Fat Burning Exercises
Long duration low intensity cardio exercises burn fat while doing them. I recommend you not do these because they do not promote building muscle or burning fat after the exercise is over.
Standard cardio exercises like jogging , only burn fat calories while doing the exercise. Try interval training instead, where you alternate short maximal bursts followed by active recovery periods of equal or longer duration. For example you could sprint for 30 seconds and then walk for 90 seconds and repeat this 2 minute interval 10 times for 20 minutes.
The advantages are; shorter workout time, burn more calories (in the form of carbohydrates), build muscle, increase endurance and burn fat calories for the next 24 – 48 hours. Your body will respond by using it’s fat stores to replace the burned fuel for the next day or so. When you increase your muscle you will also burn more calories at rest.
If you want to look like a sprinter then train like one. If you want that marathoner look then go for the long duration low intensity cardio.
I think the best fat burning, use every muscle in your body, weight lifting exercise there is, is the clean & jerk. If you only have time to do one exercise in the gym, this is it. Get this. Your moving a weight from the floor to overhead, 7 or 8 feet. Other lifts you’re moving the weight one third or half that distance. You get a pushing and a pulling routing all in one exercise.
Try 3 sets of a weight you can do about 10 reps with, or go for time and try three 60 second rounds and see how many reps you can get in each round. Either way this is one killer workout.
If you don’t know what a clean & jerk is then imagine combining a deadlift, upright row and a squat press together, in that order, all in one movement. I don’t do a technically perfect olympic clean& jerk. My form is not perfect, but I do them for reps, not competition.
The big compound exercises that work the whole body burn fat the best. Clean & Jerks, squats, deadlifts, and to a lesser degree, pullups, dips and benches. For instructions on these exercises, and others, check out, the No Nonsense Muscle Building program by Vince Delmonte.
For a total body workout that requires a minimum of equipment and time and a maximum of full body muscle recruitment, I recommend, Turbulence Training. You will learn bodyweight exercises that you can do at home. Craig Ballantyne will set you up with workout plans that focus mainly, but not entirely, on bodyweight exercises to get you moving, and burning calories and building muscle, without having to join a gym or buying a lot of equipment. Turbulence Training will show you that bodyweight exercises can be the best fat burning exercises.
If you’re not eating a healthy diet with a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, lean protein and healthy fats, none of your exercise will ever show on your body. You can put down a thousand calories in a few minutes, but you’ll never burn them off that fast. Don’t try to out train a bad diet, you’ll lose every time.
Try out those clean and jerks for 3 sets of 10 and see how you feel and know that all that work might have burned 50 – 100 calories. You’ll think twice about what you shove down your gullet.
How To Build Lean Muscle
Building lean muscle is based on one simple fact: how much protein and calories you take in everyday. To build muscle and burn fat you need to weight train, eat clean and consume enough protein.
Eat properly to lose all the fats and instead gear up on the protein consumption. But here’s something else to consider, if you’re not eating right, then you have no reason to be in the gym; you’re actually harming your body if you do.
Here is what you need to do to build lean muscle – keep a daily food journal that counts the fat, protein and carbohydrate calories you are consuming each day.
When you’ve done this, start following a plan that will prevent you from accumulating fat while increasing your muscle mass. Also, you must be able to find out exactly how much protein will you need to consume everyday.
If you weigh 165 lbs, and you want to weigh 185 lbs, then you need to eat like someone who weighs 185 lbs, and the key to that is consuming 1.5 your body weight (or goal body weight) in grams of protein.
So the guy who weighs 165 lbs, but who wants to weigh 185 lbs needs to consume 225 g A DAY to reach that weight and build that lean muscle mass.
225 g of protein is a lot, but not if you’re used to eating that much food. If you eat 5 to 6 meals a day and take in 45 grams of protein in each one, you’ll get to your goal. Note that you will have to maintain your consumption at the same level to sustain body mass. Once you’re eating right, you‘ll need to establish a weight-training routine that gradually builds as you graduate up the scales.
Of course, eating right also means eating smart and by this, we mean selecting menu items that are high in protein, vitamins & minerals, especially Omega-3s (good fat) and low in bad fat. Chicken and tuna comes to mind, so do certain other fishes, but you’ll probably need to start taking a quality protein shake to get the necessary daily dose of protein.
Carbs, you can take in all the carbs you want just as long as you’re getting the protein that you need, because you’ll be burning lots of carb calories during the workouts which requires an intense cardio routine.
There are lots of healthy carbs on the grocery store shelves, like fruit, vegetables, nuts, and grains, so don’t think that carbs are solely from fastfood. It is important to note that junk foods contain useless carbs that you should stay away from, instead get your carbs from natural fruits and vegetables.
Your goal will be to stay off the junk food, eat the necessary amount of protein everyday and consume quality carbs and fat later.
Now you know the key factors involved in how to build lean muscle mass, don’t forget to take a multi-vitamin every day while you’re working out. It helps replenish everything that’s getting used up and expelled as you push your body to the max.
Tips to Gain Muscle
Following are tips on how to gain muscle.
1) Diet: eat clean. To gain muscle and a minimum amount of fat, you need to eat a good lean quality protein source. About 1 – 2 grams per pound of lean body weight must be divided over 5 – 6 meals per day.
Carbohydrates: Complex fibrous carbs in the form of fresh vegetables are best for gaining lean weight. Potatoes and other starches should be eaten early in the day so they can be burned off while you’re active, preferably as a post workout meal.
