Many people ask me the same questions over and over again… What should I eat and what should I exercise like in order to look like the guys in the fitness ads? Well, the truth is that there is a lot of hard work and dedication behind the people in the fitness ads, and one thing we can know for certain is that they did not get that way by using the gizmo or supplement they are trying to sell you. Nope, the best fat loss workout programs involve a series of steps and should all include 3 vital parts.
- Weight or Resistance Training – Bodyweight exercises or going to the gym (building muscle)
- A cardio component – Running, biking, aerobic exercise (losing fat)
- Diet – A good solid nutritional guideline (to help lose fat)
The weight training should be as intense as possible… The idea is to build a lot of muscle and place your body under tension that it has never experienced before. That means using heavier weights and progressing towards more and more weight…. Don’t worry about looking like a bodybuilder either… It takes YEARS of lifting and careful dieting + supplementation too look like those guys, and many of them use steriods… The worst case scenario is that you look like a fitness model, seriously.
Cardio is important for you to lose lose fat, since weight training is building muscle… But traditional cardio also burns muscle, so therefore we are going to use High Intense Interval Training as our cardio component. This is proven to be more effective than running for longadn extended periods of time, such as 1 hour on a treadmill.
Instead we can do 15 minutes of intervals, where the working set is only 7-8 minutes and the rest is 7-8 minutes as well, and this will burn more calories over 72 hours than the 1 hour on the treadmill would. The key here as well is to increase the intensity and progress. So if you are doing 1 minute of work, try doing 1 minute of harder work for each week. Or if you are doing a bodyweight exercise like the burpee for your HIIT, then you want to increase the speed at which you do your burpees to reach a higher level of work during the same period of time.
Any fat loss program that doesn’t have all 3 of these components (diet, cardio and weight training) is a waste of time in my book. You need all three components, although cardio can be worked into your weight training in the form of circuit training or little to no rest periods between sets in order to keep the heart rate up.
Craig Ballantyne has a really, really good program for fat loss that has these exact components in it… He calls it his turbulence training program and you can download a copy of this program from his website over at turbulence training.