Cardio Free Diet - Pt. 2

Yesterday, I had finished the first part of the book and part of the second half where he talks about the benefits of strength training. Today, I have finished all of it and am actually slightly more impressed even than I was yesterday. We've often made the mistake, especially women, of neglecting strength training. If you tell someone that you run on a treadmill for an hour a day, they will say, "Great! That's a good workout!" If you tell them that you spend an hour every other day with weights, the inevitable response is, "What do you do for cardio?" It's as though that is the undisputable way to better health and anything else is gravy, but that is an absolute necessity.

It is true that cardio burns fat and builds cardiovascular endurance, but where did we ever get the strange idea that building muscle is somehow less important? What Karas proposes is that by utilizing circuit training, which is essentially little to no rest between strength exercises, you can maintain a significant amount of the benefits of cardio exercise (he estimates 80 percent of the benefit) by keeping your heart rate elevated while doing strength training. You also burn nearly as many calories doing lifting exercises and, as if that isn't enough, after you do cardio, you have an afterburn of about 2-4 hours, but Karas says that the afterburn from strength is up to 36 hours! And that's not even counting the fact that muscle is a huge fat burner, so the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn in a resting state. This is pretty exciting to me.

Now, he does not recommend that you never do anything aerobic...if you enjoy it. Sure, go dancing or play tennis or whatever you like, but do it for fun and don't rely on it for your fitness routine. Because all it does is burn calories (and usually a lot less than you think), make you want to eat more and possibly cause injury. Strength training, though, reshapes your body rather than only making it smaller. He talks about how even thin people can have what is called "intramuscular fat" and this is why doing strength training can change the shape of the muscles, by simultaneously making the muscle stronger while eating the fat that is inside the muscles and making them leaner.

For women, part of the fear is that we will get large or bulky, but we only have 10 percent of the testosterone men do and even they can have a hard time bulking up. We should train just as they do with no fear of getting large. It just won't happen. We will see a curvy aspect to our arms, legs, etc. This is muscle growth, but huge vein-popping muscles just aren't a possibility for us. I think that plays a large role, that fear, in keeping us firmly on the cardio side of the gym while men tend to lean toward the weight room. Ladies, we need to be in the weight room!

This is a great book with an excellent workout routine in it. He gives two alternatives. One uses stretch bands and something called lex loops, which I am unfamiliar with. The other uses dumbbells, which I love. They are just an alternate. One can be a travel routine and the other a home one. One can be the primary, but every now and then switch to keep your body guessing, etc. It just looks like a great program. For now, I have a few other books to read, but I will be seriously considering refocusing on strength training because I feel these points are very valid.