How Does Working Out Help Our Metabolism?

Not only does exercise boost our metabolism, it has other benefits related to improving our overall health and fitness. Having an increased metabolic rate is a sign of better health, and can help those looking to lose body fat. Increasing our metabolism will not only help us burn more calories when we work out, it will also help burn more calories when we are doing nothing!

A common approach to weight loss has always been to decrease caloric intake. Your body has a set amount of calories it needs in a day to maintain its current composition. Decreasing our daily intake will mean we are burning more calories than we are consuming, therefore resulting in weight loss as we continue this over time. But that's the thing, it's "weight" loss, not fat loss. We also run the risk of losing our lean body mass when we just decrease our caloric intake and don't exercise. Increasing our bodies lean mass improves our resting or "basal" metabolic rate and means our bodies will need more calories to maintain itself..aka, we can eat more! Healthy food of course :)

So increasing our lean body mass means doing some type of resistance training 3-4x a week, getting adequate protein intake to ensure we are rebuilding the tissue, and getting enough rest/recovery. As we do this our bodies will become more efficient at burning fat as fuel, that being our protein intake is high enough. Think of your body transitioning from being a smart car to a corvette. If our protein intake is below what it should be our bodies will use it as fuel if necessary, but we don't want that. As our metabolism increases over time when we continue to train, we will burn more calories during our workouts and more fat at rest. Muscle tissue requires more calories at rest to function, where as fat does not require much at all. Hence why when we are sedentary we just continue to keep storing it. Once fat cells form in the body, they can shrink during weight loss but they do not disappear, which "debunks" the restricted calories method. Weight gain is caused by the creation and expansion of fat cells, or adipose tissue. Being in a calorie deficit can shrink fat cells but it does not eliminate them, which is why people can gain weight back so quickly this way.

Hypertension is related to damaged homeostasis of our metabolism and can be considered a metabolic disorder. It is one of the factors in and when diagnosing metabolic syndrome, a grouping of risk factors related to cardiovascular disease. When your heart doesn't have to work as hard just to pump blood through the body, it will become more efficient at pumping it to our muscle tissue. The heart is a muscle too that we don't want to be working hard at rest, we can save that for our skeletal muscle instead.

The 3 main purposes of our metabolism are: converting energy from food to run cellular processes, converting energy from food to building blocks for proteins, fats, and some carbohydates, and eliminating metabolic waste. All pretty important processes.. so let's keep our machines running smoothly and do our weightlifting!