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Slow and steady...

If you want to lose weight by the kilo, you have to be patient

STAY PUT Bodybuilding involves hard work and lots of patience

He that can have patience can have what he will.

Benjamin Franklin

Most attempts at exercise have their origins in a lush haze of enthusiasm. You've suddenly noticed that muscles count. Or maybe you've read an article on the health benefits of exercise. You join a gym, purchase sports shoes and do a few early morning jogs. But enthusiasm wanesafter a few weeks when the rippling muscles you promised yourself do not appear. Soon you are back where you started.

Most new programmes of exercise would last longer if people had a more realistic idea of how long it takes to build muscles or to burn fat. An 80-kilo man burns 380 Calorie by walking 5 km in one hour. This burns around 40 gm of fat. It would take more than six months of this to burn 8 kg, provided you maintain your calorie intake. As you progress, it gets harder to shave the kilos off- the so called "plateau effect". So if you want to lose weight by the kilo, you have to be patient. Looking at the bathroom scales daily is no way to monitor weight loss.

Bodybuilding also involves hard work and lots of patience. Developing a ripped figure involves two things: burning the fat overlying the muscles, and building up the muscles themselves. The former requires reducing the overall body fat content (spot reduction and targeting body areas for fat removal is not possible- unless you are talking about liposuction). And burning fat for bodybuilding is no different from burning fat while walking. It takes just as long.

Bulking up muscles takes time because the process involves converting cell signals of stretch and tension into signals for the creation and packing of muscle fibrils. Tendons and ligaments have to be strengthened for increased loads. All this begins in the first few days of exercise, but it takes months for reasonable results.

It takes years to attain the physique of a pro bodybuilder. Few have the patience for what the process involves. As with weight loss, results plateau off after a few months, and it is patience and perseverance at this stage that separates the pro from the rest. Trying to speed the process up by taking drugs does infinitely more harm than good.

RAJIV.M

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