The Great Aerobic Hoax

For decades, we've been told that the best activity for burning calories and fat is aerobic exercise. Many studies, dating back 3 decades ago, have reported that aerobic exercise is the best way to burn calories and lose fat. As well as offering other benefits, from improving markers of heart-disease risk to coping with mental stress to enhancing cognitive function.
Well, times have changed, and in the past few years with the increasing population of overweight adults and children there has been a mad rush to look at fitness and the impacts it has in our lives. If you're looking to shed fat, the newest weight-loss research will tell you that you need to do more than just jumping on the elliptical or treadmill.

A new study by Jeff Volek, Ph.D., R.D., an exercise and nutrition scientist at the University of Connecticut, is debunking the myth that all exercise is created equal.
Volek's research gives him good reason to doubt the conventional wisdom about the superiority of aerobic exercise for fat loss.
The Study: Volek and his team put overweight people on a reduced-calorie diet and divided them into three groups. One group didn't exercise, another performed aerobic exercise 3 days a week, and a third did both aerobic exercise and weight training 3 days a week.

The results: Each group lost nearly the same amount of weight — about 21 pounds per person in 12 weeks. But the lifters shed 5 more pounds of fat than those who didn't pump iron. The weight they lost was almost pure fat, while the other two groups shed 15 pounds of lard, but also gave up 5-plus pounds of muscle. "Think about that," says Volek. "For the same amount of exercise time, with diets being equal, the participants who lifted lost almost 40 percent more fat."
So, why do you want to build lean body mass (muscle)? The amount of Lean Body mass you have is directly related to your Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) or commonly known as your metabolism. Your RMR dictates the amount of calories (energy) your body needs just to maintain life. Therefore, the more lean body mass you have-the more metabolically active tissue you have- the higher your metabolism will be.
This isn't a one-time finding, either. Research on low-calorie dieters who don't lift shows that, on average, 75 percent of their weight loss is from fat and 25 percent of it is muscle. That 25 percent may reduce your scale weight, but it doesn't do a lot for your reflection in the mirror. Having strength and definition is important. However, if you weight-train as you diet, you protect your hard-earned muscle and burn extra fat instead.

The New Science of Calorie Burning
In the past we thought that any form of aerobic activity, such as jogging was far better than any type of anaerobic activity, like resistance training, in burning calories. Women focusing on Low-fat options at the store and only cardio at the gyms may be doing themselves a disservice.
When Christopher Scott, Ph.D., an exercise physiologist at the University of Southern Maine, began using an advanced method to estimate energy expenditure during exercise, his data indicated that weight training burns more calories than originally thought — up to 71 percent more. Based on these findings, it's estimated that performing just one circuit of eight exercises — which takes about 8 minutes — can expend 159 to 231 calories. That's about the same as running at a 6-minute-mile pace for the same duration.

From the beginning, fitness programs should be scientifically based. Starting out, we knew that weight training was necessary to avoid muscle loss, and that it appears to boost your metabolism for hours after you work out; we also knew that according to studies, higher-intensity exercises such as interval training and weight training resulted in greater fat loss than lower-intensity exercise did."
Stay tuned for part 2............