This post is ESPECIALLY for the ladies of Cause Fit­ness, but men, please read this and share it with the ‘Car­dio Queens’ in your life. :)

Recently, espe­cially since liv­ing in Los Ange­les, I’ve real­ized that women treat weight train­ing like the plague! They lit­er­ally run…and cycle, and elip­ti­cal, and Zumba…away from it, read­ily accept­ing their fate, doomed to die on car­dio equip­ment due to the end­less hours spent on those machines.

Hey you crazy ham­ster, get off that dang wheel!!!

Wanna know a secret?

Active, fueled mus­cle tis­sue, not car­dio, will keep you small for­ever! What does that mean? I’ll try to explain. Read on…

YOUR BODY: If we break it down to the VERY basics (bear with me, smarty pants…I’m try­ing to make it VERY easy to ‘get’) is made up of  organs/tissues/fluids to keep you alive, bones to keep you upright and pro­tect your ‘innards’, mus­cle to sta­bi­lize and move you, and fat which insu­lates, pro­tects and pro­vides energy for sur­vival. BUT…let’s break it down fur­ther and talk strictly aes­thet­ics for a minute.

YOU WANNA LOOK GOOD: No, you wanna look GREAT! But you wanna be healthy at the same time right?

Now, you may  think this is a sim­ple game of “Mir­ror, Mir­ror on the Wall”, but really, it’s a game of per­cent­ages: the per­cent body fat you have, ver­sus the per­cent of lean body mass (mus­cle and every­thing else other than fat) that when com­bined, total your body weight.

Relax, take a deep breath and stay with me…

FAT and MUSCLE are two com­mon words that have very dif­fer­ent con­no­ta­tions, and it truly depends on who you ask. But for the sake of this arti­cle, I want you to under­stand that as a bodliy ’tis­sue’, body FAT is inac­tive, dor­mant…it basi­cally does noth­ing but “hang out”. MUSCLE on the other hand, is alive. It’s an active tis­sue. It can break down and/or become weaker, or it can grow, and/or get stronger, but either way, it’s doing going or the other direc­tion at all times…slowly, but it’s hap­pen­ing. To make it real, at this very moment in time while you’re read­ing this, depend­ing on how you’re train­ing and fuel­ing or not fuel­ing your body with ade­quate foods at opti­mal times, you are either los­ing or repairing/building mus­cle tissue. 

Before you stop read­ing, and take every­thing you’ve read so far and think some­thing like, “All I need to do stop doing car­dio,” or, “I just need to build mus­cle all the time and lose all my body fat because fat is the enemy,” let me explain some­thing vital.

Yes, too much is unhealthy, can cause dis­ease and other health issues, and by soci­eties stan­dards, unpleas­ing to the eye, but…a lit­tle fat is good, healthy, and nec­es­sary to survival!

This is how we judge per­cent­ages as healthy, unhealthy or some­where in between… (see chart to the right)

Oh, and FYI, just so you have a visual, the girls who com­pete in fit­ness com­pe­ti­tions on stage are around 9–11% body fat, but it’s just for stage and next to impos­si­ble (not to men­tion dan­ger­ous) to stay that low. See post on “How I Tighten-Up”.

Men, on the other hand, can main­tain much lower per­cent­ages and still be healthy. The stud at the gym with shred­ded arms and abs (that you can see through the sides of his cut out tshirt/tanktop that he “acci­den­tally” cut “too much” off of when he made it at home) is prob­a­bly sit­ting pretty around 4–6% body fat. Ladies, is this unfair? YES. Can we change that? No. Life is unfair. Train hard and con­cen­trate on YOUR best.

That said…

QUESTION: HOW DO YOU BUILD AND KEEP JUST THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF MUSCLE AND BURN JUST THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF FAT TO GET AND STAY HEALTHY/FULL OF ENERGY, AND LOOK FABULOUS?

