What is Metabolism and how can you boost it?

Your metabolism consists of a complicated set of cellular activities that take place all the time. The way your body creates and distributes hormones, rests and wakes and burns fuel, are all parts of your metabolism. The virtue of exercise is that it increases or boosts your metabolism by its effect on muscle cells throughout the body. Metabolism is like money: the rich get richer, and the poor stay impoverished. Men generally have a higher metabolism than women: they also have a higher muscle-to-fat ratio. However, there are always exceptions: a man who is out of shape and doesn't get enough aerobic exercise will probably have more body fat and a lower metabolism than a woman who is in shape.

People with higher muscle to fat ratios tend to have a higher metabolism, which burns fuel more efficiently and prevents excess fat storage. People who have more fat have a lower metabolism that tends to conserve fat. While these facts have been used to justify the argument that weight is largely determined by genetics, the fact that metabolism can be increased by exercise and diet means we do have some control over our bodies method of storing and burning fats and carbohydrates.

 

Five Common Metabolism Facts and Fallacies

1. Aging slows down the metabolism.

Technically this is not true. Reduction of lean body mass - specifically muscle - causes the metabolism to slow down. People tend to lose muscle mass as they age for one important reason - they move around less. The more sedentary you are, the higher your fat-to-muscle ratio becomes, and since fat doesn't need that much energy to exist, your metabolism slows. If you keep eating the same amount, your body stores the extra energy (calories) as fat, perpetuating the problem.

The key to keeping your metabolism from decreasing from decade to decade is to keep exercising, and make sure you include resistance training to keep up your muscle mass. While this is a simple answer, it is admittedly not always easy - you have to make time for exercise, no matter how hectic your life is. The benefit of doing this - in addition to enhanced metabolism - is that exercise gives you more energy and reduces stress, making that hectic life of yours seem more manageable. left: Gladys and Maree, competing in senior fig 45, are proof you can look super hot at any age.

 

2. Exercising in the morning will increase metabolism throughout the day.

The truth is it doesn't make any difference what time of day you choose to exercise - the important thing is that you do it. Thus far, there hasn't been any research proving that exercise at a certain time of day burns more calories than another. So why are people often encouraged to work out in the morning? Research does show that people who work out in the a.m. hours are more likely to stick to their program than those who do their exercise later in the day. Bottom line: the more often you exercise, the more calories you burn, so pick a time of day, and days of the week that work best for you. You want to be as consistent as possible with your workouts so that doing them becomes second nature for you.

3. Eating Within 30 Minutes After Exercise is a Metabolism Booster.

Sorry, but no. Post exercise meals make no difference in your metabolism. However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't eat something after you exercise. A small post-exercise meal or snack is great for your glycogen levels, and helps your body recover from exercise. So just because something doesn't do wonders for your metabolism, don't dump it - it can still be doing you good in other ways.

 

4. Exercising Raises Your Metabolism for the Rest of the Day

While this is true, the amount your metabolism raises is really not all that much. Resistance training increases fat free mass (FFM), which results in an increased metabolism, and studies show aerobic training also raises metabolism even though it does not significantly increase FFM. How much does this amount to? In the case of resistance training, the increased FFM burns maybe 50 more calories a day, and the raised metabolism from aerobic training nets an extra 25 to 30 (this, of course, is not counting the calories burned during the activities themselves).

Although these numbers may seem disappointing at first, keep in mind that it doesn't take a lot of calories to make a big difference over time. If 17 extra calories a day can add over a pound a year, then 30 to 50 more calories burned will not only use up that extra amount, but also create a deficit that will add up. If you want to lose weight more quickly, however, you need to create a larger energy deficit - burn three to five hundred more calories than you consume daily, either by exercising more, eating less, or both.

 

5. I Shouldn't Eat After 8 p.m. If I Want to Lose Weight

Technically, the time of day you eat makes no difference in your weight loss program. The problem comes with what the average person eats after 8 p.m., and how much. If you sit in front of the television, scarfing down chips, before you know it you've consumed several hundred calories - enough Kcals (energy) to power a workout, when all you're going to do is head off to bed (and that's doesn't mean that chips are a recommended workout fuel - you should eat something with nutritional value!).

