Author: Jonathan Wong, Singapore Personal Trainer And Fitness Expert
What Fat Loss Workouts Work?
Fat loss workouts that really work do not do so by chance. Here are the reasons why effective workouts get the job done.
Effective fat loss workouts always aim to preserve muscle – Muscle is your calorie burning furnace. The majority of our calorie needs come from our resting metabolic rate (RMR).
Any workout that looses muscle is killing your chances of burning calories because more muscles mean higher RMR. Your body is a super efficient survival machine, and if it is put into a stressed state, it tends to shed muscle because muscles burn calories, and burning less calories is good for survival (if you are lost in the jungle or desert for example).
However we are now at the other end of the scale. Our food is so processed (stored easily as FAT) and so calorie dense that running out of calories is not really a problem. The opposite is true…so much fat that all the developed country diseases are killing us instead. Obesity, diabetes, cancer, heart disease.
So, our exercise must keep our muscles so those muscles can help burn off calories The great thing is that having muscles costs calories both when we are active and even when we are not moving! Yay!
The kind of exercise that maintains muscle is exercise that makes the body think: “I better keep my muscles or this exercise program is going to crush me!”
That means resistance training and sprint intervals. Slow long cardio sessions are not demanding on the muscular system and the body will no doubt shed its muscles instead of fat when we go on a diet.
Effective fat loss workouts work because they always aim to increase calorie usage even when we are not training - One way to do this is of course to build and keep muscles as mentioned in the first point. The other method that must be used is to do hard exercise.
Hard is relative of course. To an advanced athlete multiple 200m sprints with 60sec rest would be hard. To beginner or untrained individual it would be suicide! In fact it would be utterly irresponsible for me to prescribe such a workout to them. But that doesn’t mean they don’t work hard in terms of what they are capable of. It may be 20 sec of increased speed on a stationary bike with 90 sec of easy pedaling. But regardless of their current fitness stage, we all work HARD. Smart, and within our capabilities… but HARD.
What does hard work get us? It gets our bodies to work “overtime” to recover from that hard work. Even AFTER the training, the body needs to spend extra calories to get back to “normal”. That’s great news because it means we get this overtime for free without spending more of our REAL TIME exercising! This is the key component that allows us to get results in a short time.
This is as good as a magic pill that burn’s calories for free (BTW those don’t exist) but this stuff is real.
Hard exercise is like investing in the stock of a very profitable company. Your money grows in your sleep, and the parallel in fat loss is, you burn calories even at rest.
Easy exercise is like putting your money in your drawer. It doesn’t do anything for you. You only burn calories while you are exercising. No free overtime, no free post exercise calorie burn.
To add to the great news, research shows that the calories burnt after hard training tend to come from fat. Another big YAY!
So the principles are simple. Work as hard as your fitness level allows you to, as often as your schedule allows you to, and you will do really well! Enjoy the workouts on the site, and even more than that, enjoy the RESULTS of the workouts because these workouts work!Contributed to Coachjon.com, site of Singapore Personal Trainer and Fitness Coach Jonathan Wong
Written For www.CoachJon.com Singapore Personal Trainer & Fitness Expert
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