Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights_ - Alex Hutchinson [77]
In a sense, Cloud’s article was a wake-up call to anyone who thought that heading to the gym for half an hour a few times a week would, on its own, transform their bodies. You also have to pay attention to what you eat, both immediately after your workout and throughout the rest of the day. But the article’s most serious sin was underplaying the other benefits of exercise, from cardiovascular health to stress relief, that accumulate even if your weight isn’t changing. Exercise—and particularly “fiery spurts of vigorous exercise”—is the most powerful force for good health that we know of. And it won’t make you gain weight.
Can I lose weight while gaining (or maintaining) muscle?
In a perfect world, you’d be able to exercise and eat in a way to make your muscles grow bigger while your fat stores shrink. This is possible in some cases—but for most of us, a more realistic goal is to lose weight by dropping fat without losing useful muscle mass. This is particularly important for athletes who compete in weight classes, like wrestlers, who don’t want to weaken themselves while trying to “make weight.” Researchers have been studying the problem for the past few years, and they now believe that one of the keys is making sure you’re getting enough protein.
Protein gets a lot of hype for its weight-loss potential. For one thing, foods containing protein make you feel more full, so you’re likely to consume fewer calories overall. Some research suggests that protein helps maintain levels of a hormone called triiodothyronin, which counteracts the tendency of your resting metabolism to slow down when you lose weight. Protein is also a relatively inefficient fuel: your body has to burn 25 percent of the available energy just to convert it to a usable form. These factors all sound great, but it’s not yet clear that they make any appreciable difference in your attempt to lose weight and maintain muscle. There’s stronger evidence for the role of leucine, one of the essential amino acids provided by dietary protein, in stimulating your body to create more muscle protein.
In practice, several studies have found that higher protein diets help overweight or obese subjects lose more fat while retaining more muscle compared with diets with less protein. But it’s important to clarify what “higher protein” means in this context. For example, the diets in a 2005 study at the University of Illinois contained either 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight (g/kg/day) or 1.6 g/kg/day. In this case, the “high-protein” diet actually corresponded to the amount of protein in a “typical” North American diet, which is about 1.6 g/kg/day—equivalent to about three-quarters of a pound of chicken breast for someone who weighs 150 pounds. So the message isn’t to eat more protein; it’s just to avoid slashing your protein intake if you’re cutting calories.
Athletes in training face somewhat different challenges. They have less fat to start with, which means any weight loss is more likely to come from muscle. But the same basic pattern holds true, according to a 2010 study at the University of Birmingham. Researchers found that a diet containing 2.3 g/kg/day of protein (35 percent of calories) helped athletes maintain their muscle mass far better than a diet containing 1.0 g/kg/day (15 percent of calories). They lost roughly the same amount of fat on both diets.
Another key factor that athletes need to consider before ramping up their protein intake is that carbohydrates are the most important fuel for extended bouts of exercise. A study in New Zealand found that even a single week