Actually, depending on how much you had for dinner, a small mid-evening snack may be appropriate. The key word here is small, and that's if your dinner was relatively light. Consider a snack along the lines of lite cottage cheese, unsweetened yoghurt, protein shake or an apple - if you're feeling hungry, that is (if you're just bored or restless, give the snack a pass). Having an evening snack will keep your internal engine stoked just a bit so you won't wake up ravenous.

Source:

aboutaerobics.com

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Legendary bodybuilding trainer Vince, "The Iron Guru" Gironda was famous for saying, "Bodybuilding is 80% nutrition!" But is this really true or is it just another fitness and bodybuilding myth? Which is really more important, nutrition or training?

This IS an interesting question and I think there is a definite answer. Firstly I'd say you can't separate nutrition and training. The two work together synergistically. Regardless of your goals: gaining muscle, losing fat, conditioning, whatever -you will get less than-optimal or even non-existent results without paying attention paid to both. All these goals require three main key areas - weight training, cardio training and nutrition - take any of these parts away and it could cause a slowdown to your goals.

Nutrition and training are both important, but at certain stages of your training progress, I think placing more attention on one component over the other can make big improvements. For example if you're a beginner and you don't know much about nutrition, then mastering nutrition is far more important than training and should become your number one priority. This is because improving a poor diet can create rapid fat loss and muscle building progress if you know how to work it.

For example, if you've been skipping meals and only eating 2 times per day, jumping your meal frequency up to 5 or 6 smaller meals a day will transform your physique very rapidly. If you're still eating lots of processed fats and refined sugars, cutting them out and replacing them with good fats like the omega threes found in fish and unrefined foods like fruits, vegetables and whole grains will make an enormous and noticeable difference in your physique very quickly.

If your diet is low in protein, simply adding a complete protein food like chicken breast, fish or egg whites at each meal will muscle you up fast. No matter how hard you train or what type of training routine you're on, it's all in vain if you don't provide yourself with the right nutritional support. In beginners (or in advanced trainees who are still eating poorly), these changes in diet are more likely to result in great improvements than a change in training. The muscular and nervous systems of a beginner are unaccustomed to exercise. Therefore, just about any training program can cause muscle growth and strength development to occur because it's all a "shock" to the untrained body.

You can almost always find ways to tweak your nutrition to higher and higher levels, but once you've mastered all the nutritional basics, then further improvements in your diet don't have as great of an impact as those initial important changes. Eating more than six meals will have minimal effect. Eating more protein won't help. Once you're eating low fat, going to zero fat won't help more - it will probably hurt. If you're eating a wide variety of foods and taking a good multi vitamin/mineral, then more supplements probably wont help much either. If you're already eating natural complex carbs and lean proteins every three hours, there's not too much more you can do other than continue to be consistent day after day.

At this point, as an intermediate or advanced athlete who has the nutrition in place, changes in your training become much more important.  Except for the changes that need to be made between an "off season" muscle growth diet and a "precontest" cutting diet, the diet won't and can't change much - it will remain fairly constant. But you can continue to pump up the intensity of your training and improve the efficiency of your workouts almost without limit. In fact, the more advanced you become, the more crucial training progression and variation becomes because the well-trained body adapts so quickly.

So, to answer the question, while nutrition is ALWAYS critically important, it's more important to emphasize for the beginner (or the person whose diet is still a "mess"), while training is more important for the advanced person. It's not that nutrition ever ceases to be important, the point is, further improvements in nutrition won't have as much impact once you already have all the fundamentals in place.

Once you've mastered nutrition, then it's all about keeping that nutrition consistent and progressively increasing the efficiency and intensity of your workouts, and mastering the art of planned workout variation, which is also known as "periodization." The bottom line: There's a saying among strength coaches and personal trainers... "You can't out-train a lousy diet!" If your nutrition program is your weakest area, either because you're just starting out or you simply don't have the nutritional knowledge you know you need to get results. Lisa, GoFigure

 

Bits and pieces of article sourced from: leehayward.com, kcfitness.com