Lose Weight Gain Muscle

Lose Weight Gain Muscle
Only recently have nutritionists and sports scientists
started to realise that in order to lose weight, gain
muscle. It seems strange but makes perfect sense when you
take a closer look at the process.

After all, muscle requires a lot of nutrients to keep it in
perfect condition so naturally someone with more muscle
will burn more calories, and so lose weight easier, than
someone with less muscle.

There is something of a problem here though - and that is
that gaining muscle requires additional nutrients in the
diet typically, whilst weight loss requires fewer calories
than are required for maintainance levels.

There are a number of books which have mereged recently
however which aim to solve this riddle.

It seems that in order to lose weight and gain muscle at
the same time you should eat a similar number of calories
to your standard level (as worked out using one of the many
online calorie calculators) but to consume these nutrients
in a very specific form.

That form, of course, is in a low fat, moderate carb and
high protein diet. Carbohydrate sources are selected
carefully so that the body has to work hard to break them
down into a useable form, thus slowing the flow of sugars
into the blood and reducing the chances of any being stored
as fat.

Ideal carb sources include brown rice, wholewheat pasta and
a range of non-starchy vegetables. Add into this mix low
fat and high protein sources like cottage cheese, egg
whites (or substitute) and a range of meats and you have
the basis of a diet that will enable you to lose weight and
gain muscle.

Exercising with weights should be hard and you should aim
for heavy weights that can only be lifted for around 10
reps. Keep increasing the weight lifted during each workout
so as to "force" your muscles to grow and adapt. What seems
to work well is a workout 2-3 times a week that focuses on
each muscle group in turn, and exercising each with two
different exercises.

Thus, you would do 10 reps of a bicep exercise (such as a
bicep curl) then 10 reps of another bicep exercise (such as
a hammer curl) then move into the next muscle group.

A workout should take no more than around 45 minutes as
after this time your body has a a harder time coping with
the intensity of the workout and frankly, if you feel you
could keep going for another half an hour to an hour, it's
probably the case that you're not actually working out hard
enough. When I have finished one of these workouts I can
barely move my muscles are so tired.

You may find initially that you do put on a small amount of
weight but this shouldn't be a major concern as don't
forget that muscle weighs more than the fat you are trying
to lose so this exchange may cause a few peaks and troughs
to appear.

However over the longer term you should find your fat
levels start to drop whilst your lean muscle mass
increases, enabling you to lose weight and gain muscle
together.

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