a very demanding training but it also produces the greatest metabolic response. If you are not comfortable with such training, you can still achieve great results by working with heavy weights, but stopping each set a rep or two or three short of failure. Either of these approaches will get you far faster results (whether burning fat or building muscle) than higher rep training where you do 15 or more reps in each set.
If you worry about building too much muscle through this kind of training (which may be aesthetically undesirable for a woman), then be assured that it will not happen AS LONG AS YOU DON'T GAIN WEIGHT! If you overeat to gain weight and perform heavy weight training, then yes, there's a small chance you'll start becoming overly muscular (this, of course, depends on how you define 'overly muscular'). However for a woman, even when overeating and weight training muscle mass comes very slowly. But simply make sure you don't overeat and don't gain weight and then you'll have nothing to worry about at all as far as getting excessively muscular no matter what your training regimen is.
Also keep in mind that heavy weighttraining will make you hungry! This is a side-effect of increased metabolism. So if you don't exercise any diet control, then it is easy to overeat while lifting weights. This is by far the biggest reason why people say that weighttraining made them gain weight! In reality, what actually happened was that weighttraining revved up their metabolism, which led to greater hunger, and they simply ate too much. So, once again, watch what and how much you eat!
As to your second question, freeweights are actually superior to machines in raising your metabolism and burning fat! Machines do all the stabilization work for you and keep your exercise motion the same rep-to-rep. This means that many muscles that could be engaged aren't because the machine is doing the work for them or because machine's mechanics prevent them from ever being used. Because you don't exercise all the muscles you could be exercising, you also don't get metabolic response you could be getting. Still, you can make very good progress with machines only. Machines also provide a good introduction to resistance training for beginners and reduce the risk of injury due to potentially improper use of freeweights (not that freeweights are inherently dangerous -- some people simply don't keep good form on many freeweight exercises).
232. Q:
I have a question. Will speed walking and jogging (sometimes even running) on the treadmill make my body lose fat (i.e. MANBOOBS)?
I also have a gut that pops out. I don't eat that much during the day. I usually have rice and lentils and for lunch and dinner. For breakfast I have a glass of orange juice or milk.
So, will using the treadmill for 30 minutes every day make me lose my gut and/or manboobs? I want to be 'normal.' Please advise.
A:
You are going about losing that extra fat in a very wrong and actually dangerous way! If you literally just eat rice with lentils and a glass of milk in the entire day, then you're absolutely starving yourself!!! Such a regimen will seriously endanger your health far earlier than it will burn off your gut and/or man boobs! Here's what's happening in your body daily...
- You probably eat around 500 or 600 calories for the entire day (rice/lentils/milk)! This is three to four TIMES less than you should be eating.
- Your body 'realizes' it's not getting nearly enough calories (not to mention minerals and vitamins) for normal functioning and has a decision to make of how to make up for the calorie deficit.
- It can burn either muscle or fat for energy. Muscle is an active metabolic tissue, meaning that just to maintain itself it requires significant energy. Fat is a passive metabolic tissue that does not require much or any energy to maintain itself.
- Given those facts, your body will choose to burn MUSCLE and NOT FAT for energy as much as possible! By burning muscle it will both get some energy out of it AND lower its energy demands for the future because it now has less of active metabolic tissue to support.
Now you can probably see what is happening. Your body will use up all the muscle available for energy and spare as much fat as possible because it's under such a severe caloric deficit! And the more muscle it loses, the lower its energy demands become and the less likely it is to burn fat at all! These results are all exact opposites of what you want.
So what you need to do is sery seriously change your diet and engage in heavy weight training to rebuild all the lost muscle, and to rev your body's metabolism back up. Good news is that it's something you can and should do. Read this article and also read the two artcles it references. Together they will give you a compelete diet and workout program to follow. Switch to the workout program as soon as you can and switch to the diet one sloooooooowly, over the course of a month. Your new diet program will be very different from your present one and will ask you to eat several TIMES more than you do now. If you jump to it right away, you will gain a good amount of additional fat because your body is so used to eating almost nothing now. So add additional meals slowly over the course of the month.
And please please please don't continue with your present diet. You may even be afraid to eat now because you feel like every calorie goes straight into fat on your body. You'll need to change your mindset. Nutricious food is your best friend and without it you will quite literally kill yourself. As you read the nutrition article, keep that in mind. It will take a couple of months for your body get back to normal and then is when the serious fat loss (and not just weight loss) will start, thanks to a healthy fat-burning diet and weighttraining. Best of luck to you!
233. Q:
I realized I had asked a question I already knew the answer to in Q 231. I think I was just worried about not having access to machines & heavy weights. I only have two 3-pound DBs to work with. But if I can somehow get my hands on different size weights, would it possible to build small muscles in one area and large muscles in another? For instance, say you want large quad, hamstring, and calf muscles but small muscles in the shoulders & biceps. If it is possible, how? I love your site by the way! Very motivational & informative.
A:
Thank you! Very glad my site is helping you. To answer your questions, yes, absolutely, with just several sized dumbbells you can have very good workouts for all the major muscle groups in your body! I just put up a sample dumbbell-only program and you can change my other workout programs to substitute nearly every barbell exercise with an equivalent dumbbell one. And the best news for you is that your body will naturally do what you want as far as muscle size :) If you train your whole body with any good resistance program, then the major muscles such as quads and hamstrings will naturally grow even bigger and the smaller muscles like biceps and shoulder muscles will grow bigger too, but slower, so your overall proportions won't change much. Calf muscles can be a little tricky -- they are not a naturally very big muscle and for most people they won't grow huge from weight training, but they can get quite big from a lot of running! But for pretty much every other muscle, as long as you train them all, devoting most time to big muscle groups and less time to smaller ones (such as in all my sample programs), they will all grow in proportion achieving exactly the effect you're looking for.
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