By Star Nebula

One of the most common misconceptions that many of us harbor about fitness is that the more weight we lose, the healthier we are. Not surprisingly, almost all our fitness goals and the efforts we make are charted by the numbers displayed on the weighing scales.

However, when blinded by fallacies such as these, what most of us fail to consider is that weight loss does not necessarily translate into fat loss. And so, even though your weight might be well within the recommended guidelines, if your weight loss techniques are drastic and unscientific, you could still end up with a high amount of body fat; symptoms of which are loose skin, poor muscle tone, and even a heightened risk of chronic diseases.

On the other hand, when you concentrate your efforts on losing fat instead of simply letting the weighing scales determine how healthy you are, you may still be as heavy as you were when you first started out, but in much better shape. The simple reasoning behind this theory is that the weighing scales only tell you how much your entire body weighs. What they don’t tell you is whether a majority of this weight is comprised of fat, or simply water, or even muscle tissue. Also, muscle tissue is a lot denser than fat, making measuring your body weight a redundant way to estimate how much fat your body really contains.

Simply obsessing about how heavy you are may earn you some solace as you hop on and off the weighing scales… it still doesn’t guarantee that you are any closer to your fitness goals than you were on Day One. Even worse, once you get off your diet and back to your regular eating habits, all those pounds instantly bounce right back on, leaving you with very little to show for all your painstaking efforts.

The little known, and most commonly ignored, key to effective fat loss lies in building lean muscle.

• What is lean muscle and how does it help you lose fat?

Clinically described as metabolically ‘active’ tissue, muscles need a certain number of calories to maintain themselves. And so, the more muscle mass you have, the greater the number of calories – and hence, fat – you burn, even while your body is at rest. In fact, pound for pound, the muscle in your body burns 35 to 50 more calories than the fat deposits, without you having to so much as even lift a finger!

When you scrimp on calories without paying attention to your fitness regime, approximately a quarter of every pound of weight you lose is made up of lean muscle mass. Thus, the more weight you lose, the harder you have to work to keep up the weight loss, as your body steadily loses its most powerful fat-busting allies!

The secret to an effective, long-term fat loss regime, which produces clearly visible results on your physical health, is to target your efforts towards developing lean muscle mass. And this is one of the primary reasons why merely curbing your food habits will not lead you any closer to your fitness goals, if you fail to back it up with a regular and planned exercise routine.

Just as your body needs a healthy blend of different food groups to fuel its functioning and to keep you in the pink of health, it also needs a proportionate blend of different forms of exercise to boost your immunity, enhance your blood circulation and build lean muscle.

Broadly classified, exercises can be divided into three basic categories, each of which has a distinct role to play in enhancing your fitness levels:

• Aerobic Exercise:
Also termed as cardiovascular or endurance exercise, aerobic exercises can be loosely defined as those which make you breathe faster and hence, make your heart beat more quickly. These forms of exercise enhance your body’s consumption of oxygen and include activities like jogging, running, swimming and brisk walking. While these forms of exercise are considered by many to be the most ideal when it comes to losing weight, fitness experts opine that an exercise regime that consists of solely aerobic exercises may not make for a complete and well-balanced fitness program. Aerobic exercises also do not enhance your body’s metabolic rate like anaerobic strength training would and is therefore also considered to be less effective in terms of fat-burning.

However, aerobic activity is essential for the healthy functioning of your heart and respiratory system and is thereby considered an important element of a well-balanced fitness regimen. Also, your body’s metabolism receives a temporary boost for a few hours after a bout of cardiovascular exercise, which helps you burn more calories during that interval.

• Resistance Training:
As the name suggests, resistance training is based on the principle of exerting an effort against a specific opposing force. This effort could either include moving against the opposing force, in which case the exercises are classified as isotonic, or holding still against the force, which would deem the exercises are isometric.

Resistance training is very effective in building muscle strength, while also the amount of lean muscle mass your body contains. Further, regular resistance training also goes the extra mile by boosting your body’s basal metabolic rate by 15%, so that you keep up the calorie furnace even on lazy television afternoons. Over a period of time, resistance training can also help build your bone density, thus keeping you from bone degenerative diseases like osteoporosis in your later years.

• Flexibility Exercises:
These exercises keep you from muscle injury, while also keeping you more agile and flexible as you grow older. Flexibility training also helps you recoup from the muscle tightness and overuse which sets in when after an intense bout of repetitive activity, especially in sports which require you to use one side of your body a lot more than the other. The two most common strata that flexibility exercises are categorized into include Dynamic Stretching which uses momentum and active muscular force, and Static Stretches which use an external force to hold the stretch at an end position for 30 seconds.

Decades of research have revealed the most effective form of fitness training to be a measured amalgamation of these three categories, laying special emphasis on technique and form to produce optimal results.

By Star Nebula, a freelance writer