1) Increasing Metabolism is the SECRET to Losing Fat
If you want to burn fat and tone up, you HAVE to boost your metabolic rate – the amount of calories your body burns each day. To do this you’ll need to make sure you are working out at a high-enough intensity. That means intense relative to your current level of fitness. Your workouts should be challenging, but not excruciating. They should be doable, at a push, and you should feel like you’ve reached a new best.
You can only do this by recording your workouts and making constant improvements and gradual increases in intensity. The biggest mistake that stops millions of people losing weight every year is that they fail to keep getting fitter. They repeat the same workout over and over again and never increase the difficulty. By not changing anything your body soon adapts to the demands you’ve placed on it, and then slows down it’s rate of calorie burning, meaning your weight loss suddenly slows to a crawl and then stops.
Don’t worry about fancy exercises or super-complicated workout programs. Just take a few good exercises and work on increasing the amount of repetitions you do each workout, or decrease the amount of rest time you take each workout. This will make you constantly fitter so your metabolism can never adapt, and will keep you burning maximum calories week after week. That is the KEY.
2) Use Total-Body Exercises
Exercises that use more parts of your body in one go naturally burn more calories and help you tone faster. So a full body squat will burn more calories than a leg-curl machine you’d find in the gym. Likewise, many women like tricep kick-backs to tone their arms (where you repeatedly bend and straighten your elbow with a weight in your hand). However, a press up will tone your arms, your glutes, shoulders and stomach all in one go.
Spend time with total-body exercises and ditch the single-joint, isolated exercises movements (unless you want to spend 3 hours working out everyday). The absolute ‘must-have’ exercises you need in any good fat-loss workout are:
Squats
Press Ups
Lunges
Step-Ups
Jumps
3) Use Bodyweight and Free Weight Exercises (No Machines!)
The problem with most exercise machines is that they require you to sit down while doing them. Not only does this drastically reduce the amount of calories burned in your workout (remember more muscles used = more fat burned), but it also keeps your bum and tummy soft and unsexy.
Using bodyweight-only exercises are extremely effective for losing weight fast because they build your core strength quickly, and force you to use your total-body. These exercises also cause your heart rate to rise sharply so you get a great cardio workout at the same time as you tone. This will literally slice the time you spend working out in half – and you’ll lose weight faster! These exercises also increase flexibility and overall fitness very quickly.
4) Workout 3 - 4 times per week (but do SOMETHING every day)
It’s been a proven fact for years, 3 – 4 workouts per week, done at a challenging yet achievable level of difficulty, is the fastest and most effective way to drop the pounds and start turning heads. But you also need to keep things up in-between these 3-4 main workouts. On days you aren’t performing a main workout, go for a 20 – 30 minute walk or perform a light, 10-minute bodyweight workout at home.
5) Don’t let your workout last longer than 60 minutes
If your workout takes longer than 60 minutes to complete it means you aren’t exercising at a high enough intensity. If you’ve actually pushed yourself a bit then you won’t be able to continue past 45 – 60 minutes. It’s that simple.
There’s a reason that most women spend 2 hours on the treadmill every day – its because they jog at a low intensity and don’t push themselves to work harder – only longer. And that’s the same reason why those women never seem to lose weight either – because they aren’t pushing their bodies hard enough to boost their metabolism.
Science shows that after 45 minutes of exercise your body starts pumping a hormone called cortisol into your blood. This is a stress hormone that causes your metabolism to drop and your body to store unsightly body fat! Keep your workouts short and sweet. Little and often is the best way.
6) Don’t do more than 15 repetitions of an exercise
I hate to say this, but you’ve been lied to. If you’ve ever seen in a women’s fitness magazine, or a bog-standard personal trainer with a client, you’ll see them tell you to take little pink dumbbells and perform sets of 20 – 30 repetitions to ‘shape and tone’. Sorry, this is a load of crap and does nothing to boost your metabolism (i.e. it doesn’t burn fat) and neither does such an exercise tone your muscle.
The fact is that the best toned women use a lot more weight when they do their workouts. That doesn’t mean you have to lift heavy dumbbells (although I do recommend it), but the toned, athletic look is often achieved through challenging body-weight exercises such as lunges and press ups.
