Friday, 6 June 2014

FAT LOSS: Metabolic Resistance Training

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.