Well, although there has been, if you ask me, conflicting evidence on this one, and there almost always is for every new health, diet or fitness theory that pops up sad to say, new research is suggesting that exercise may not offer as much benefit to those that are overweight, as it does to those that are on the thinner side.

But why would that be? And why would exercise even still be recommended for people who are overweight or just wishing to lose weight or get fit by instituting an exercise regimen in their life?

The new findings don’t suggest at all that overweight people may not even want to bother with the treadmills, ellipticals and weight machines, it is just suggesting that overweight people may need to kick it up a notch higher than if they were thinner to get equivalent results in weight and cardio training.

The differences in muscle mass and BMI measured on test subjects were several percentage points lower in the groups that was obese or overweight after a series of workouts designed to measure improvements such as these over a period of several weeks. The thinner people had several points higher in these categories. Scientists are chalking that up to genetics mostly though.

Also, there may be some physiological reason that the heavier people did not get the same results, as some hypotheses may suggest that their bodies were just not as efficient at burning calories because of the excess fat and weight, and also not as efficient at gaining muscle mass, but may have been just as efficient had they been a few pounds lighter and done the same exercise regimens they did in the experiments.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 26th, 2007 at 7:23 am and is filed under Health and Fitness News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.