ANSWER: 1) EAT TO MAINTAIN, 2) LIFT HEAVY, 3) DON’T OVERTRAIN

Photo Credit: Mike Luong

Remem­ber, as an “active” tis­sue, mus­cle is in a con­stant need of energy (stored or incom­ing calo­ries that are bro­ken down to become energy…). Unlike FAT, your mus­cle needs/uses calories/energy to build, but also just to main­tain what you already have. So most impor­tantly, you need to eat. You need to eat the right amount of calo­ries to fuel your body. See post on “How many calo­ries do you need” here

2) LIFT HEAVY 

NOTE: Keep in mind, you won’t “BULK UP” unless you’re eat­ing a sur­plus of calo­ries for your energy needs, aka. eat­ing more calo­ries than you’re burning/using.

Did you hear me? I’ll say it again. Repeat after me:

“I won’t “bulk up” unless I’m eat­ing more calo­ries than I’m burning.”

Good job.

Know­ing what you do now about mus­cle being an active tis­sue (requir­ing calories/energy just to ‘be’), doesn’t it make sense that the more lean mus­cle tis­sue you have, the less fat you’re likely to have stored? WATCH THIS *OLD VIDEO* (Throw­back Alert! — This is one of my first video ‘tips’ from when my busi­ness was still called “iFit: Inde­pen­dent Fit­ness”) AND LEARN…

GOT IT? YOU HAVE TO LIFT HEAVY.

Need a *very gen­eral* lift­ing split/training pro­to­col? Shoot for 3–4 sets of every exer­cise, 8–12 reps of every exer­cise, and chose 4–6 exer­cises per mus­cle group, rest­ing 60–120 sec between sets. (NOTE: This changes depend­ing on indi­vid­ual needs, but gen­er­ally, this will help you build and main­tain some awe­some, fat-fighting, lean mus­cle tissue).

Need another rea­son to lift heavy? How about 12 rea­sons? Check out this blog by a fel­low true-fitness friend and fit­ness model, Jill Cole­man, called 12 Ways Lift­ing Weights Improves Your Well­be­ing (& Gen­eral Awe­some­ness).  Ya’ll KNOW I don’t rec­om­mend just ANY­one. She’s the real deal. READ IT. NOW. (Love you!) :)

3) DON’T OVERTRAIN

Rest is essen­tial to building/maintaining lean mus­cle tis­sue, los­ing fat, and almost every other bod­ily func­tion. It’s while you’re at rest, only AFTER you’re fin­ished with a heavy, intense, train­ing ses­sion, that you rebuild mus­cle, get stronger, and burn fat. This is why I don’t want you to fall into the “Car­dio Queen” trap.

–Yes, car­dio is good for your heart.

–Yes, car­dio can help burn some extra calo­ries, but…

Too much car­dio will trig­ger more fat stor­age later due to your brain and body’s sur­vival instincts. It’s basic science/evolutionary principles. 

Imag­ine your brain dur­ing excess calo­rie burn. It might sound some­thing like this:

“RED ALERT: We are starv­ing! EMERGENCY PROTOCOL: Store FAT for sur­vival and don’t burn it so fast next time. In case she con­tin­ues this behav­ior, we will still have energy to keep her going!”

Funny to me :)

To say it another way, your body learns to become very effi­cient at pre­serv­ing energy (burn fat slower than before and store it longer than before). This is why you will always see a cou­ple over­weight marathon run­ners and endurance ath­letes. They have essen­tially taught their bod­ies to become VERY good at stor­ing and hold­ing body fat. See post on HIIT train­ing and ‘why sprint­ers are sex­ier’ here

Have any “car­dio queen” friends? SHARE THIS ARTICLE WITH THEM! :)

YOUR TURN: I wanna know how you feel about lift­ing heavy weights: DO YOU? If not, why not? Is it know­ing how, intim­i­da­tion, fear of “bulk­ing up” despite my explaina­tion of why you won’t?? :) Let me know in the com­ments below! Here to help! :)