Weight gain is a lot easier as you grow older particularly as the motivation to exercise also wanes, but you can turn it around it does not matter how old you are. You should start to weave some sort of exercise into your daily life.
One type of exercise that you should consider to do is weight training, also known as strength training or resistance training. Weight training will not only help with losing weight but will also trim and tone your body. Age does not matter. It has been shown that women as old as 70 who have started to weight train and have improved their body strength within a very short while.
Weight training is an important element in fighting flab, perhaps maybe it is the most important. If you do aerobic exercise you only burn fat during the exercise but with weight training you burn fat even when you have finished. The body is still burning fat for up to as much as twelve hours after finishing the exercise whilst it is building the muscles worked, so you can still be burning fat while you are resting. But that is not the end of the story.
A body full of muscle uses far more calories than a body full of fat, so you will find that you will need to eat more to maintain your weight and your muscle. But not to worry, the extra calories will feed your muscles, helping them to recover and tone.
When you first start to weight train you might find that your weight will actually increase. This is because muscle is heavier than fat but as muscle is smaller so you should notice the body getting smaller even if the scales do not show an decrease in weight. Health is more than a number on a scale. Your weight is calculated by different aspects: muscles, fat, bone, etc.
The additional benefits from weight training are:
- It helps to strengthen and increase the density of your bones because the act of the muscles pulling and flexing the bones helps to lay down more bone fibre.
- Stronger muscles help your body to be more steady and so helps to prevent falls.
- It has also been found that it can fight the build up of abdominal fat by lifting weights at least twice a week.
Finally, when weight training make sure that you change your routine around so that the body does not get used to the routine. It only takes the body about six weeks for it to learn how to work efficiently if keeping to the same routine and therefore you will stop seeing any weight or body changes.
So have fun and start weight training to lose weight and tone your body.
