Topic: News: Weightlifting Puts Crunch on Women's Belly Fat!

[Chris Ⓐ LeRoux]

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Weightlifting Puts Crunch on Women's Belly Fat, Researchers Say
By Jamie Stengle, The Associated Press

DALLAS -- By just lifting weights twice a week for an hour, women can battle the buildup of tummy fat that often takes hold with aging, a new study suggests.

And they didn't even diet.

The study focused on intra-abdominal fat, the deep fat that wraps itself around organs and is the most unhealthy because it's linked with heart disease.

"One of the most common complaints in women, especially as we continue to age, especially as we go through menopause, the No. 1 complaint is abdominal growth," said Dr. Tracy Stevens, a cardiologist who directs the women's heart center at St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City.

"It's the apple-shaped person I'm most worried about," said Stevens, who was not involved in the study. "The more central the fat, the more it's laid down in the arteries."

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and was presented at an American Heart Association conference earlier this month in Phoenix.

In it, 164 overweight and obese Minnesota women ages 24 to 44 were divided evenly into two groups. One group participated in a two-year weight-training program and the other was simply given a brochure recommending exercise of 30 minutes to an hour most days of the week. Both groups were told not to change their diets in a way that might lead to weight changes.

Women who did the weight-training for two years had only a 7 percent increase in intra-abdominal fat, compared with a 21 percent increase in the group given exercise advice.

The strength-training group also decreased body fat percentage by almost 4 percent, while the group just given advice remained the same.

"I think we need to provide people with multiple possibilities, multiple roads to the same end. If this is what you're willing to do, I'll tell you what you can get out of it," said the lead author of the study, Kathryn Schmitz, an epidemiologist at the school of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Researchers reported only marginal effects from the training on total fat mass and the fat you can pinch under the skin.

Using both free weights and machines, the women in the strength-training group worked out for about an hour and were encouraged to gradually increase the weights they lifted.

"This is not a program you could do in your home, unless you can afford to have a full gym in your basement," Schmitz said.

The women, who completed 70 percent of the advised exercise throughout the study, were in supervised strengthening classes for 16 weeks.

Schmitz said the focus was on chest, back, shoulders, biceps, triceps, lower back, buttocks and thighs. She noted that adding muscle mass can help overweight women move faster so they burn more calories.

Dr. Rita F. Redberg, a cardiologist at the University of California San Francisco, pointed out that since muscle burns more calories than fat, increasing muscle mass means losing more calories.

"Certainly, any kind of exercise is better than not doing anything," Redberg said. But for "maximal benefit, cardio with weight training will get a lot more bang for your buck."

"I think exercise is the fountain of youth," she said. "If it was a pill, everyone would be taking it."

[Pete_Stewart]

Another good article.  I have been having discussions with my partner about the health benefits of weightlifting.  The main problem she keeps bringing up is those flipping gossip magazines showing wafer thin girls who have literally starved themselves.  I tell her I often find people who have lost weight or toned up look better than people who have went on some crazy diet.  She now accompanies me to the gym and is doing a range of free weights and machines which seem to be doing the job without as she puts it 'making me all muscly'

[Gabriel Grinstead]

This shouldn't be a shock to anybody. If energy intake stays the same (no modification to their diet) and energy outake is increased (Lifting weights), then this results in weight loss.  If this is done by way of lifting weights, your body will likely drop stored fat under this calorie decifit.

If you train low intensity cardio, the body isn't using all the required muscle fibers and is training in a catabalic type fashion.  The result is a loss in lean body mass and thus increases their body fat percentage. If your weight isn't LBM, then the only other thing it can be is fat.  So lowering LBM increases bodyfat percentage.

It isn't as cut and dry as people think though. Low intensity cardio doesn't seem to help much to lower body fat. Lowering body fat is the result of lifting heavy weights and energy intake, with the proper macronutrients.

Weight loss is easy, but fat loss isn't.  Cardio bunnies are typically poster boys/girls of "skiny fat". Meaning, they lost all their muscle mass and didn't lose much fat. So they are skinny, but still fat.