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Train Heavy, Lose Fat!!!! (PART 2)

By Kevin Raison

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 10Dec2007 Word count: 557 Viewed: 271 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

As mentioned in part 1, muscles are extremely important for maintaining and elevating our metabolism. If we begin to lose muscle through excessive cardio (check out part 1) We begin to slow down our metabolic rate and hold onto bodyfat more efficiently, the complete opposite of what we desire.

What is the goal of a fat loser?

'To burn as many calories during the workout and raise the metabolism after your training session'.

What if we could raise our metabolism for up to 36 hours after exercise?

Well this becomes possible when we introduce weights into our training programme.

If we really want to speed our metabolism for an extra day and a half and I'm guessing if you're reading this article you do. Then we need to involve as many muscles in our exercise or workout as we can.

This is exactly what happens when you train with free weights and/or you train more functionally when using what I call the 600 muscle rule.

Our body has over 600 muscles, if we can actively stimulate as many of those muscles as possible within one exercise, we will naturally stimulate and raise our metabolic rate. When we talk about functionally using the exercise, we are referring to using free weights and performing exercises on your feet. Straight away this begins to involve our stabilizing muscles such as our abdominals and glutes (bum). These muscles alone once involved will have a dramatic effect on speeding up the metabolism.

Something else we produce when performing this kind exercise is something called EPOC (Excessive Post Oxygen Consumption) meaning that our body has to work harder to produce more oxygen to recover. This is where we are able to raise the metabolism for up to 36 hours after exercise and where weights play a vital part in fat loss.

To get the maximum effects of EPOC, we have to use weights to make our muscles work even harder. We can turn our everyday exercises such as the squat, lunge and step up into a more intense exercise by adding weight that we can do for no more than 12 repetitions.

Now this is pretty much common sense and the out come will be more muscle meaning increased calorific expenditure and increased metabolism. In fact for every pound of muscle, the body will burn approximately 50 calories extra!

Unfortunately, a common problem with training this way, at least more common for women is they begin to add a little too much muscle, especially on the thighs. I'm not going to go into the science of why this happens but this is where we need a more even balance of exercise routines which you will get in part 4. So don't panic too much.

So with a combination of strength exercise to increase lean muscle whilst at the same time reducing the amount of aerobic exercise and instead focusing on higher intensity cardiovascular exercise. We already have a better idea of personal programme design for us to achieve maximum results for fat loss.

There is of course one more thing that will slow down the process of too much muscle and at the same time increase our muscle firmness more than any of the previous. But you'll have to read part 3 for that kind of information.

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