This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 10:33 am and is filed under womens fat loss. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
One of my ForestFit clients was asking me the other day why even though she had trained for a marathon, she had not lost any weight, or more importantly not seen any significant change in shape. This throws up a whole discussion on the effectiveness of aerobic type workouts, and what your overall goal is. Once again I’ll try not to bore you with the science of this but hope to clarify what happens to the body when you are training for an endurance event like a marathon.
Your body is more clever than you, it does everything in its power to survive despite its owners best efforts :o)
If you starve yourself, your body does everything to economize, holding on to all energy, and breaking down all substances that use fuel too much.
When you run a little your body burns fuel of which you have a limited amount.
If you run for a long time your body will burn all its immediately available fuel as well as some of the stuff that is reserve.
If you keep eating into your reserves your body will start to go into that economy mode as if you where starving yourself, breaking down substance that uses fuel(muscle), and start trying to store more of the fuel that goes into your reserves(fat).
Prolonged training of this nature over a period of 6 months, whilst great for burning calories whilst doing the training, causes massive damage to your metabolism, breaking down all that muscle, thats why elite marathon runners are all skin and bones and really low levels of muscle mass.
As a side thought, it is very common to see retired elite marathon runners, cyclists etc pile on huge amounts body fat when they stop their doing the huge number of kilometers training each week.
For the ordinary guy and gal on the street training for a marathon may be a great goal, and something that I am happy that people do. BUT, and this is a BIG BUT! Unless you are training to go and do the Olympic marathon, I would certainly advise you to do other styles of training that promote fat loss and boost your metabolism, otherwise you will be disappointed.
