A good friend of mine asked me recently to design a program for him for fat loss. I wrote it up, and in doing so thought of a bunch of tips that he should know before embarking on such a program. Maybe someone here can benefit from them too, so here they are in no particular order:
[Written to my friend, copy/pasted here]
1. Weigh yourself at every workout, wearing generally the same thing and at the same time. For example, always with shoes off and always after workouts.
2. 2lbs a week is generally a safe estimate for fat loss. Any more than that and you’re most likely losing muscle (which is not good). In other words, it would take about 10 weeks for you to achieve your goal of 20 lbs of weight loss.
3. Going to the gym everyday can be detrimental to your health. You may not be getting enough recovery in between workouts, meaning a loss in performance as well as a lost ability to burn calories (the more tired you are, the less calories you will be able to burn).
4. Countless studies have shown weightlifting to be better than cardio for burning calories (Due to something called EPOC – exercise post oxygen consumption – means weightlifting raises your metabolism for hours after your workout, while cardio doesn’t). In other words, do weightlifting at every session, and if you want added benefit or fat/calorie loss, do cardio after your weightlifting session. There are studies that show that doing cardio after weightlifting will be more effective for fat loss.
5. Try to write down the amounts of weight that you do every week in a notebook. It’ll be easy to see results in strength gain, which can help motivate you during times you don’t see much fatloss progress.
6. Make sure to eat enough protein a day – if you don’t, your weightloss will be muscle instead of fat (more studies prove this). A good amount for you is about 100-150g a day, which translates to about 6-8 chicken breasts or any equivalent of that. Steak/beef is good too. If you need to cut food to make sure you aren’t eating too much, cut out the carbs like bread or rice. They will only fatten you up.
7. Lower body weightlifting is just as important, if not more, than upper body. You need to go at it hard on both days to see strength gains and continued fat loss.
8. Compound body exercises are more beneficial to you than isolation. It’s pretty much common sense that bench pressing or squatting will burn more calories/stimulate more muscle than bicep curls.
Note: these are generalizations because I didn’t want to swamp him with details and statistics, but they are pretty much backed up by research and study.
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