If you want to see RAPID and lasting results in fat
loss and fitness you need to understand the basics.
The current guidelines suggest a healthy adult should
exercise between three and five times per week at a moderate to high intensity
between thirty and sixty minutes and it should be cardiovascular exercise
...judging by the state of the nation these generic,
boring and inadequate recommendations seem to be working?!
The sad truth of the matter is they don’t.
Following the government exercise protocols combined
with the government guidelines on nutrition will leave you fat and unhappy at
best.
Why So
Complicated
Before I tell you the truth I need you to understand
how we have arrived at where we are...
For a long time the mantra ‘eat less, move more’ has
haunted the masses. In the old days the only way to improve the way you looked
was to go on a low calorie diet and go running.
If you look back at some of the old pictures from
yesteryear closely whilst from afar they were admirable somewhat tragically
these people under closer inspection were not so hot.
With the sharp reduction in calories and obvious lack
of efficient exercise these people looked kind of skinny fat. They might have
fitted into a pair of jeans, but the absence of muscle tone meant they didn’t
look any better with their clothes off.
Bodybuilding.
Fast-forward a few years and with the popularity of
Arnie movies bodybuilding became popular.
For guys lifting weights and staring in the mirror
admiring themselves between sets for a couple of minutes became the way to go.
The benefits of strength training became popular, but
this was a very masculine way to train, and despite the obvious chemical
advantage of the movie stars, guys went in there droves and followed the plan
and invariably didn’t get the look they wanted.
Aerobics.
At this time aerobics became popular. Dressing in
leotards, sweatbands and hopping back and forth over boxes was the only way to
burn fat and this was popular.
You could trade your flabby unpleasant bits for achy
hips, knees and ankles and this was the perfect compliment to life's excesses.
Unsurprisingly this craze continues today, however now
it’s called Zumba and involves more dancing and co-ordination than before.
Today.
Step into the new millennium and despite an abundance
of evidence to the contrary cardiovascular training and strength training are
still seen as separate exclusive entities.
More worryingly women are scared of strength-training
for fear of becoming bulky and guys are scared of cardiovascular exercise
becoming skinny. The irony is neither is true.
Strength Training
Strength-training will not make women (or most guys
that matter) bulky. The truth is they don’t have the right hormones to elicit
this response.
Strength training is fantastic for women (and guys).
It stabilizes joints, balances the body and can tone muscles that your typical
cardiovascular training cannot reach.
The trouble is using the same outdated principles
bodybuilders in the 80’s used mean it will not make an inference on body fat
especially when combined with a terrible diet.
The Cardio Myth
Similarly cardiovascular training will not have a
meaningful effect on body composition due to the way many people go about it.
Slow and steady cardio has many shortfalls. With
latest research saying it does not have the impact on metabolism many people
think with much of the weight loss coming from muscle hence the skeletal look
of many runners.
This combined with the joint pain; discomfort and
boredom make it a double whammy.
Good information?
With the birth of the Internet we are now better
informed than ever. By typing into Google ‘fat loss’, ‘exercise’ or ‘diet’ you
will have over a million hits and will be inundated with options to help you
get fit.
The trouble with this is not all of it is factually
correct and with that much contradictory advice comes a certain degree of
paralysis.
Too much knowledge means people don’t know where to
start.
Therefore the question of what do I do to get in shape
still remains...
How To Get In
Shape
In truth, there are hundreds of ways to get in shape.
I’ve already alluded to a couple.
It would be remiss of me to say they have no benefits.
Some are just more effective than others.
My preference and the most-effective training method I
have found is a training method called metabolic resistance training. These
workouts are popular with the people in the know.
Supported by science, and tried and tested on the gym
floor, metabolic resistance training or MRT is the perfect compromise of
cardiovascular and strength training.
In fact I’ve used it to get hundreds of men and women
in shape.
To be honest, for many the benefits have to be seen to
be believed.
MRT is quite simply strength training with incomplete
recovery.
By carefully pairing exercises you can get much of the
benefits of strength training (muscle tone, increased stability, etc) and due
to the short recovery time between exercises it has a cardiovascular response
(accelerated fat loss, out of breath and sweaty!).
Often the workouts are of shorter duration and
slightly higher intensity making them the perfect solution to the
time-challenged person.
Metabolic resistance training can also be done using
bodyweight exercises. Or with equipment like barbells, dumbbells, kettlebells,
the prowler, tractor tires or farmers walk.
Characterized by the short blasts of intense efforts
and whole body routines the workouts follow a 600 rule.
The aim of each short and intense workout is to get
every one of your 600 muscles to work hard. This might on occasion include a
frown, a grimace or a smile!
The Afterburn
Effect
Using multiple sets of between five and thirty
repetitions of each exercise MRT stimulates the exact metabolic processes
needed to create The Afterburn Effect.
It is this Afterburn Effect that makes it so
effective. Research indicates in isocaloric comparisons MRT is more effective
than either strength training or cardiovascular training for fat burning. This
is due to something called EPOC.
EPOC or Exercise Post Oxygen Consumption is quite simply
the recovery of metabolic rate back to pre-exercise levels. Many people are
fixated with calorie expenditure during exercise and have totally overlooked
what happens afterwards.
The truth is once you have finished exercise it can
take several minutes for your metabolism to return to pre-exercise rate with
light exercise or several hours for something more intense or vigorous.
This means with MRT you could continue burning fat at
an elevated level for up to 48hrs after a workout. This is why it is so
effective. Imagine burning more calories each day without even exercising...
Muscle Confusion
With hundreds of exercises to choose from the mini
circuit style workouts tend to focus on larger compound or wholebody exercises
for maximum metabolic impact and being shorter duration they are easy to fit
into your busy and hectic lifestyle and they’re fun and challenging too.
