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article (read me!) : aerobic exercise and fat/muscle burn

Quote:

I pulled this from Tom Venuto's http://www.fitren.com/ site.

A common concern about doing cardio in the fasted state, especially if it’s done with high intensity, is the possibility of losing muscle. After an overnight fast, glycogen, blood glucose and insulin are all low. As we’ve already concluded, this is an optimum environment for burning fat. Unfortunately, it may also be an optimum environment for burning muscle because carbohydrate fuel sources are low and levels of the catabolic stress hormone cortisol are high. It sounds like morning cardio might be a double-edged sword, but there are ways to avert muscle loss.

All aerobic exercise will have some effect on building muscle, but as long as you don’t overdo it, you shouldn’t worry about losing muscle. It's a fact that muscle proteins are broken down and used for energy during aerobic exercise. But you are constantly breaking down and re-building muscle tissue anyway. This process is called "protein turnover" and it’s a daily fact of life. Your goal is to tip the scales slightly in favor of increasing the anabolic side and reducing the catabolic side just enough so you stay anabolic and you gain or at least maintain muscle.

How do you build up more muscle than you break down? First, avoid excessive cardio. Aceto suggests limiting your cardio on an empty stomach to 30 minutes, and then it would be "highly unlikely that amino acids will be burned as fuel." He also mentions that "a strong cup of coffee should facilitate a shifting to burn more fat and less glycogen. If you can spare glycogen, you’ll ultimately spare protein too."

Second, give your body the proper nutritional support. Losing muscle probably has more to do with inadequate nutrition than with excessive aerobics. Provide yourself with the proper nutritional support for the rest of the day, including adequate meal frequency, protein, carbohydrates and total calories, and it’s not as likely that there will be a net loss of muscle tissue over each 24-hour period.

Third, keep training with heavy weights, even during a fat loss phase. Using light weights and higher reps thinking that it will help you get more "cut" is a mistake: What put the muscle on in the first place is likely to help you keep it there.

I also don't agree that you can't build muscle or do serious exercising on LC, people do it all the time. I think as long as you get enough calories to supply you with energy, and get protien in you will be fine. I did not mean to imply that breaking down muscle protien for energy was a bad thing, it is a natural process. You even do that why you are sleeping, your body is constantly rebuilding muscles.

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