Working Out for Fat Loss - At Home vs At The Gym

Why go for a gym membership when you can already do everything at home? Working out at home sounds and feels so easy that almost anyone who is looking forward to address some fitness goal cannot but show an increased propensity towards starting it all at home. Is this approach strategically flawed? Does getting fit mandate a gym or health club membership? How do you actually figure out what suits you the best? 

It's not only lifting weights and training hardcore in the gym that has been hyped over the years. If you go around browsing the internet for ways to lose fat, you'll definitely end up getting convinced with some 7 minute fat burning workout which you could right away do at home. Pretty straightforward and hustle free. Right?  Probably not! 

Let's not demystify it all at once but proceed systematically. Talking specifically about fat loss, you should know that it's a game of calories in vs calories out. If you cannot completely relate to what I just mentioned, you may want to consider an example to better understand the same. Imagine an electrical power generator that is used to light up some condominium during power failure. Say, the generator provides a back up of a maximum 60 minutes per liter of fuel i.e. if you pour in 1 liter, it will empty it in 60 minutes. To empty 24 liters of fuel it would take the generator a full day of running. Considering a hypothetical condition with an electric power generator having an unlimited storage capacity ,what happens when you fill in another 24 liters of fuel before the day finishes? What happens if you keep pouring in extra 2 liters of fuel every hour? The generator will not be able to use it all and the fuel store will keep growing with respect to the rate at which the generator burns the fuel. Now reconsider the same concept replacing the generator with your body. What happens when you put in more food (a form of energy) than your body actually uses up in a day? What happens when you keep putting in extra food every hour before your body gets rid of the already stored energy? You end up storing it in your body as fat. This energy reserve continues to build up over time and never actually gets used up. 

Now an awaited question, how do we know what exactly works the best for fat loss? Let's go back to the example. How do you empty the stored fuel from the generator? Let me suggest you an approach. Increase the load on the generator. Put two extra light bulbs or a fan in the room. Will this help to burn the fuel faster than the rate at which it is being fed in? No?

By now you would have understood that by simply placing your body under extra stress, you are not going to lose any significant weight. Only if you bring down the rate at which the generator is being fed and then put it under extra load, you can think of getting rid of the extra fuel. What does that mean again? Simply put, you need to eat less than you generally eat and get yourself moving more than you generally do. When I say eat less, I am not instructing you to starve at all. Perhaps this is why some people who starve themselves to death find the 7 minute fat burning exercise good enough. What they fail to realize is that it's not the exasperating workout behind their weight loss but a lack of energy within their bodies. Anyway, you don't want to go extreme on dieting only to suffer some kind of vitamin or mineral deficiency in the long run.

Now that you know, controlling your eating pattern is the key to weight management, why do people go to the gym? Right now we talked how putting your body under extra pressure has a smaller role to play in a fat loss program as compared to keeping a check on the calorie intake. They say a little knowledge is far more dangerous than ignorance. Now there's something else you need to know. Resistance training or weight training as it is popularly known, has more to do with muscular hypertrophy than fat loss. It could be agreed upon that no matter what, any type of physical activity helps burn calories and thus aids the fat loss process. Again such a contribution may be only a minimal in comparison to diet control. But there's another important face to this statement which you should definitely look at. When you're on a fat loss program and simultaneously training with weights a few days in a week. You are losing fat more through your diet and building muscle as a result of your weight training provided your nutrition is balanced. Also, it's nothing but a fact that higher the muscle mass, more energy does your body burn even at rest i.e. simply saying that weight training enhances your rest metabolism. 

Having said that, I am not against working out at home but when asked to pick a side, I would definitely go for the better one. Working out at home without weights has it's own set of conveniences like flexibility of time, no investment at all and maybe a few more but let me tell you why is it better to build some muscle mass while you are trying to drop the excess fat. If you try to do it by diet, no doubt you are going to succeed. Why? because most importantly it is a game of calorie in vs calorie out. Why incorporate weight training into your regime? Let me put it this way. There are generally two ways to get a job done, proceeding carefully step wise or by any means whatsoever. By a step wise procedure I mean adding on some muscle mass while on your fat loss journey. This way you are promptly building a base for better fat loss in the long run with an added advantage that you won't gain back the same amount of fat if you start eating a little more over the span of time.