<p>I just posted this on another thread and it took me a while but it should be a sticky! Read it:</p>
<p>There are 3,500 calories in a pound. To safely burn one pound a week, you'll need to burn 500 calories a day. You want to aim for one pound a week because anything more than that will most likely be form muscle loss. You want to lose as much body fat and gain as much muscle as possible. </p>
<p>To gain muscle, you need to eat more (bulking) since muscle can only grow when there's a surplus of calories. So if your body requires 2,500 a day to carry out it's daily functions, you'd need to take in an extra 500 calories a day to gain a pound of muscle. Now it might not all be muscle, but you will gain. </p>
<p>You want to gain muscle AND lose body fat. But this poses a dilemma, right? You need more calories to gain muscle, but you need to less calories to lose fat. So what do you do?</p>
<p>Change your body composition!</p>
<p>What you need to do is eat "clean" and strength train. It's 50% diet and 50% exercise. If you work out properly and frequently but eat crap, you will become crap. You need to take in more protein and carbs and cut back on saturated and trans fats. </p>
<p>What I mean by "changing your body composition" is in essence, converting your fat into muscle without changing your weight. Now you can't actually transform fat into muscle, so to speak, but think of it this way: for every pound of fat you lose, you gain one pound of muscle. That's what I mean by changing your body composition. </p>
<p>You're going to want to do a complete body workout (with HEAVY weights at low repetitions) three days a week. So, do this Monday, Wednesday, Saturday. You only need to strength train three days a week because your body doesn't grow muscle when you exercise; it grows muscle when your rest. See, working out simply tears the muscle fibers but when you rest, those fibers repair and grow with sleep and calories. </p>
<p>On every day that you're not strength training, you want to do cardio. This means running, cycling, jump-roping, swimming, tennis, basketball, stationary bike, anything. Just make sure you do it at a slow-moderate pace since your body burns more fat at this rate. If you do it at a higher rate, the cardio becomes aerobic and you begin to burn more muscle and carbohydrates than fat. You should do this for 30 minutes a session. Anything more and you won't be burning solely fat. </p>
<p>Nutrition is also vital, as I mentioned diet is 50%! So since my hands are hurting now, please Google "clean eating" and discover the MAGIC!</p>
<p>One more thing: YOU CANNOT SPOT REDUCE!!!!!!!!! No matter how many crunches you do, you won't have abs unless you lose the fat covering your abdominals. Crunches/sit-ups only build the msucle underneath. And when you do cardio, you lose fat from all over your body. You can't tell your body where to lose it.</p>
<p>Hope this helps. I was 201 in the fourth grade and after research and hard work I'm now 18 years old and 165 pounds of muscle!</p>