Two ways to lose fat better....

Today's post: Friday, 12-12-2008

1. Strength training is one of the several most effective things you can do to lose unwanted fat and keep it off.

If you do strength training right, you not only burn calories while you are doing it, you burn calories for hours AFTER you do it due to its turning up your metabolism.

Because it tends to increase the size and weight of your muscles at least some, you get several wonderful added benefits.:

When you lose weight you keep or add muscle instead of losing it as people do who lose weight without doing strength training at the same time. That means that you lose MORE fat & all of the weight you lose is fat.

Because you burn all these calories doing strength training and from the metabolic boost AND you keep burning calories that feed your muscles or even larger muscles --and NOT adding more fat with those calories, you can lose fat with only moderate calorie restriction so you can lose fat and keep it off without feeling excessively hungry or deprived.

These two things mean that if you do strength training right, you are dramatically more likely to lose ALL the fat you’d like to lose; AND you are also that much more likely to keep it off and continue eating right and exercising.

The progressive strength training helps enormously to make effective and permanent fat loss doable and sustainable.

However, in order to get these effects best it helps to be gradually getting stronger and using heavier weights. And, to make it keep working, you have to do this without hurting yourself.

Start with a weight that you can lift 3 to 5 times using good form. Then try to do one more each time at first and then one more each week and then one more each few weeks if necessary until you can do 12. Once you can do 12, do a second set with a slightly heavier weight that you can do 3 to 5 times using good form. Then once you build up to doing 6 in that second set, just keep using the heavier weight and build up to 12 and only do that one set.

Then repeat the process.

Once you get to where increasing the weight becomes difficult or if you want rapid progress and have the extra time, you can also do another set at the end of your workout.

In your first set or two exert force smoothly and somewhat rapidly and then resist a bit as you move back to do your next repetition. That way you build up your ability to exert force quickly; and you can lift more weight.

However, in this extra set, use a much lighter weight in your 6 to 12 reps for each of those sets. BUT, the kicker is that you do them in slow motion. Mentally count to five as they go up & count to five as they go down for EACH repetition. AND, instead of stopping after a repetition where you suspect you’ll not do the next one, do at least part of one as best you can until you simply cannot make the weight move and then lower it as slowly as you can manage. (You still want to breathe out as the weight goes up and breathe in as the weight goes down.)

This process forces the muscle to grow and get stronger.

And, since it IS a lot of work., if you do 10 or twelve exercises and are no longer under 30 or need to be recovered in time for work and are not a professional athlete etc, pick just two of your exercises to do this extra set for. To get balanced development, try to do two sets that do the reverse of each other. One example is to use a pulley machine to do triceps press downs where it extends your arm and pair it with dumbbell curls that exercise your biceps that do the reverse, or balancing, action, contracting your arm.

If you do strength training this way and are careful, you will get stronger over time;
doing it this way guarantees you will work hard enough eventually to get the extra metabolic burn that will maximize your fat loss;
and getting stronger and losing pounds and inches will help give you the motivation to keep doing it!

(The other thing you can do is to take 2 or more grams a day of the supplement creatine. You can either take it about 30 minutes or a bit less before your strength training workout, which I think is important or you can also take some at bedtime.

Now supplements sells it in 500 mg capsules that are available at most health food stores at a reasonable price.

If it’s hot or you work out hard, you do need to drink a bit of extra water if you take creatine. But both the website www.wholehealthmd.com and a researcher at the Cooper Clinics (for exercise research and promotion) have told me that taking creatine IS effective for making your muscles stronger when you do strength training.

And, there is another supplement that has been reported to work that I’m personally testing and which will be included in our upcoming eBook on fat loss that may add even more effects and rapid progress for people who take it. Keep reading our blog as we will announce it when that eBook becomes available for sale.)

2. The second thing is to get continuous feedback on your efforts.

If you do the right things, you will get such good results over the first three months, your improvement will be pretty obvious even if you only measure your progress once a month.

And, if you do a great job eating right including slight calorie restriction and exercising right every week the progress will be there even if you don’t measure. (That’s why some trainers focus on that and don’t use scales.)

But quite often people often do too little at first or they slack off or have events temporarily knock them off course. So for most people getting the feedback is critical.

And the research backs this up.

It’s been found that people who measure their weight more often than once a month lose more fat to some degree AND are MUCH better at keeping it off than people who don’t do it or only do it once a month.

But your weight can fluctuate enough to throw you off and it can be an inconvenient task if you weigh yourself every day.

So, what is a good time-efficient solution?

Today’s Early to Rise health article has one.

Here it is. As I often do, I follow it with my comments.

This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, a free newsletter dedicated to making money, improving health and secrets to success. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.

“How Often Should You Weigh Yourself?

By Craig Ballantyne

I know you hate to look at the scale. Some trainers even suggest throwing the thing out. But the truth is, keeping an eye on your weight can help you meet your weight-loss goals.

To see if frequent self-weighing helps - or discourages - weight-loss efforts, researchers reviewed 12 studies. Eleven of the 12 indicated that more frequent self-weighing was beneficial. Folks who'd been weighing themselves weekly or daily for at least several months tended to lose more weight (and prevent subsequent weight gain) than folks who didn't do regular self-weighing.

The researchers admit the studies weren't perfect, but there doesn't seem to be any reason not to weigh yourself frequently. Through my experience with clients, I've found that weighing yourself every couple of days does help keep you on track for fat loss and for keeping the weight off. (It also helps to have your body fat estimated and take your limb, hip, and waist circumferences every four weeks.)

However, you need to understand that weight can fluctuate up or down based on the salt content of the foods you eat, the phase of the menstrual cycle a woman is in, and the previous day's activity. So don't hit the panic button if your weight jumps up one day. Just make sure the general trend is downward.”

X* X* X* X* X* X*

I very much like his idea to weigh once or twice a week & measure inches once a month.

For busy people, I think once a week on the morning you can best fit it in works well to weigh yourself. And then once a month on the same day, also measure your chest normal, your waist around the navel without either completely relaxing it OR pulling it in, & your hips.

It’s also very important to enter the results into a log book with the date you got that measurement.

This allows you to see that even though you have weeks where you don’t lose much if at all or only lose a pound, over a period of 6 months you’ve lost 30 pounds or more.

Or, once you’ve lost a bit or even a lot of weight, if the trend starts going in reverse, after a few weeks you’ll see the evidence that you need to make an extra effort or resume what you may have stopped doing –but BEFORE the trend goes far enough to wipe out your results.

Why not do both these things and eat right too?

It really does work. And if you keep doing it, it keeps working!