One thing we notice about the top level body builders or atheletes with amazing physique is that while their body is big, they look good because most of the weight they gain is in the muscles. Another thing you will notice is that they normally eat more than normal people yet not much fat is accumulated in the awkward area of abdomen and buttock. How can that be?
It turns out that the muscle they built - like other organs inside our body - does consume considerably amount of energy. According to research, each kg of muscle needs 22kcal/day to maintain. [BPAHN00] Therefore, the more muscle you have, the more your body can eat without gaining weight. And if you don't consume as many calories as demanded by your added muscle, your body will get energy from the fat stored in your fat tissue and/or the meager carbohydrates stored in liver. If we can make our body finance this calorie deficit mostly by fat, we can create fat loss without doing much work! (Oh well, you still need to do weight training but they are not as time consuming as cardios. Also, isn't doing the same cardio all time is boring?)
In this page, I will teach you the scientific knowledge related to muscle building. After that, I will show you how to adjust your diet to minimize muscle loss.
Whether someone should weight train for fat loss is a personal issue. For example, if you don't like the look of being muscular, you don't have to use weight training to lose fat. Doing cardio exercises and a right diet should be enough for fat loss.
But if you notice that you are the type who happens to have a big stomach that is hard to fill or an energy efficient digestive system (ie your body can extract more calories from food than other people), you don't mind putting on muscles or you like weight lifting more than cardio, you might want to consider weight training because the elevated calories needs can make your fat loss process easier.
There have been quite a lot of talks about "toning" your muscle in many fitness publications. Usually they recommend you do many repetitions with a small load. By doing this, stimulation to your muscles will be small and you will have small muscle gain that has little effect on fat loss. While this is not an effective way for fat loss, if you prefer slightly modified body shape, it is not a bad thing to do.
Note that muscles are always in the flux of being broken down and built up. Hence if you don't weight train for a while, your muscle will inevitably waste away in a gradual way. Therefore, there is no need to worry about adding muscle to your body because it is a reversible process. I would recommend you to try out muscle building gradually and then stop when you attain the physique you dreamed of.
Another thing you need to be aware of is that 70% of all muscles are in the legs. Therefore, if you are really short of time, you can elevate your daily calories burn rate significantly by solely training your legs.
Finally, if your cardiovascular system is weak, you should avoid heavy weight lifting (see Valsalva maneuver described below). In general, if you think yourself is less than healthy, it is highly recommended that you start a weight training program after consultation with a doctor.
When you are performing a weight training exercise, the most important thing is to perform the correct form of the exercise you are doing. This makes sure that you are exercising the muscles you intended to. To ensure enough stress is created in your muscle, it is recommended that you perform the said exercise until you fail to perform the correct form. Doing this can also prevent injury because at the first time that you failed to perform the correct form, you should usually still be able to complete the exercise with an incorrect form. As to the correct forms for different weight training exercises, they are beyond the scope of this page. You should consult professional trainers, relevant books or videos. This web site contains animated gifs for common exercises.
To design a weight training program, we first need to know what are the parameters of a weight training program. For each exercise, we have number of sets, the weight of load to use, number of repetitions (hereafter rep/reps) for each set and finally the duration of rest between sets. In the weight training world, a set is defined to be an exercise being repeated in quick succession for a certain number of reps. In between sets, we need to rest the exercised muscle because if we don't rest, wouldn't we just merged the two sets into one by definition? ;)
Before we go into more details about how to set the parameters, we need to understand a concept of repetition maximum (aka Rep Max, RM). 1RM means the heaviest load (in kg or pound) you can perform for a particular strength training exercise in a set of one rep. It follows that nRM means the heaviest load you can perform in a set of n rep. The McArdle, Katch & Katch book [EEP00] suggests that 1RM can be approximated by finding out your 10RM:
Untrained: 1RM in kg = 1.554 × (10RM in kg) - 5.181
Trained: 1RM in kg = 1.172 × (10RM in kg) - 7.704
Find 1RM from your 10RM |
A more accurate way to estimate 1RM is to incrementally increase your load to perform 1-rep of an exercise. In between each 1-rep, you rests 2-3 minutes. Repeat this until you fail to perform 1-rep with correct form. This will be your 1RM. [EEP00]
Majority of experts are of opinion that doing the 5RM or 6RM load is the optimum. 6RM load is about 85% of 1RM. [WP03]
As to number of sets, experts agree that three sets is better than one. [WP03]
As of now, I can't find any textbooks or research papers talking about the duration of rest between sets. If you know, please email me.
Another dimension to a weight training program is load progression. After each training, your muscle should be bigger and therefore you should be able to handle heavier load. [EEP00] The rule of thumb is to add a small increment (e.g. 2.5kg, 5kg) next time when you are able to perform 6RM for example with perfect form. By continuing doing this, your muscle should keep growing and growing until it hits your genetic limit.
