How does the body decide where to add or take away fat when gaining/losing weight?
In: Biology
Which places depends on physiology and genetics. You don’t have much control over that. How much depends on exercise. Basically proportional to muscle mass and endurance capacity. For synergistic results, you need to do both: strength training + cardio.
Marathoners will have very low body fat because they’ve trained their bodies to use fat efficiently as a source of nutrition during exercise. Vigorous exercise can also stimulate body to deposit excess energy in muscle glycogen as opposed to fat. This is why if you’re in great shape, it’s easier to stay in shape; you’ve already altered your metabolic profile to something kind of favorable. You can usually reshape your metabolism, if it is out of whack, but this requires *work*. A mile run a few times a week or arm curls aren’t going to cut it. Unless you’re basically 20.
You don’t have to run marathons or kill yourself at the gym to have low body fat (reshape your metabolism). Combining strength and cardio training about 1 hour every other day will lead to substantial fat burning. Make sure to target all large muscle groups for the most benefits. If you want the benefits but don’t want to spend much time, you can do high-intensity interval training instead. Those workouts tend to be 30 minutes or less. However, they are much more challenging and more people would probably prefer the longer workouts, I think.
EDIT: Since most people in this thread don’t seem to know much about exercise, and since it is getting to be that time of year again, I just want to throw out there — if you’re out of shape and looking to start getting in shape — especially with the warmer weather — I highly recommend you DO NOT start by running. Running has probably one of the highest injury rates in sports — about 33 to 75% of people are injured annually. If you’re large (fat or tall) your risk is higher. If you have history of running or you are small in size — by all means go ahead. It’s just I see a lot of people try to get started by throwing on old jogging shoes and sweat pants and plodding through the neighborhood. God bless em for trying. But honestly, even though it’s popular I think it’s a pretty poor place to start if you’re not already kind of light and used to the impact.
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