Hi.

I'm new here, this is my first post. I've been cutting down on carbs drastically over the last few months, just cutting out bread and pasta which I ate a lot of, but I want to get serious about "low-carbing". I've read The Zone book. I'm going to get my hands on an Atkins diet book soon too.

Anyway... my exercise question. I'm not overweight. I'm technically in a healthy weight range - I'm 5'6/7 and I weight 59 kilos, which is I think 125/130 pounds. My gym and diet goals are to rid myself of my body fat which I have a lot of, to tone up basically. Both me and my friend have been going to the gym for the last 3 months, I've been going almost everyday. The strange thing is that we both notice that instead of real improvements, we both see that we are smaller but flabbier... Ugh!

When I had my fitness assessment, the personal trainer said that I was doing everything right, except too many weights. He said I should only do them 3 times a week, or at most every second day. But he said I could do cardio all I wanted. So most days, I did at least an hour of cardio and every second day I did some weights for 1/2 an hour or 40 minutes or so.

I spoke to an acquaintance of mine who is also a personal trainer and he said that I was probably doing too much cardio and I had started to eat at my muscles, which is why my thighs are smaller, but flabbier...

Is that right?

I did lose about 5 or 6 kilos during my gym regimen, but I'm going to have a rest now and try swimming every day instead, just to change it up a little.

Does anyone have any advice? I'm not so much worried about weight, I just want to lose body fat and tone up. Three months of hard work at the gym and I'm flabbier than before!

I also want to get serious about low-carbing, but that's another thread!

Your acquaintance could be bang on, Mia.

Cardio is good for cardiovascular conditioning - but when it comes to burning fat nothing will do you as much good as resistance training.

I started weight training seriously in November and cut down on my cardio significantly (from 45 minutes of moderate intensity 6 days a week to 20 minutes of high intensity interval cardio 3 times a week) and I have noticed dramatic changes. In 12 weeks I recorded a loss of 19 lbs of fat and a gain of 2 lbs of lean muscle (this included a week off with a virus and a week in Cuba).

Muscle loss when dieting is very common. It is less so with LC but to ensure you do not sacrifice lean mass there are some things you can do. Limit cardio to every other day and limit the duration - higher intensity is better than moderate. When you lift weights make sure you give yourself sufficient time between workouts to allow your muscles to recover - this is vital. Never work sore muscles. Growth actually happens during recovery - working a sore muscle hinders this. Work your muscles to failure (failure being the inability to complete one more rep. w/o breaking form).

The above has been my experience - you may have to tweak things to suit your lifestyle. But if you havent seen the results you've been looking for in 3 months chances are this kind of routine will work for you.

There is a thread in this forum by Trainerdan for beginners to working out with weights - it contains a lot of useful information and I recommend it highly even though you're not technically a beginner. There are also some gym logs in another subforum (called gym logs) that you might take a look at - Many of us on this forum are following the Body For Life program which incorporates resistance work 3 days a week with high intesity cardio the other 3 days. The results have been inspiring.

I hope this helps some.
Nat

I wrote out this pretty substantial reply and the forum software kept stuffing me around, making me log in and again and again and it was lost! Ugh.

But basically Natrushka, I was just thanking you for all the information, that's great I'm going to try all the stuff you said! I'm just a bit disheartened that I was given such bad advice from a so-called professional. he totally discouraged me from doing weights, and told me, and I quote: "you can do as much cardio as you want, every day if you like, but don't overdo it with weights, because you'll bulk up", so after that, I practically cut out the weights entirely and did MORE cardio! In fact, I told him I was already noticing that I was flabbier, so shouldn't he have known that something wasn't right?!

I'm really annoyed, but not discouraged I'm glad I joined this forum now. So much information! Thanks again.

Mia, take heart, at least you didn't spend 12 years doing more and more cardio like some of us

The notion that women will bulk up if they lift weights is so very wrong and so very annoying. We had a discussion about it not that long ago that might be of interest to you.

http://forum.lowcarber.org/showthre...&threadid=31955

Happy lifting!
Nat