Do You Need to Lose Weight Before Bodybuilding?

Posted by Mark Dale on Jan 19th, 2009 and filed under Muscle Building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

To lose weight before bodybuilding is not only unnecessary, it takes more effort than bodybuilding alone. In order to accomplish that task you would have to forgo the bodybuilding program while you tried to lose weight rather than combining the two and reaching your goals much faster.

In order to lose fat you must burn more calories than you intake. If you are on a sensible diet and nutritional plan that cuts your caloric intake and you include this as part of a bodybuilding program, you will be burning more calories than you are eating and in turn losing weight as you increase muscle mass.

This is why bodybuilding helps with weight loss. Your metabolism is determined by how your body is able to burn calories and how efficiently your body burns that energy.

The higher your metabolism is the more efficiently your body is burning calories. Your metabolic rate is affected not only by your age and gender but also by your lean body mass.

The more lean muscle your body has, the higher your metabolic rate is – therefore, as you are bodybuilding and following a diet program, your body will lose weight fatty inches because it is building lean muscle and increasing its metabolic rate.

So people attempt to actually lose weight before bodybuilding, but this is counter-productive. Doing the right sort of bodybuilding program will see an amazing transformation in your body composition. Your body fat will disappear and your muscle tone will increase.

Many people rely on their body mass index (BMI) to know if they are within a healthy weight range; however, as you work through a bodybuilding program, you will notice that this is no longer a valid indicator of obesity or health.

Muscle is heavy and dense, so as you add lean muscle mass to your body with a body building program, you may not see a decrease in your weight. However, this does not mean you have not lost fat, it means you are shifting your muscle to fat ratio. You are becoming learner, not lighter.

A BMI calculation is simply your height divided by your bodyweight multiplied by 703. This is therefore meaningless because someone who is overweight may have the same BMI as a bodybuilder who carries only 5% body fat. You need professional fat callipers or specialist body fat measuring equipment to accurately determine how much fat you carry.

Everyone wants a permanent weight loss program that will keep the fat off for good, but many look for a miracle pill or a fad diet. Forget that nonsense; a bodybuilding program designed specifically around your goals is by far the best way to lose fat forever.

You should use inches as your guide rather than actual pounds due to muscle being added to your body as fat disappears completely. No, you don’t need to lose weight before bodybuilding, you do need to body build to help yourself lose weight and feel great about yourself.

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