Losing 20 Pounds of Weight

I've got a weight loss story to tell you. Back in the Fall of '93 I did an internship at Northwestern University. This internship was required to get my degree in Fitness.

Now if you don't know anything about college internships, often you end up doing a lot of menial tasks that no one else wants to do.... like supervising aerobics classes. Sure, there are worse things than watching college females exercise, but I was hoping for something a little more challenging.

I was hoping to do some personal training or maybe help out with the training of some of the college teams. Well, the only training I was involved with for the most part - was teaching a power walking class.

Yes, that's right. Not a walking class, but a power walking class, mind you. It actually wasn't too bad as we would walk through some of the residential neighborhoods there near the lake, which is a beautiful area.

Otherwise, we would walk in a park next to Lake Michigan, with the Chicago skyline in the distance. Being outdoors in the Fall is always great, so it wasn't too bad. Needless to say, I ended up doing a lot of walking those three months and not very much strength training.

After paying rent, I didn't have a whole lot of money left over for food. So I ended up losing about 20 pounds while I was there. At the end I got my bodyfat percentage checked and was disappointed to lose only 2% of my bodyfat, yet I lost almost 20 pounds!

Man, did that teach me a lesson. If you want to lose fat, aerobics isn't the way to go, instead you need some strength training to build lean muscle tissue - that keeps your metabolism elevated. Now some of you might be saying that this is because I was walking and not jogging or doing the stepper, or whatever.

I can tell you that the walking pace was very high and we were swinging our arms like race walkers. Add in my 200+ pounds that I was carrying and I was working pretty hard. It just shows how efficient your body can get with aerobic only training.

I've been in plenty of gyms where someone lived on the cardio machines but never saw any improvements. Others have looked soft, like they don't even exercise. With resistance training, people can see from the shape of your body that you work out.

The bottom line, if you only do cardio for fat loss, you are missing the boat.

For a better way, try Turbulence Training or a similar method.