Finally, I would like to introduce you to a useful formula that describes the relationship between rep and load: [EEP00]
rep number = 173.525 - 6.31 × p + 9.576 × 0.01 × p2 - 6.742 × 0.0001 × p3 + 1.75 × 0.000001 × p4 where p is the load as a percentage of 1-RM you are trying to lift.
For example, if you are trying to lift 70% of your 1-RM, you can expect to lift at most 12 reps. Reps = 173.525 - 6.31 × 70 + 9.576 × 0.01 × 702 - 6.742 × 0.0001 × 703 + 1.75 × 0.000001 × 704 = 11.82 reps (rounded to 12 reps).
From Physical Education classes we had at school, we learned the importance of warming-up and stretching before we do any vigorous exercises. It is said that by doing that you can improve performance and reduce the chances of injury. Indeed, this is true. [EEP00] So a natural question is: is it helpful for weight lifting and how should I warm up to maximize my performance? Are there any precautions?
First, we need to properly define warm-up and stretching. Stretching is a type of exercises. Stretching lengthens your muscle and/or pushing your joints to larger range of motion. Warm-up is not a type of exercises. Warm up means to perform an exercise with a small load. For example, if you are going to bench press 100kg, doing 20kg bench press prior to that is a warm-up exercise. You can do warm-up for stretching also. To do this, instead of stretching your muscle all the way to its max or stretching for a prolonged period of time, you just take it easy and keep it short.
Some people confuse stretching of muscles and joints as part of the warm-up. They did some heavy stretching on muscles related to the lift which inadvertently worsen their weight lifting performance.
While stretching of joints can improve their flexibility, heavy stretching of muscle (ie lengthening the muscle) can weaken the stretched muscle. [FB03] This isn't going to have any noticeable impact in normal exercises like playing a basketball game. But during weight lifting, you are stressing your muscles to the maximum, so even a minor weakening of muscle can be dangerous because you may try to lift more than you think you can.
Let's take bench press as an example. Bench press involves chest muscles, triceps, shoulder muscles, wrist joints, elbow joints and shoulder joints. It is recommended that you do a light set with high rep as warm up. For instance, if you plan to bench press 100kg for 1 rep, you can do 30kg with 10 reps for warm up. However, don't do any heavy stretching on your the muscles or joints you are going to use. Otherwise, your muscle can be weakened and you won't be able to perform to the level you expect.
Before I learned anything about exercise physiology, sometimes I felt dizzy or seeing spots before my eyes while I was liftng heavy weight. I learned some other weight lifters also had similar experiences. Why is that? How can I prevent that?
Later I learned that this is due to Valsalva maneuver, ie holding your breath with mouth closed while lifting a heavy weight. When you are lifting a heavy weight and holding your breath (especially for upper body exercises), blood pressure increases dramatically as elevated thoracic (the space inside your body that holds your lung and heart) pressure forces blood from the heart into the arterial system. Meanwhile, the main artery that carries blood back to the heart contracts due to decreased thoracic pressure. Reduced blood returning to the heart subsequently causes the heart to pump less blood to the brain. As your brain is running low in the nutrients delivered by blood, you feel dizzy and seeing spots before your eyes.
To prevent this from happening, you are recommended to exhale during muscle exertion and then inhale during muscle relaxation. For example, when you are doing bench press, you inhale when you lower the barbell and exhale when you lift the barbell. By doing this, you make sure that you won't hold your breath during muscle exertion. (note that you will have a brief moment of breath holding when you transit from inhalation to exhalation) As a result, you shouldn't have a dazed look. [EEP00]
Correct Breathing Pattern during weight lifting is particularly important for people who have high blood pressure, heart diease and people with weak cardiovascular system (e.g. cancer patients on certain chemotherapy drugs). For those people, incorrect breathing during heavy weight lifting can result in death.
If you haven't been exercising regularly, one thing you will notice after you have your first gym session is that your muscles become sore for one or two days. This phenomenon is called Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS). There doesn't seem to be effective ways to eliminate DOMS. [EEP00] claimed that supplements of 800IU Vitamin E per day can alleviate DOMS. In general, after regular training for period of time, the effect of DOMS will gradually diminish.
Working on muscles affected by DOMS can cause overtraining. This is because overtraining creates too much stress on your body which induces your body to release cortisol to breakdown muscles. [FM04] Also, to build muscle, you need to give your muscle a chance to grow. Preferably at least 24 hours or even 48 hours if you are an untrained individual.
Therefore it is suggested that you work on different muscle groups in each session such that each muscle group is given enough time to grow and recover. A popular three-session breakdown is: 1) Chest and Tricep; 2) Back and Bicep; 3) Legs. To design your own program, you need to carefully study the muscles/joints involved in the exercises you plan to do.
