Not on its own and it's not the most efficient and healthy way either. Fats are necessary for the body to absorb fat-soluble vitamins, provide energy and produce certain essential hormones like testosterone specifically in men. The ideal way is to reduce overall your caloric intake from food and drinks, mainly if not solely by reducing the carbohydrates that are only being used for energy and they are not essential to the body. While you'll increase protein intake and do resistance training.
No, lifting weights increases muscle mass and reduces fat due to an increase in metabolism. For men this muscle mass increase is larger because of higher testosterone levels than women. Also, the muscle increases only when given a direct stimulus from an exercise that targets them. Therefore, if for example one doesn't want big arms but big glutes, then one would lift weights with exercises that activate the glutes and less exercises targeting the muscles of the arms.
Absolutely not. Supplements get through lots of testing before they are allowed to be sold in the market. They aren't necessary for progress but they surely contribute positively if used right when needed. Specifically creatine monohydrate is one of the most heavily researched and beneficial supplements in the market. Supplements should not be confused with anabolic steroids and other drugs and hormones that are illegal to use and only sold with prescription from a doctor. Many supplements are not actually offering any positive results in performance or body composition so always seek advice from a professional before purchasing them.
Ketogenic diet is a high fat diet, with very low protein and almost no carbohydrates at all. Like any dieting method, it relies on calorie balance. Your caloric expenditure compare to your caloric intake from food is going to define your progress and not the method itself. It's a great diet for people that love fatty foods like bacon, salmon, sausages, coffee with butter etc. Also, It has some benefits with diabetic population because of being independent to carbs and insulin. Furthermore, fats create a feeling of satiety which might help regulate hunger while being in a caloric deficit. It's not recommended for body building or sports performance. The reason is because of the extremely low amount of protein allowed to eat, which results in muscle loss or barely maintenance, but certainly not enough for muscle mass increase, with perhaps the exception of untrained individuals. Potentially, it could work for endurance based sports but even then, research has shown that a high carbohydrate diet provides more energy if the muscles are fully loaded with glycogen, than a high fat diet, therefore high fat diet isn't the most efficient.
Yes, especially for inexperienced people the chances are that you'll be losing even more body fat while building muscle. For more experienced people that have been training for years, unfortunately it's not possible to do simultaneously but split your training throughout a year in mesocycles. Those are periods of time with different goals for your training and diet. Firstly you focus on eating in a caloric surplus and build muscle, then when you are happy with the size you have attained, you eat in a caloric deficit while continuing to train and maintain your muscle mass from the previous period while getting rid of the fat. That's called periodisation and is how strength and conditioning coaches design their athletes annual plans.
Sadly, the body doesn't choose where to burn the fat first depending on the exercise you choose to do. Therefore, doing crunches and any other abdominal exercise for 1000 repetitions will not get you closer to your goal than doing heavy squats for 5 repetitions and being in a caloric deficit through the right diet plan. Choosing exercises that require the activation of many muscle groups is far more efficient than isolation exercises if the goal is to reduce body fat. A few examples of those kind of exercises are squats, deadlifts, bench press, lat pull downs, dumbbell rows, shoulder press, lunges etc.
By recruiting more muscles you are able to lift more weight. Lifting more weight requires a higher energetic demand than lifting light. Calorie is a unit of energy. Therefore, by spending more energy we are ''burning'' more calories.
It is true that cardio burns more calories acutely but has very small effect in the metabolism after the cessation of the session. Whereas, research has proven that resistance training elevates metabolism (burning calories for just existing) for up to 72 hours after the end of the training sessions. Furthermore, cardio while being beneficial to improve the cardiovascular ability, provides very little stimulus to the muscle for growth due to the fact that the intensity of a prolonged cardio session is very low. In contrast, resistance training is so versatile that not only it can provide higher intensity training which promotes protein synthesis (building muscle), but also, through the right design and methods like circuit training, it can provide similar cardiovascular improvements as cardio and in much less time.
The ability to preserve as much muscle while being in a caloric deficit diet is extremely important, as losing weight by not just fat but muscle too, will not bring the desired physique but also potential long term health issues.
This is a difficult question to answer accurately because it depends on many factors that change depending on the individual. I will try to address them and everyone can hopefully pinpoint which ones apply to him/her. To begin with, everyone that starts training for hours will improve if they haven't been training before. Therefore, the question that arises if someone is new and isn't improving in some way is, are you actually training when you are in the gym for hours or just chilling on a bike distracted by your phone 95% of the time?
Next option is that someone has actually been training really hard for a long time and reached a plateau because of the body not getting enough time to rest and overcompensate from the stimulus of training in order to adapt and progress. In this scenario, what you should do is make sure you sleep at least 8 hours a day, drink more than 3 liters of water per day, eat enough good quality (vitamin/mineral dense) calories to be at least in maintenance values, try not to stress too much in your everyday life and take a de-load week. A de-load week can be either a week of total rest from working out, or just a reduction of volume and intensity of what you normally would do. In certain cases that you have been overtraining for a very long time, that may take over a month for the body to recover.
Lastly, training hard is a very vague statement because if someone wants to become faster in sprinting 30m but they train by running 10km every day, that will definitely be considered hard work, but what that person is actually training is endurance and not speed, even though both are running activities. In conclusion, we need to train specifically for what we try to achieve and not focus on the amount of sweat, pain and discomfort that an exercise induces but the relevance to our actual goal. That's where a strength and conditioning specialist is needed to guide you to the right direction.
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