Weight loss, strength training and results!

Weight loss, strength training and results!

If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say that they didn’t want to lift weights because they didn’t want to get big, I would be very rich man.  The funny thing is that this awful logic is never brought into other sports.  For example, I have never heard anyone say, I don’t want to play basketball because I don’t want to be really tall.

In this blog I will shoot down some common misconceptions about weight loss and strength training.

Lifting weights creates a high metabolic demand on a persons body that actually causes muscle breakdown.  Without the proper rest, recovery and nutritional program weight training will not yield muscle gains.  The professional lifters and bodybuilders spend their lives trying to gain more muscle.  They eat, sleep and lift to gain muscle and still with this as their primary focus they can only gain 3-7 lbs of muscle per year.  This compared with fat loss which really has an uncapped gain potential.  People can put on 50lbs of fat in one year but that is actually impossible with muscle gain.  Fat gain is much easier than muscle gain.  Yet when people eat one ice cream come they don’t say “I can’t eat this ice cream or I’ll turn into the 600lb person.”  This would be easier to do than gain a large amount of muscle but people aren’t logical and that is why I’m writing this blog.

Weight loss and “toning” are the primary focus for most adults who are training in a gym.   At The Spot Athletics we never focus on the “weight” loss but rather focus on body fat changes.  No one has ever looked at someone with abs and said “yeah, but what do they weight”.  We don’t judge looks on an arbitrary scale number, we base it off of how someone looks.  Their are three main factors that go into how someone looks, Lifting, Cardio and diet.  That is why with all of our personal training packages we deal with not just the time when you are training with us but the nutritional and cardio programs that you should be doing as well.  The diet is the most important factor as you cannot out train the fork.  You can train very hard but if you are eating like junk then you will never look your best.  Next most important is the lifting.  If you are trying to look better and you are not strength training then you are never going to look your best.  The least important factor in “toning” is the cardio.  It is funny that most people put this one 1st in their training.  This is probably why when you go to average gyms you see a bunch of overweight people on cardio equipment.  At our facility, we have some cardio equipment but it is not where we focus our program and a lot of our clients will never get on these never ending hamster wheels.

Training with light weights does not do anything for you!  All of our clients work with weights that are challenging for their skill level.  What this means is that some of our clients will use 100lbs and another might use 50lbs but the weights will be challenging for the individual client.  If you are only using 5lb dbs because you “don’t want to get big” then you should also say you are using 5lb db’s because you don’t want to work hard and you also don’t want to see results.  The only way to see body changes is to push your body.  These light weights will not create a high metabolic demand and thus you will not burn enough calories to matter.  On top of this the weight is not heavy enough to illicit a change from your body.  So basically if you are doing super high reps with really low weight then you are just wasting your time.  The Spot Athletics clients are busy people and don’t have time to waste doing things that don’t work.  That is why they come to us to train, to get results.

Hopefully you will use this information to either change your training or change your trainer.  Strength training may produce huge bodybuilders but it also produces bikini models and huge weight losses, but that’s not the picture people get in their heads when they think of weight training.  Our clients, however, see results because we challenge them, they get stronger, lose fat and look better because we don’t bend our training to fit some awful logic they come in with.  We try to educate our clients so that they understand that what most people hold as true is not.  Our system isn’t for everyone, a lot of people are happy just blaming their bad genetics, their lives or whatever for not getting results and hold on to awful logic like weight training will make them big.  Those are not the people that train here, only the people who want to get results train with us because we are not here to waste our time or our clients.  So next time one of your friends spouts out this awful logic, ask them why they eat ice cream, because that sort of activity is exactly what makes the american population “big”, not weight training.