While supplements are not necessary, they can be very helpful. There are many different kinds of supplements you can take to enhance muscle growth. However, many of them while effective for some people, can have pretty strong side effects that are detrimental to your long term well being. Therefore, I am not going to introduce you to them. Instead, I will tell you the three tried and true natural supplements that is for sure to help you build muscles. They are protein, carbohydrate and creatine.
Muscles are body tissues that are made up of proteins. Obviously, you need protein to build muscles. Research demonstrated that protein (especially essential amino acids (EAA), see Nutrion page) consumption after training promotes muscle growth. [RTMWW00] Further research showed that, protein consumption immediately before exercise is better than immediately after exercise. [TRMWOPW01]. This is also confirmed by a later study. [TECASW07]
Uptake of protein in muscle is enhanced when insulin concentration in blood is high. [EMP03] In the Diet page, we learned that protein or high GI carbohydrates will cause our body to release insulin, especially the latter. When a muscle takes in more protein, it can use it to build more muscle. Therefore it is highly recommended that to attain maximum benefit of a protein drink, you should mix it with some high GI carbohydrates. Another good thing about this is that refined sugar are high GI carbohydrates, so now you have a protein drink that is sweet. Isn't that nice? ;)
Another useful supplement is creatine. Recall from the Exercise Physiology page, creatine is the main component of the phosphocreatine energy system. This energy system provides the explosive energy you see from sprinters or power lifters. The goal of taking creatine to improve the number of reps you can do for a given weight. It won't improve your 1RM however but the extra stress on your muscle should improve your muscle growth during the post exercise recovery phase and therefore your 1RM should improve more.
On average, muscles in human body can store about 120g of creatine which is good for less than 10 seconds worth of explosive power. [EEP00] Obviously, creatine can also be found in animal muscles. Therefore one obvious way to replenish your creatine is to eat the muscles of various meat. Unfortunately, on average you can get only 4-5g creatine per 1kg of meat. [EEP00] 1kg of meat usually comes with a lot of fat, so it is not recommended for us fat loss oriented folks.
A better way to do this is to take creatine supplements. [EEP00] suggests a regimen that consists of two stages. First, you load up your body with creatine by consuming 20g/day for 5-7 days. After that, you can consume 2-5g/day to maintain your creatine level. Since creatine provides energy for your muscle, you should take it before you perform the exercise for the best result.
For lay people, creatine might come as something new and therefore have some fear about consuming it as supplements. But I can assure you that creatine is not really some fancy chemical that can boost your performance. It is a natural occurring substance and part of our energy system, so it is not banned in any way in the Olympics or any competitions. In fact, about 80% of Olympics atheletes take creatine regularly (Note that due to the nature of creatine, they are not that useful for endurance or ball games atheletes). [SEN05]
To conclude, a combo drink of protein, carbohydrate and creatine immediately before weight training should help you jump start your muscle growth. A combo drink used in [KBMWOPW01] consists of 6 g of essential amino acids (histidine 0.65g (10.83%); isoleucine 0.60g (10%); leucine 1.12g; (18.87%) lysine 0.93g (15.5%); methionine 0.19g (3.17%); phenylalanine 0.93g (15.5%); threonine 0.88g (14.67%); and valine 0.7g (11.67%), and 35 g of sucrose in 500 ml of deionized-distilled water. When you buy protein powders from stores, check to see if their EAA ratio mimic this. Then add the correct ratio of sugar and creatine to it. This should create a great combo drink that allows you to get the most out of your exercise.
As we learned in the last section, protein is good for muscle growth, creatine is good for doing the extra reps and carbohydrate helps your muscle take up protein to build muscle. So eat food that contains more of these things. Two popular low fat high protein food eaten by bodybuilders are skinless chicken breast and egg white.
Beyond what food to eat, you should also prevent your body from releasing too much cortisol (see the Diet page for more info on cortisol). According to [FM04], cortisol causes your muscle to breakdown and release the protein inside to generate energy, ie burn your muscle for energy. (As an aside, for ladies who are afraid of putting on too much muscles, you can literally starve yourself to get rid of them quickly because of the magic of cortisol.) To prevent that from happening, you need to make sure you consume enough carbohydrates for daily activities.
That's it for this page. I hope you learned a lot about building muscles. Having said that, I still have to stress that for effective fat loss, building muscles is not necessary. Cardiovascular exercises are enough. Nevertheless, doing weight training itself also consume energy and muscles you built elevate your daily calories burn rate, so it will definitely help in the fat loss process. Weight training is also good for your bones and joints, too. So do it if you can. And finally happy fat loss! :)