Pass the Light Meat, Please...
Chickens have light meat and dark meat. The pieces of dark meat are small and fatty, and the pieces of light meat are big and lean.
Why is there both dark and light? And why does the dark meat store more fat?
Dark meat is found on the body parts of the chicken that are exposed to a lot of high repetition, low load exercise. The leg, for example, doesn't have a lot of weight to carry around, but it's busy all day. To fuel all this low intensity activity the leg stores more fat locally. More oxygen is needed in this muscle, so more blood vessels develop. All these capillaries give the leg meat its dark color.
Light meat is found on the strongest muscles, like the breast. The breast muscles are responsible for the strong and explosive wing flaps of the chicken. These flaps don't happen all the time and create a lot of muscular tension when they do. Not as much oxygen and hardly any fat are needed to fuel higher intensity activity, so the muscles don't store as much.
How does this information carry over to humans and exercise?
Traditional fat loss prescriptions are aerobics and light weight, high rep resistance exercises. This is exactly what creates the fatty dark meat in a chicken. And it does the same thing to humans.
Since aerobics burn fat, the body wants to store more fat to fuel its next bout of exercise.
Long and slow cardiovascular exercise can actually make you fatter. You won't be big and fat, you'll be small and fat. The exact same shape as before, only smaller. Elite male marathon runners have about ten percent body fat.
Strength and explosion training will build shapelier muscles, which don't store nearly as much fat. Just like the light meat in a chicken breast. Elite male sprinters have about 5% body fat.
The way to get lean is to with higher intensity, shorter duration exercises.
This type of training teaches the body that it doesn't have to store fat.
A perfect fat loss program would use a combination of weightlifting and interval training. The weight component should consist of training that falls between five and fifteen repetitions per set, lifted quickly. And the interval component should use higher intensity bouts mixed with lower intensity recovery.
The take home message is this: To get lean, quit the long slow light stuff, and replace it with short hard high intensity training.
Unleash the Beast!
Related Tags: fat loss, training, marathon, aerobics, weight lifting, repetition, high intensity, sprinter
Lucas Wold is an elite strength and conditioning specialist located in central Washington state. Working with athletes of all levels, from adolescent beginners to Olympians to professionals, he focuses on spreading the most effective training methods to as many people as possible. He can be reached through his website at http://www.BeastAthletics.com.
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