As mentioned earlier, these exercises develop a good level of strength and sculpt your body whilst burning mounds of fat as your heart rate is elevated. With these exercises you’ll only have the strength to complete 8 – 15 repetitions at a time – which is exactly what we want as this is the scientifically-proven best repetition-range for burning fat and toning up.
Fat-Burning & Weight Loss Workout Q & A
7) I know I need resistance training to tone my body, but don’t I need to go running to lose weight?
The notion of running to lose weight is something that was recommended many years ago, and since then has been proven as ineffective in literally hundreds of scientific studies. Since the recommendation of aerobics in the 1970′s, our understanding of fitness and exercise for targeted fat loss has come on in leaps and bounds. We now know that resistance training is the key to toning and shaping muscle, but is also the key to raising your metabolism.
One study has shown that a good-intensity circuit class made up of exercises such as press ups and squats done for just 30 minutes can boost your metabolism and keep your body in ‘fat-burning’ mode for up to 38 hours following the workout. Cardio exercises, such as running or cycling for an hour or longer, on the other hand, is shown to give your metabolism only a very short metabolic boost for an hour or two after the workout. To simplify it, cardio exercise helps you lose fat (but not tone muscle) but only whilst you are doing it. When you stop exercising, the fat-burning stops.
Resistance training done to the guidelines shown on this page helps you lose fat (up to 9 times more) AND tones and shapes your physique, and does so for the next 2 days following the workout – so you’ll keep burning calories even when you're at home and sleeping! This is why all the top fitness pros in the world swear by resistance training and have totally abandoned the notion of ‘running’ or long cardio for fat loss and body-transformation.
Another important point is that most women who start a running program become injured within months (at least 65% get ankle, knee, hip or back problems). Why is that? It’s because our bodies are actually not developed to run long distances. It’s simply a task that humans have not needed through our evolution. From the dawn of time humans have been designed to sprint short distances (to run away from danger), throw objects (i.e – life weights), and move in multiple directions to gain flexibility and keep our joints healthy (not run in a straight line on a treadmill). As a result, excessive aerobic exercise such as treadmill running or using the Xtrainer will lead to joint, muscle and pain problems.
So I bet that’s a relief – you now have permission to quit jogging for miles. It’s boring, ineffective and even painful. That’s the final nail in the aerobics coffin! Start using your body how it was meant to work and get shaping that lean and trim figure!
8) How many sit-ups do I need to do to tone my stomach?
Sit-ups and crunches are another long-time fallacy. Just like running for weight loss, the idea of doing hundreds of stomach crunches to tone and firm your stomach is something else that is now outdated as better and more faster methods have been found. I actually advise that you do no stomach crunching at all. Top spinal expert Dr. Stuart McGill, author of “Low Back Pain Disorders” claims that his research shows that spinal flexion (bending it forward as in a crunch or sit up) is the leading cause of spinal disc degeneration.
In other words, lots of crunches may lead to back problems down the line. Not only that, but crunches are what we call an isolation exercise – remember the exercises that only use one-joint and don’t involve many muscles? This means not many calories are burned and you won’t challenge your body to tone the area. Just remember that quality and quantity are inverted. If you can do 100 crunches (or any exercise for that matter) then the quality of those repetitions can’t be very effective.
It would be better to use an exercise that you can only perform for a smaller amount of repetitions – this would be a more challenging exercise but you would get more benefit from it and your workouts would be shorter! The best alternative is the plank exercise, and all it’s variations. This exercise teaches your body to hold the midsection still and ‘brace’ the muscles. This exercise uses every muscle in your core (not just the front of the tummy but also the sides and deeper muscles) so you’ll tone your all-round midsection 3 times faster, but you’ll also burn fat from all over your body.
9) What’s the difference between ‘weight loss’ and ‘fat loss’?
When you start a regime to get fit, 99% of women first think of weight as being the measuring stick to track their success. This is simply because it’s always been the factor that get’s measured. However, since this all started decades ago, exercise science has progressed and showed us that the amount of weight lost is not as important as the amount of actual fat lost.
If you think about it, what you really want to lose isn’t weight, but inches and the amount of fat on your body. When we talk about weight loss, it’s often substances other than fat that gets taken from your body – such as water, bone tissue and even muscle can waste away, all contributing to weight loss. To measure your success by amount of weight lost and not consider the amount of weight that comes from fat is now considered quite pointless.
