Why does training with a weight vest, ankle weights or doing exercises like a farmer’s walk make your body build more muscle while being fatter does not? In all these examples, your body is carrying around extra weight all day. However, overweight and obese people do not seem to gain extra muscle to compensate for it. What is going on here?
In a study detailed in the NY Times, it was found that extra fat may be inhibiting muscle development. This was a great study that involved attaching lead weights to moths and making rats chubby. I would have loved to have been involved in this one.
Fat is not a passive tissue. It actually secrets hormones and affects how the body works. The initial findings suggest that the extra fat weight is not only an anchor you are dragging behind you. It is also a “anesthetic” for muscle development.
One of the best theories for why this is the case was found in the comments section of the article:
…in nature, there was no need to correct or compensate for this... If an animal was this obese, it would be easy prey for a carnivore since it could not move effectively. At the same time, nutrition is more scarce in the wild, and obese animals do not exist on the whole.
Therefore, nature never had to come up with a mechanism for dealing with "what happens when we get too fat for our muscles to compensate." It is simply a scenario that nature never encountered. As a result, there was no evolutionary pressure to develop a compensatory response.
Moral: stop working so hard at the gym or on the road if you are not going to address the extra junk that is holding you back. Check your cabinets and plates. That might be what is holding you back from your next personal performance record.
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