On Fri, 16 Mar 2001, Philip Thrift wrote:

> Did you read this:
>
>      http://www.superslow.com/why_not_aerobics.html

Yes, but some of it is illogical and in any case doesn't answer
my question.  I grant that the most effective way to maintain
muscle mass is strength training.  The only way, in fact.  But
the amount of strength training needed to maintain muscle mass
isn't really that much.  I'm not asking whether one should stop
strength training and just do aerobics; I no the answer to that
question is no.

For those of use who have done strength training for a few years,
however, we are no longer making significant additions to muscle
mass, if any at all.  To maintain muscle mass, it is not
necessary to do that much strength training.  At times, for
example, I have slowed to one session per week or less without
losing any LBM.

If my LBM is the same when I train once a week as it is when I
train 3x per week, then there is no good reason to train 3x per
week, as far as I can tell.  It's possible that I might be able
to add a few more pounds of LBM by making strategic changes in my
training schedule and methods; I'm sure I'm not training
"optimally."  But frankly, I'm not willing to do it.  My LBM is
about 183 and I just don't care about getting any bigger.  My
concern is to shed fat, and for me that is not going to involve
adding muscle.  I've added enough to where I am as close to my
genetic ceiling as I am likely to push myself.  So I need to
think about other ways to burn fat.

The author of the superslow article makes the point that the most
aerobic exercise of all is sleep, but misses the point that if
one wants to burn fat the goal should be to maximize the energy
demand of as many muscles as possible while remaining in the
fat-burning mode (i.e., recruiting mainly slow-twitch fibers).
Sleeping is obviously not the way to do this.

The article, like many such articles, creates a false dilemma.
You're either building muscle or you're interfering with the
building of muscle.  Well, that's not right.  After a certain
amount of strength training, you're not building muscle anymore;
you're maintaining.  It seems to me that when that point is
reached it makes sense to (a) recognize it, and (b) change
exercise strategies in light of it.  The article also tends to
equate aerobic exercise with aerobic exercise abuse.  There is
some justification for this, since there are so many aerobics
abusers out there.  But it hardly means that aerobic exercise is
inherently bad.

VO2 max is relevant to fat burning in the sense that it is an
indicator of how much energy expenditure one can tolerate for
extended perdios of time.  It is obviously not the whole story
about fitness.  But a trained person with a relatively high VO2
max will be able to burn more fuel in a half-hour than a person
with a low VO2 max, and that means that that person will be
burning more fat.

Todd Moody
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