The Role of Exercise

If exercise doesn’t burn many calories, and if it doesn’t contribute significantly to causing fat loss, what role does exercise have in the fat loss process? Exercise provides the following 6 contributions to a fat loss program. The first three and most important of these contributions can only be provided by strength training (weight lifting). Neither aerobic activity, nor any other physical activity is of any real value. The contributions of exercise are listed in order of importance.

1. Discriminate Weight Loss
2. Increased Basal Metabolism
3. Improved Body Shape and Appearance
4. Continued Preoccupation
5. Depressed Appetite
6. Increased Caloric Expenditure

Discriminate Weight Loss: Weight loss per se’ is not the objective. What the scale indicates is of no relevance. Fat loss is what matters. A calorie deficit created in the absence of strength training will result in the loss of valuable lean tissues (muscle, organ tissue, and water). Some studies have shown that diet alone without exercise results in more muscle loss than fat. Aerobic activity also fails to prevent the loss of muscle. Strength training exercise, and only strength training, causes the body to selectively lose fat and spare muscle. 
 
Increased Basal Metabolism: Basal metabolism describes the amount of energy (calories) your body expends each day for all its basic life sustaining functions. Essentially, it is the base level of energy expenditure to sustain life. It does not include extra calories expended during physical activity. In addition to preventing a loss, strength training causes an increase in lean muscle tissue. Muscles have a high energy requirement to sustain them. Therefore, as muscle tissue is increased, basal metabolism increases. The body then requires additional calories each day to support basic physiological functions. This allows a higher calorie intake without fat gain, a higher calorie intake that still results in fat loss, and a higher calorie intake for fat maintenance. 


Improved Shape and Appearance: When muscles become stronger they become firmer and possess better muscle "tone". Their shape, contour, and definition also improves. All these attributes enhance overall body shape and appearance.




Continued Preoccupation: You can’t eat and exercise and/or perform physical activity at the same time. Therefore, by preoccupying you, exercise can assist in prevention of excess food consumption. 


Depressed Appetite: Physical activity, especially exercise, depresses appetite. However, this factor is of limited value due to its temporary effect. Hunger returns after the body has recovered from the bout of exercise.
If you develop a craving for food, get up and take a walk, clean the house, or wash the car. These activities do not qualify as exercise, nor do they burn much in the way of extra calories, but they will depress your appetite and keep you preoccupied. 


Increased Caloric Expenditure: Increased caloric expenditure is by far the slightest and least important contribution of exercise to a fat loss program. Its contribution is so insignificant that it hardly deserves mention. Ironically, increased caloric expenditure receives the most attention by the press, health care professionals, and the general public. This is indicative of how out of touch with reality people are in regard to the facts of fat loss. 

It has already been illustrated how few extra calories are expended by exercise. So few that you should not even consider them in your program. Far better, more time efficient results are achieved by restricting calorie intake and performing two brief, but intense, strength training workouts each week.