In several recent blogs, I’ve talked about one of my most frequently asked questions, in which the asker grabs some part of their body that they find undesirable and asks, “Can you give me an exercise to get rid of this?” This common question brings up two important topics: body shapes and where your fat is stored and that all-time favorite subject of “spot reducing.” To learn about where fat is stored and how different bodies burn fat differently, check my blog archives.
Today I’d like to talk about the fact that you can target muscle firmness – or tell your body exactly where to firm up a muscle.
Targeting muscle strength, firmness, and tone is a really good aspect of exercise. If you use a muscle (make it contract and relax repeatedly) it will be hungry or metabolically more active. If you do this often or involve a lot of muscles in this activity, you will use a lot of calories and perhaps burn some of your stored body fat. But of course, the fat that is burned isn’t necessarily the closest fat cells to the worked muscles.
If you have reached the primary goal of being physically active most days of the week, it’s a good idea to set a goal of doing some targeted strength building. To plan an exercise routine that will build strength in skeletal muscles, you should know the “Thirty Repetition Rule.” This rule of physiology says,
“If you can repeat an exercise 30 times, then that proves you are already as strong as that particular exercise can make you. You won’t get any stronger by doing it, even if you do it for more repetitions.”
If you want to get stronger, then you need to overload the activity enough that you are not quite able to do 10 repetitions of the activity. The resistance you use can be metal weights, rubber balls filled to make them heavy, jumbo rubber bands, or for some exercises, your own body weight. No matter what the resistance device or your age or gender, you want to make it hard to repeat the exercise 10 times. If you pick up a book bag to use for your weight and you find that you can only repeat the exercise 2 times because the bag is so heavy, then make it lighter until you find just the right weight – that you can perform between 8 and 10 repetitions and are really glad to stop there. If you can easily do 10 or 15 repetitions, then you will need more resistance to be able to make yourself stronger.
The American College of Sports Medicine advises that American adults should find 10 exercises to do at least twice a week and do them against a resistance that makes it hard to do 10 repetitions. Each exercise you do will probably need a different amount of resistance because different parts of your body have different strength levels. So plan on finding 4 to 10 different weights/bags/bands.
Once you have loaded the muscles that perform each of your chosen activities with enough resistance that it is hard to do 10 repetitions, you have found a way to build more strength, cause the muscles to firm up, and to become more toned. Keep at it about twice a week and your muscles will become stronger, denser, heavier and hungrier! You will then have a higher metabolic rate and will be able to burn today’s food better and also will be a better fat metabolizer to burn up yesterday’s stored food.
Finding ways to eat more food and not be concerned about it turning to fat puts me in a good mood!