Strength, Muscle, Fat and Body Composition

This article by Tony Leyland gets at the importance of anaerobic exercise AND diet for body composition changes. (Graphs can be found at http://www.exrx.net/FatLoss/WTCalLBWStudy.html.) With diet alone, participants lost weight--fat and muscle mass. With weight training alone, participants lost fat, put on muscle mass, and gained weight. Remind anyone of their first few camps? Weight training and diet combined wins the triple crown: lost weight, lost body fat, and put on that oh so important muscle (lean body mass). The article continues to talk about why scale weight is not the measure of choice for body composition changes:

Regardless of total body weight loss, if you loose body fat and gain muscle then you will “trim down” even if your weight remains constant.

That's FitWit 101.

(8 week program, 40 obese women)

	Control	Diet	Weight Training	Weight Training & Diet
Weight (kg)	-0.38	-4.47	0.45	-3.89
Fat (kg)	-0.07	-3.56	-0.62	-4.32
Lean mass (kg)	-0.31	-0.91	1.07	0.43

The group that weight trained and dieted lost more fat than the groups that either dieted or weight trained alone. This study also demonstrates that weight training can maintain (or increase) lean mass while dieting.

Ballor, D.L., Katch, V.L., Becque, M.D., Marks, C.R., American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 47(1): 19-25, 1988.