TruBlog

by Craig Morgan

Through the course of doing a lot of consultations with new clients, I have come to realize how much confusion exists on the topic of how your body changes from strength training.  A lot of people have sat with me over the years who have worked with one san diego personal trainer or another, yet have never been taught how what they are doing actual works. What follows is a simple breakdown of this process.

(1) Caloric Expenditure – When you exercise in a functional setting (an environment where your body has to stabilize itself through movement such as when you are doing a walking lunge), your body is using your movement muscles to move, your core muscles to stabilize your body posture, and your nervous system to coordinate the whole show. The last point is very important as your neurons (nervous system cells) are the most metabolically active cells in your body, so getting off machines and benches gets them involved in the game at much higher level, in turn burning a lot more calories.

(2) Muscle Breakdown – When you perform a strength training program that has been properly designed, and you do so using the proper loading parameters (mainly using the correct loads to reach muscle fatigue within a pre-determined repetition range), your muscle tissue breaks down during each training session. This triggers a growth and recovery process (during which proper nutrition and sleep are critical) of the broken down tissue. During this process your metabolism is elevated because simply stated it requires calories of energy to rebuild and regrow. This effect oftentimes lasts for 2-3 days.

(3) Muscle Cells Are More Metabolically Active Than Fat Cells – As your existing muscle tissue becomes more active and you grow new muscle tissue, your resting metabolic rate increases due to the fact that muscle cells require more calories of energy to be maintained than fat cells. Again, when nutrition is controlled this leads to a reduction of fat cell volume and you look leaner.

I hope this helps to clear up the confusion and give you a better understanding of how functional strength training works. Feel free to e-mail me at craig@truhealthandwellness.com or leave a comment if you have any questions.

Tags: Functional Exercise, Healthy Weight Loss, San Diego Personal Trainer

This entry was posted on Monday, June 7th, 2010 at 7:57 am and is filed under Healthy Weight Loss, Metabolic Fitness, Personal Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.