how to lose fat without losing muscle

You have all experienced the time after working out for a few months at the gym when you see the slightly bulged muscles of your biceps, chest, and legs in the mirror starting to show themselves. But you still see the stubborn belly fat which doesn’t let your abs to show? This is of course because you have put on some significant muscle mass, but you may not have focused enough on getting rid of the extra body fat that prevents your body from getting in ideal shape. Instinctively, you may think to adapt to a lower calorie daily diet, do a lot of cardio exercises and work out specific muscles (like abs) in the body to get rid of those fats. The fact is that if not done correctly, all those advises work negatively and you may end up losing your valuable muscle tissue while lowering your body metabolism and even maintaining your body fat!

The purpose of this series of notes is to cover the battle between losing fat and keeping the precious muscle tissue that you have put on. The critical point in burning fat is that the calories that enter the body (your food) must be less than the calories that are consumed (burnt). Many factors need to be taken into account that we will try to cover in a series of articles. In this note, the first point to be taken into account is what kind of exercises to do!

What type of exercises are recommended for Fat Loss?

It is critical to know that our body has three significant sources of energy: The carbohydrates (glycogen in our muscle and liver), our body fat and our body muscle tissue! When doing moderate exercise or sitting at our desk and working on our computers, our body energy consumption toggle is on fat, meaning that we are burning mainly fat for those activities (for simplicity let’s say less than 40% carbs and over 60% fat). However, once we start doing more intensive exercises, the energy from carbohydrates sources kick in, and the proportion becomes 60% from carbs and 40% from fat. But we need to keep in mind that although at high-intensity exercises the percentage of fat consumption is less, the total calories burned are so much higher; hence the total fat burned is higher for higher intensity activities. Thus it is higher intensity, and more energy consuming exercises are highly recommended for fat loss. High-Intensity strength workout or High-Intensity Training (HIT) is any strength exercise that requires high-calorie activities such as weight training.