How to Lose Fat and Gain Muscle in Menopause

Taking plenty of aerobic exercise won't help you to lose fat and gain muscle. Walking, jogging, cycling and any other forms of aerobic exercise are great ways of exercising to lose weight, and for boosting the condition of your heart and lungs, getting your blood circulating and persuading those fat cells that it's time to shed their load.

But what they won't do, is build your all-important strength. If you don't make strength building exercises part of your weight loss exercise program, your muscle mass will gradually dwindle away as a natural part of ageing. And in its place, you're likely to accumulate fat.

Aerobic exercise can help you drop some of that fat. But the only way to lose fat and gain muscle is by consistently working all the muscle groups in your body.

Work those female muscles

There are plenty of benefits to be had from building muscle. If you concentrate on working as many of the muscles in your body as possible, through consistent strength training, you'll:

• Increase the amount of muscle mass on your body, which will give you a sleeker, more toned outline.
• More of the calories you consume in your food will be directed to those muscles, because they burn far more calories in a day than the equivalent amount of fat.
• Fewer of the calories you eat will end up being stored as fat.
• Once you've increased the amount of muscle on your body, you'll get more benefit from any exercise you do. Why? Because aerobic exercise releases fat from your fat cells - it's then down to your muscles to burn that fat up as you exercise. The more good strong muscle you carry, the easier it is for your body to burn the fat. It's win/win!

Build muscle and burn fat

How to do it? There are lots of ways to introduce strength training into your routine, from using gym machines, through muscle-strengthening games like tennis, golf and squash, sports like bowling, mat exercises, pilates or yoga.

Check out the possibilities and get started - soon. When you make up your mind to lose fat gain muscle, you can see results very quickly, which will spur you on to do more.