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Break a Sweat Before Breakfast For Maximum Fat Loss |
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Written by Dan Gwartney, MD
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Monday, 05 January 2009 |
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Page 1 of 5
 Bodybuilding is a unique sport in that it’s judged by criteria that
aren’t concrete and objective measures of the contestants’ individual
talents, experience or abilities. Rather, bodybuilding is much akin to
art because the final determination is based on a subjective visual
impression formed by spectators and judges who critique based on
relative displays of muscular development, symmetry, definition and
presentation. When people scoff at your gallon jug of distilled water
or a sink full of protein-caked shakers, they will be dumbfounded, much
like the effect of Samuel L. Jackson’s hit man character Jules
paraphrasing Ezekiel 25:17 in the motion picture cult classic “Pulp
Fiction.”
Designed to Consume Every Calorie
Success onstage is dependent on maximizing muscle and minimizing subcutaneous body fat. Though these two goals are paired together so often that public opinion assumes they naturally occur together, experienced bodybuilders know that emphasizing muscle growth typically forces one to accept fat gain, while focusing on fat loss usually involves sacrificing muscle size and strength. This is particularly evident in drug-free athletes, as drug protocols have been developed that allow enhanced individuals to “manually override” the metabolic fail-safes normally protecting against the marginal energy stores present in conditions of extremely low body fat, or limit muscle growth to reduce the amount of caloric energy necessary to maintain great masses of metabolically active tissue.
Our bodies don’t realize we live in the 21st century. Physiologically, we’re designed to consume every calorie in our reach and store it as fat in preparation for long, cold winters. Thanks to efficient building insulation and heating-cooling systems, we’re not exposed to seasonal variations in weather, but consider that our genes still remember the last ice age, which ended in 1850.1
So, bodybuilders are forced to train and diet in a manner that continues to build and maintain muscle, but also drops body fat in a subtle, sneaky way. It’s not a simple matter of combining intense cardio and weight training, as the body’s response to muscle-building weight training often sabotages its response to fat-burning endurance exercise and vice versa. This is called the concurrent training effect and it’s been observed down to the genetic level.2
Bodybuilders and powerlifters shouldn’t include aerobic exercise as a major component of their training— at least for the purposes of maximizing muscle size and strength. Certainly, there are numerous health benefits to aerobic exercise, but those are outside the scope of this article. Yet, unless one is willing to follow a very strict diet, some form of cardio is necessary to increase fat loss. The question is: how does one maximize fat burning without resorting to muscle-wasting aerobic exercise?
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Research and Review 
