Posts Tagged ‘burn the fat feed the muscle review’

Inside’s Guide to Fat Loss Part 2

INSIDER TIP #3
Cycle your cardio

Maximizing the efficiency of  your cardio  is better than aimlessly running for hours on end and hoping for a midsection miracle. Remember, you want to strike a balance between fat-buring and muscle growth, and doing too much of the former can hinder the latter. “Cardio doesn’t keep you from gaining strength and muscle, but it does compete with the characteristics of skeletal muscles that allow them to increase in size and strength,” Hinojosa explains. To avoid this, vary your approach to cardio, doing 4-6 sessions per week and alternating between steady-state and HUT cardio.
“HUT — alternating between all-out sprints and slower-paced recovery periods — relies mostly on carbohydrates during exercise but will burn more fat afterward due to excess post-exercise oxygen consumption,” Hino-josa says. “Steady-State cardio, in which you aim to work at 500/0-700/0 of your max heart rate for a set period, tends to burn more fat as fuel during exercise because you can go longer. And as exercise duration increases, so does the use of fat as fuel.”
While HUT has gained ground as one of the best ways to perform cardio and hold on to muscle, it’s tough to do with regularity, which is why the sessions are generally shorter. That’s why Hinojosa recommends performing 2-3 HIIT workouts a week and sprinkling in 2-3 easy-to-moderate steady-state sessions to get the best of both worlds. “Consider the steady-state days to be active recovery,” he says. » Perform 2-3,20-30-mlmite HIIT cardio workoutR per week to maximize postexercise fat-burning. Mix in 2-3, 30-4ธ-minute easy-to-mod-erate steady-state cardie sessions each week to burn more fat during exercise and to allow your body to recover.

INSIDER TIP #4
Exercise patience

what you do in the gym isn’t the only factor in shedding your spare tire. A great many people become discouraged if fat loss doesn’t come quickly.

The truth is, it’s hard to experience any meaningful alteration in body composition in less than three or four weeks after starting a new program. “It takes time for the body to respond with significant change,” Hinojosa notes. Also, many people tend to use the scale as the measure of progress, forgetting that muscle is denser than fat and that weight training may be paying yet-unseen dividends in the form of new muscle throughout the body.

For the first month of a program5 avoid the scale. Rely Instead on the mirror when assessing your body composition. After* a month, start weighing yourself on a weekly basis. ¥©« ean also have a trained professional assess your hodyfat to traek your progress.

Inside’s Guide to Fat Loss Part 1

INSIDER TIP #1
stronger effort yields better results

At the risk of sounding like Captain Obvious, Jeramie Hinojosa, MS, sen­ior clinical exercise specialist at East Texas Medical Center Olympic Cen­ter in Tyler, Texas, is quick to point out that eating into your body’s fat stores is, first and foremost, a simple matter of effort.

“While people claim to have a bunch of magical solutions to fat loss, there’s simply no substitute for hard work,” Hinojosa says. “Even in long-term clinical trials, the single best pre­dictor of long-term weight

loss and prevention of weight gain is consistent exercise. The effort of exercise is one of the most important yet underrated aspects of fat-burning.”

That’s why techniques such as high-intensity interval training (HUT) — which we covered in last month’s “Fit With HUT” feature and touch on again here in tip No. 3 — and advanced lifting techniques such as supersets and drop sets should be part of any fat-burning program; they simply demand more of your body, allowing you to burn more fat after a workout. In fact, one study on football players found that those who did forced reps in their workouts lost significantly more weight than athletes who stopped at failure — all without dieting! » To maximize fat-burning, always keep your workout intensity high and add new challenges as your body adapts.

INSIDER TIP 2
Burn fat without losing muscle

Is it possible to burn fat without eating away at your existing muscle mass? Yes. “A well-fed athlete can effectively control his diet and train his body to increase its utilization of fat as fuel for exercise and recovery,” Hinojosa says. “But the strength training must be sufficient to warrant lean body mass increases, and cardio must be reasonable.” (See tip No. 3.)

To prevent excessive use of muscular protein, you must maintain adequate protein intake. But you also have to make sure you have enough carbohydrates and fat to continue training hard.