You can reach your goals of looking better by losing inches from your waist, hips and arms, but the weight on the scale might not move that much. That still means you’re doing great and reaching your goal! Resistance training (body-weight and free weight exercises) melts your stored body fat and replaces it with lean, toned body weight.
Lean body weight is actually smaller in size than an equal amount of fat body weight. For a visual example, imagine that 1lb of fat looks like a beach ball, whereas 1lb of muscle looks like a golf ball. They are the same weight but muscle takes up far less space on your body. So you can actually stay the same weight or even gain weight – but still be smaller and more lean and toned!
10) What if I don’t want to tone up, and just want to lose weight? Do I still need to do resistance exercise?
Yes, you do. Resistance exercise is the foundation of any exercise program, regardless of your goal. This is because your metabolic rate is the key to fat burning.
It is a myth that running or biking burns fat and resistance exercise only tones muscle. The truth is that resistance training actually tones the muscle and burns more fat. In fact, when done according to the guidelines on this page, resistance training for fat loss will help you burn up to 9 times more fat than normal cardio exercise will.
If you ask ANY top fat-loss expert and trainer in the world, they will tell you that they no longer have their clients run, jog or cycle to lose weight. These things are simply the ‘icing on the cake’ – a separate activity done after all the resistance workouts have been completed just to burn a few extra calories – but never as the main workout.
Resistance training keeps your muscles healthy and toned – and your amount of toned muscle is what keeps your metabolism high. Remember jogging for longer than 45 minutes produces cortisol which breaks down muscle and lowers your metabolism, slowing down your bodies ability to burn fat stores.
11) I need to reduce the size of my hips or stomach, what spot exercises are best for these areas?
There’s a good saying, “Spot removal works in the laundry, but not on your body“. Yet another myth people have been led to believe is that focusing exercises on one specific area will achieve more fat loss in that area. This leads you to then start doing more isolation exercises such as crunches, leg curls and tricep kickbacks - which as I’ve already stressed are the LEAST effective fat-burning and toning exercises! Not only that but to hit each area of your body you’ll need to spend hours in the gym!
Fat is lost evenly throughout the body. Its just nature, I’m afraid. But all hope is not lost – if you are having issues with a certain trouble spot, you can increase the intensity of work done around that area with compound exercises. So for example, if you want to shed more fat from your legs, then get doing those squats and lunges. For a slim and sexy midsection start doing planks, and for sleek arms and shoulders start your presses and push ups. All these exercises will force that problem area to work hard but will also burn calories from all over your body, leading you to a quicker result.
Fat-Loss Diet Guidelines
12) Measure quality, not quantity
In my experience, counting calories, grams of fats and carbs and weighing specific portions of food is not only time-consuming, but also frustrating and overcomplicates the entire journey. In other words, counting calories makes things a lot harder than they need to be.
Just like with exercise, quality is more important than quantity. Counting calories is a measure of quantity with no regard for the quality of the food eaten. All calories are not created equal, and here’s an example of why calorie counting just doesn’t add up:
Let’s imagine there is a pair of twins, both female, both the exact same age, weight, body fat, and with the same goal of losing 10 lbs of fat. A ’typical’ calorie-based diet would say they should eat 1,200kcals per day to lose that weight. Now, let’s say Twin A eats 1,200 calories each day… but it all comes from chocolate, crisps, pizza and ice cream. Twin B eats the exact same amount of calories but gets every calorie from lean meat, vegetables, fresh fruit, fish, raw nuts and drinks water.
Do you really think both twins will lose that 10 lbs at the same rate?
Do you think that Twin A will look better after one month of that diet?
As you can see, the calorie counting method is flawed, and is yet another old-school concoction that has no place in today’s world.
13) Eat mainly whole, raw, natural foods
So if quality of calories is the answer, then where do we find those good calories? The most simple, fast and effective way to reshape your body and reach your goals is to make up the majority of your diet from real foods that humans were intended to eat, such as:
Free range eggs
Wild fish and seafood
Grass fed meat and poultry
Rice
Quinoa
All fruits
All vegetables & legumes / beans
Nuts & seeds
Healthy oils (coconut, olive, flax, fish oils etc)
Drink water and green tea
In a nutshell, eat these foods at least 80% of the time and you’ll transform your body as if by magic. It really is that simple.
