It may sound daunting; especially if at the moment you perceive yourself
to have much more fat than muscle.
Yet the important thing for you to remember is that once you start
building muscle – through any kind of strength training – your body will
itself start burning more calories.
It has to; even while you sleep, or go to a movie, or read a book. It’s like
putting your calorie-burning (catabolism) program on auto-pilot.
So don’t let a little (or even a lot) of extra flab, at the moment, deter you
from believing that muscle building is important.
Yes, you should enjoy cardiovascular exercise too, because that’s
ultimately how your body is going to burn existing fat. But muscle building
plays a profoundly supportive role in that pursuit.
And it’s an exponential one, too: the more fat you transform into muscle,
the more calories you’ll burn simply to maintain that new muscle (and the
wonderful cycle goes on and on!).
Interval Training
The basic weight loss nuts and bolts behind cardiovascular exercise (or any
kind of exercise, really) is, as you know, a matter of catabolism.
Essentially, if you can engineer your body to require more energy, your
body will comply by breaking cells down to deliver it; and that process
(metabolism) burns calories. Simple, right?