Five principles to add to your strength training program to get that esponse are:
1) Programming: When you set out to achieve something you usually plan for it, correct? If you wanted to be successful with it you would. If your goal or desire is to drop some body fat, you must plan or program for it. Know what each workout is going to consist of. Know what exercises you're going to do, how many sets, how many reps and how long the rest period is going to be. Your workouts should look like those of any successful fat burning program. Just following any program from some newsstand magazine may not get you the results that you're searching for.
2) Use Compound Movements: If you're spending a good portion of your time doing triceps pressdowns or standing calf raises as part of a fat loss program, you're wasting your time. The goals of any fat loss program should be to elevate your metabolism during and post workout. Part of achieving this rise in metabolism is performing exercises that are demanding and place stress on more than one muscle group at a time. Muscle is a metabolically active tissue. So if more can be recruited at one time a spike in metabolism will occur. The bulk of your workouts should be made of compound movements such as: chin ups, incline presses, push ups, deadlifts, squats and lunges. The use of exercises such as pressdowns or calf raises should be used in order to bring up lagging body parts, not to burn fat.
3) Use Short Rest Periods: Successful fat loss programs are based on having short rest intervals between exercises. These short rest intervals have been shown to induce higher levels of blood lactate. In turn, higher levels of blood lactate result in higher levels of circulating growth hormone, your body's number one natural fat burner. The suggested amount of rest between exercises will depend upon the exact program and which exercises are being used. But I would suggest rest intervals of no longer than 90sec. For less demanding exercises, rest intervals can even be cut to 30 seconds or so. This type of training is unlike relative or maximal strength training where rest intervals may last anywhere from 3-5 minutes to allow for recovery of your your central nervous system. Remember, the goal if you're reading this is fat loss. So keep the rest intervals short
4) Intensity: If you want to burn some fat you're going to have to work at. Lifting the cute, pink dumbbells by hardly exerting any effort is not going to get it done for you. Walking on the treadmill at 3mph while reading the latest issue of People magazine is not going to get it done for you. Just because you're moving, it does not mean you're shedding body fat. In order to shed body fat, you must work at a higher intensity level. Working at higher intensity levels will result in an accumulation of blood lactate which, as mentioned before, will stoke the fat burning process
5) Use an alternating set scheme: Use supersets, compound sets or tri-sets as part of your strength training program. One, they are much more efficient for getting more work done in a certain amount of time. Two, using some type of alternating set type of programming will induce higher levels of blood lactate leading to a greater fat burning response. A typical superset made up of two exercises may look like:
A1) Chin Up, rest for 60seconds and then move to A2.
A2) Bulgarian Squat, rest for seconds and go back to A1.
Keep repeating this sequence until the desired number of sets and reps is completed
So there you have it. Five ways to turn your strength training program into a fat loss program.
Rich Ruffing is an NSCA Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist in Cambridge, MA. For more information about Rich and his services visit http://www.richruffing.com
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