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 [log in to unmask]