Muscle is Key to Long-Term Weight Loss

I believe, as you age strength training is the best thing you can do to improve your health and fitness level. Strength training is important because around age 40 you start to experience muscle loss. “If you don’t do anything to replace the lean muscle you lose, you’ll increase the percentage of fat in your body,” says Dr. Edward Laskowski, a physical medicine and rehabilitation specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Left unabated, you can lose up to 10 pounds of muscle each decade starting at age 40.

Loosing muscle is detrimental to your fitness because muscle is the component of your body that burns the majority of the calories you consume each day. Therefore, when you lose muscle your body requires less calories to function. Consequently, those extra calories you consume are stored as fat around your waist, hips, and other places.

Your body constantly burn calories, even when you’re doing nothing. This resting metabolic rate is much higher in people with more muscle. Every pound of muscle uses about six calories a day to sustain itself, while each pound of fat burns only two calories daily. This small difference can add up over time. In addition, after a bout of resistance training, muscles are activated all over your body, increasing your average daily metabolic rate.

Fortunately, strength training and the proper amount of protein in your diet can mitigate, and even reverse the loss of muscle at any age. Thus, increasing the amount of calories needed to function. That’s why you hear some people say that their appetites increase after they have been strength training for awhile. This is a sign that they are starting to build muscle.

It's been proven that consuming 25 to 30 grams of high quality protein within 30 minutes of completing a strength training session is the most effective way to stimulate muscle growth and recovery.  Thus, I use Protein My Whey for my recovery immediately after my workouts.  Protein My Whey contains 26 grams of muscle building whey protein isolates, one of the highest quality protein sources available.  In addition Protein My Whey is:

• Fat Free
• Cholesterol Free
• Only contains 1 gram of carbohydrates
• Sugar Free
• Lactose Free
• Sweetened with Stevia

I highly recommend Protein My Whey.  Find out more by clicking on this link: Protein My Whey
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