How To Look Great Without Losing Weight

     First of all, you do not need to lose weight to have a great body, you only need to convert that body fat to muscle tissue and you would have a body that people would be envious of. So, how do you get this god-like body when you are fairly or even slightly overweight? Furthermore, I'm not talking about building a body like those of professional body builders. I'm talking about building a nice, toned, and healthy body.

So, how do you do this without losing weight? First, the same weight in muscle tissue is much smaller than the same weight in fat tissue. Another way of putting it is... let's say you have one pound of fat tissue and one pound of muscle tissue side by side for comparison. The muscle tissue is much denser and much smaller in size than the fat tissue. Some numbers I've seen is that muscle is 18% denser than fat tissue and another number is that fat tissue of the same weight of muscle is 3 times as large. Years ago when I went to the gym, there was a model mockup of this comparison at the personal trainers counter. I do not remember the numbers that model mentioned, only that it talked about the same issue.

Now let us get to the part that most of you want to know, how to achieve this. Do you lift weights to build the muscle or do cardio exercises to burn off the fat? The answer is a bit of both. Many guys I know only weight lift and find themselves gaining weight without looking any better. The reason for this is that they are building muscle but they are building it underneath the fat tissues, so technically, they are not burning off the fat tissue as fast as gaining muscle tissue. For some reason, most guys do not think about doing cardio type exercises but these are the best exercises to do to burn off the fat.

The best way to achieve these results is to do a mixture of weight training and cardio exercises. For weight training, 1 to 2 sets of 12 to 15 reps will suffice for each body part. You do not need to do heavy weight training, just enough weight to exercise the muscle and it's important to do both the upper body and lower body during the same session. Most weight lifters will alternate with doing the upper body one day, then the lower body the next day. We're not going for the same results so I suggest one day of a full body workout in weight training, then the next day doing nothing but cardio. Usually, the old adage is to do 3 sets of 12 to 15 reps if you are only doing the upper body or the lower body. But, we are doing the whole body in one session so you want to spread out your energy for the whole body by only doing 2 sets for each area.

For cardio workouts, you have a lot of options. The funny thing is that most guys don't want to be caught doing aerobics even though that is one good cardio workout. The other options are swimming, boxing, and any other non-conventional aerobic type exercises. Basically, the goal of cardio exercises is to work the whole body with little to no resistance and get the heart pumping. Have you ever seen an overweight water polo player? No! By swimming laps, you work the whole body. It's like doing weight training with very little weight and reps that count into the hundreds, if not thousands. This doesn't build big muscles but it will burn off the fat very well.

So why not just do cardio to burn off the fat? Well, do you want to look skinny or toned with a bit of muscle?

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