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LOW CARBOHYDRATE DIET WITH RESISTANCE EXERCISE MAXIMIZES BODY COMPOSITION
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Research & Development
By Jeff Volek - Chat with Doug on the ProSource Fitness Forum
Jul 28, 2010
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Low carbohydrate diets are an effective way to lose weight and body fat. In fact in many studies they outperform conventional low fat diets.
Weight training is a potent stimulus to increase lean body mass. So the combination of a low carbohydrate diet with resistance training would be expected to result in the most favorable changes in body composition. We did a study to prove this hypothesis. We had overweight untrained men consume diets that emphasized restricting fat or carbohydrate, and we had two additional groups follow the same diet but also add heavy resistance training. After 12 weeks the results were striking. In the diet only groups, the low carbohydrate lost more weight and fat than the group restricting fat, but both diets lost some muscle. Resistance training resulted in significant increases in lean body mass irrespective of diet. Thus, the combination of low carbohydrate with resistance training led to the greatest reduction in percent body fat. In just 12 weeks they lost over 15 pounds of fat while gaining more than 2 pounds of muscle. The largest reduction in percent body fat was in the low carbohydrate diet resistance training group (25.3%), followed by low-fat resistance training (23.5%), low-carbohydrate diet only (23.4%), and low-fat diet only (22.0%) groups. To get the fastest and most dramatic changes in
body composition, the combination of restricting carbohydrates and resistance training is a powerful duo.
.Volek, J.S., E.E. Quann, and C.E. Forsythe. Low carbohydrate diets promote a more favorable body composition than low fat diets. Strength and Conditioning Journal. 32(1):42-47, 2010.
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