Today I want to discuss how to increase metabolism in women.
Have you ever watched the children’s TV show Sesame Street? I used to watch it with my kids when they were little. There was a segment that they called “what doesn’t belong here?”
Let’s play:
Here I have a dumb bell:
A fork:
A skipping rope:
And a dog:
What doesn’t belong to increase your metabolism? Let’s figure it out.
Let’s talk about the dumbbell. Any kind of resistance training, whether its weight training or body weight training, will tone and build muscle. This is also going to build metabolism. This definitely belongs if you want to increase metabolism.
The reason for this is because muscle is metabolically active tissue and it takes more calories to maintain it than just fat. Fat is just dead weight and doesn’t need any calories to maintain. We need to have some resistance training in our fitness program, especially as we age, to help us keep our metabolism stoked.
The fork. You may not think that using a fork is a way to build your metabolism, but eating actually does build your metabolism. The mistake that most people make is that they lower their calories in an effort to lose weight. This will work in the short term but what will happen is that your body, in its wisdom and efficiency, will actually get by on fewer calories. Unless you stoke your metabolism by eating, your body will just burn less calories and your metabolism will start to tank. We need to eat to keep our metabolism revved up. Obviously if all you’re doing is eating, this won’t help weight loss is your goal. We need to pair eating with the other things.
The skipping rope. This item can be used as another great way to build your metabolism. Any heart pumping type activity that gets you sweating and gets your heart rate up is a great way to build your metabolism. I’m talking about high intensity interval training, or HIIT. We want to lose the long slow burning cardio. This will not elevate your metabolism for anytime other than the time that you’re actually doing the brain numbing long, slow boring cardio. You’re burning fewer calories while you’re doing long, slow boring cardio and once you go sit down, the calorie burning effect stops completely.
If you’re doing high intensity interval training, such as jumping rope, anything where you’re working super hard and your heart rate is way up, then this is when you’re going to burn calories during you work out and you’re going to burn calories after your work out. You’ll have elevated metabolic rates for up to 38 hours after your workout, depending on how hard your work out is.
You may be wondering what Desi Dawg is doing in this post…well, he gets a little jealous when all he sees are pictures of me on my blog, so I promised him I’d feature him too. As you can see here, I’m interviewing him for an upcoming segment of ‘Bury Your Bone for Better Health’.
To conclude, the three things in our little ‘what doesn’t belong?’ game, actually all belong together when you’re looking to increase metabolism in women. The fork represents eating, the dumbbell represents adding lean muscle tone to your body and the skipping rope represents high intensity interval training. All three of these will work to increase your metabolism.
