When your car needs fuel you pull into a gas station and you place your debit card into the little slot on the pump and you add fuel to your automobile.  This fuel is what allows your car to be able to do the things you want it to do.  The fuel is what allows you to go up and down hills and travel to the places you desire to go.  Without the addition of fuel your car would be nothing more than a large paper weight.  In many respects your body is like a car needing fuel.  Without food your body would eventually run out of energy and you would cease to exist.  The fuel you place in your body is what everyone refers to as food.  In today’s world the fueling portion of life is not the issue.  Almost everyone in the industrialized world has an abundance of “fuel” in their tank.  The problem is that all too often the tank of the human body has grown too large and this is what is rudely referred to as being fat. 

Metabolism is a collection of chemical reactions that takes place in the body's cells to convert the fuel in the food we eat into the energy needed to power everything we do, from moving to thinking to growing.  The question that is rampant in society today is how we increase our metabolism so we can shed the excess weight.   We all would like to be slim and fit into that bathing suit and prance around the pool or the beach and attract the glances of people we may not even know but would like to meet.  There are a few ways to increase metabolism.  A little known fact is that the bulk of diet pills are designed to increase or boost metabolism.  Pills are not a healthy way to lose weight but increasing the metabolism is the goal of diet pills.  There is an age old question of how cardiovascular exercises and weight training exercises boost your metabolism.  Let us look at how each of these exercises affects the metabolism of your body.

Cardiovascular Exercise (A.K.A. Aerobic Exercise)

Aerobic exercise is the act of getting your body in motion.  You do this through walking or running or whatever.    Your mind will resist this at first because most of us are lazy but your body really loves to be in motion.  When you do this form of exercise your heart rate increases and you use more fuel at a faster rate.  It is similar to taking your car on the road and driving well over the speed limit.  We all know that speeding causes your vehicle to burn fuel at a faster rate and your body is no exception.  By getting on that treadmill and raising your heart rate you are forcing your body to look for fuel.  If you eat a diet that is sensible your body will have no other recourse than to look to its reserve fuel tank.  In the human body that reserve tank is the fat you want to lose.  In a nutshell, the way to lose weight is to burn more fuel (calories) than you take in, or eat.  Rev up your fat burning process by getting in motion.    Grab your mind and your body will follow.  Plus, cardio exercise speeds up your metabolism for several hours after your workout.  So even when you are done exercising you still reap the benefits as your body burns calories at a faster rate even when you are back on the couch being a potato. 

Weight Training

Muscle burns up to five times more calories than fat.  To understand this let us go back to the automobile scenario and this time let us visualize an 18 wheeler in your rear view mirror.  That truck may not be able to climb the hills as fast but it can pull a heavier load.  The reason it can pull the load is because it has a bigger engine and that larger engine results in it needing more fuel than your car.  To apply this to your body you only need to know that muscles are the trucks in your body.  In order to maintain larger muscles your engine must supply more fuel to just operate it on a daily basis.  The larger muscles a person has the higher metabolism the person has.  The larger the muscles a person has the more calories a person must burn on a daily basis to simply exist.   It just takes more energy (fuel) for a person with large muscles to get through a day.

In Retrospect…

The age old question is what type of training is better?  There is no simple or even an answer that is correct.  The advice here is to do what interests you the most to keep you interested over the long term.  Doing either type of exercise is better than sitting on the couch and just thinking about it while eating that bowl of ice cream and getting fattier.  Just Do It!

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