14) Eat more fat and protein
Healthy fats and proteins are a staple of a successful weight loss diet, yet are overlooked by many people. Atkins and the newer Doucan Diet both espouse the benefits of protein, although they exaggerate it at the expense of other vital factors (I do not recommend the Doucan Diet by the way, as it is based on having non-vegetable days, which is absolutely insane. As if you’ll stay fat from eating too many vegetables…).
Healthy fat is essential for reducing inflammation in your body, boosting your metabolism, and for regulating your fat-burning hormones. Many women suffer from hormone imbalances as a result of avoiding all foods containing fat. You must know the difference between healthy and unhealthy fats.
Fats found in any natural food listed above (such as nuts, seeds, fish and oils) are all healthy. Feel free to eat these healthy fats- I assure you there will be no negative effects, and instead you’ll feel ten times better as your joints, nails, hair skin and teeth all thrive from healthy fats.
Protein from lean meat, fish and legumes is vital for repairing your muscles after your workouts. If you don’t eat enough protein, your muscles will remain sore and this will slow you down at the gym. The quicker your muscles can get back to normal the more often you can workout and the faster you’ll shape that sizzling hot body!
15) Eat the right foods at the right times
This technique is called Nutrient Timing, and is a super-effective method of eating what you need, when you need it. Doing this boosts the right fat-burning hormones in your body to work when needed, and stops those pesky fat-storing hormones from getting near you. Here are the basic rules of Nutrient Timing:
- Eat the majority of your carbohydrate foods in the meal following your workout and in the evening.
- Never combine carbohydrates with fat. For each meal of the day, either make it a Carbs + Protein meal, or a Protein + Fats meal.
16) Drink water like your life depends on it!
Stay away from any calorie containing drinks such as fizzy drinks, milk, alcohol and fruit juice. All these drinks are hardly more than sugar in a glass. Stick to water and green tea. A cup of coffee a day is acceptable but don’t become dependent on it as a stimulant (If you need a cup of coffee first thing in the morning this will lead to you having sugar / caffeine cravings later in the day, and will likely lead to you overeating).
A litre of bottled water a day should be your basic minimum to meet, but a better guideline is to take your bodyweight in pounds, and drink half of that amount in ounces. (So if you weight around 150 pounds, you need 75 ounces or water per day)
RRR – Rest, Recovery & Relaxation
Recovery is essential to repairing your body and feeling your best. A de-stressed body will store less fat and will get fit more easily. RRR basically consists of how you rest, recover, and what you eat.
17) Get your 8 hours of sleep per day
Sleep is by far the most important recovery method you can use. You’ll be amazed at how much weight you lose and how much fitter you feel just by getting adequate sleep. It is only when you are sleeping that your body can repair itself and burn off those fat calories, and tone up your arms, tummy and legs.
If you don’t get enough hours of sleep each day, your cortisol levels will rise and your insulin
sensitivity will drop, meaning that your body will store carbohydrates as fat far more easily than usual. In other words, lack of sleep makes your body start clinging on to fat, as the body senses danger and may need the fat for survival. Again, it’s just how we’ve evolved! Understanding the way your body wants to work and going along with it, rather than trying to fight nature, will always be the best bet.
18) Minimize stress
Like we’ve just mentioned, when your body gets stressed it releases a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol eats away your lean, toned muscle and tells your body to dump fat cells around your stomach, making your body look soft and bloaty. To avoid this you need to de-stress; each day simply take some time for yourself, see some friends, watch a comedy (laughing is shown to be a great de-stressor) and even try meditation if you like.
19) Stretch and massage
To reduce physical stress to your body, stretch for a few minutes each day to keep your joints mobile and supple, and keep the blood flowing. Having a regular massage by a qualified therapist will also go a long way in easing out tension in your muscles and helping your body keep its metabolism up and keep burning fat all day long.
20) Eat the right foods for recovery
Like I said before, eating the right food is also a form of recovery. After a workout, you have about one hour to get a good dose of protein which will help kick-start your recovery and reduce soreness. A good option for this is a post-workout shake drink, containing whey protein powder.
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