Good fats need to be taken in at each meal: olive oil, flax oil, Udos essential oils or fish oils. Eating wild-caught salmon 2 or 3 times a week is a good way to get your fish oils.
Keep in mind that any meal you take must have protein, carbohydrate and fat. Stay away from sugars. If you have to take them, then eat them in the form of whole fruit early in the day.
Nutritional calories are best taken from food sources rather than liquid ones.
Make water your main drink, and drink enough each day. Here’s a simple rule of thumb to determine your basic water needs. Divide your body weight in half and turn that figure into ounces. That is the figure you need to start with, you may need more if you are really active. Example: you weigh 100 lbs. 100 / 2 = 50 ounces of water.
The one exception to the above is, fruit, vegetable and/or protein shakes.
You can use these for meal replacenents, snacks or post workout meals if you just make them with the right ingrediants. Precision nutrition has a whole section on these types of shakes with a lot of recipes and they are categorized as either anytime or post workout shakes.
You will need to determine your caloric needs to maintain your present mass, and then add about 15% – 20% more calories to that to increase your weight and gain muscle.
Muscle gaining tips for exercise:
Go for the big compound lifts to get your body to burn more calories. These would be: Clean and jerks, squats, deadlifts, squat presses, benches; flat and incline, dips and pull-ups. Make sure that your big lifts are already done before moving on to your isolated lifts.As far as reps go, vary it. Some days go for strength with heavier weight and lower reps. Other days go for more reps with a lighter weight. Keep the intensity high always, and you need to be flirting with failure on every working set. I like to do one warm up set and 3 – 4 working sets.
Get in get your workout done, if you’re spending more than an hour you are doing too much and/or you are not working intensely enough. Not training enough can equate as much damage as overtraining. Remember that training provides the stimulus to get the muscle to recover and grow. During rest, the muscle actually recovers and grows. So get your 8 hours of sleep in and don’t overtrain.
In general, muscle gaining tips are:
1) Eat clean and get enough lean protein.
2) Exercise intensely enough to stimulate the muscle to grow without injuring yourself
3) Allow your muscles to recover and grow by getting enough sleep or rest.
4) Rinse and repeat. KISS (keep it simple, stupid)
Starting Body Building
Perfectly performed compound exercises doubled with a proper diet is the core secret of body building for newly starting body builders. I can’t stress this enough, and to work up in weight incrementally.
You can probably lift more than the weight you should begin with, but the key is to do the exercises consistently.
Patience and self control are very important aspects to get results even though you are just starting with the program; don’t lose hope when you don’t see immediate results.
Compound exercises develop as well as strengthens muscles, after gaining the strength you are aiming for, you can now move on to isolation exercises.
Compound exercises are ones in which at least two joints are used to do the exercise movement, so for chest & triceps, you’ll want to do DIPS or BENCH PRESS, for lats and biceps you’ll want to do PULLUPS or LAT BAR PULL DOWN, for legs… it’s SQUATS and then DEADLIFT (which also hits your lower back).
For your shoulder & triceps, you’ll wan to do MILITARY PRESS, CLEAN & JERKS or SQUAT PRESSES.
CALF WORK, because of the unique nature of that muscle group, requires the intensity of CALF RAISES & DONKEY PRESSES which only work one joint, so they tend to be an isolation exercise.
Once you have designed your exercise scheme, you need to figure out the reps and sets.
It’s suggested that beginning bodybuilders, for the first two weeks do light weights and high reps to get your muscles primed for the growth phase, so you want to start with 1 or 2 sets and work your way up to 4 or 5 sets of 12 to 15 reps (this includes your warm-up sets).
Then you’ll want to swap out exercises, so if you’ve been doing WEIGHTED DIPS it’s time for BENCH PRESS, and you’ll want to raise the weight maybe 15 or 20% and do less sets and less reps (say 2 or 3 sets of 6 to 8 reps), stay on this course for two weeks, then it’s it time to bring the weight back down and do 4 or 5 sets of 10 to 12 reps for one week, then you can jump up in weight from the heavy phase, but do less reps and sets.
The key element here is to a) switch up the routine so your body has to constantly adapt b) build strength and mass by alternating what intensity of weights you pump. Basically, this means that you should perform a heavy set once a week and keep the remaining ones light but with more repetitions to shed off more calories, develop strength and stamina.
Once you’ve been on the compound exercise cycle for about 6 weeks, you can start to slowly work in isolation exercises, these are exercises that use one joint to move the weight.
For example, do the barbell or PREACHER CURL, instead DUMBBELL CURLS. You want to do the FRENCH PRESS instead of ONE-ARM TRICEP PRESSES, LEG EXTENSIONS instead of LEG PRESSES, and so on. After getting the form and structure that you want, adapting more unusual exercises won’t be a problem. Although it’s nearly impossible to do “spot work,” you can eke out specific gains by alternating your routine and the reps/sets combinations.
For instance, when doing EZ-BAR BICEP CURLS, instead of doing 4 or 5 sets of 12 to 15 reps, do two sets of 21s; 21s for BICEP CURLS are when you do 7 reps of vertical to 90 degrees, then 7 reps of 90 degrees to the full contraction, and then finally 7 reps of the full motion… all without a break. That’s a burn that you won’t forget, and it’s a great way to shock you muscles if you’ve reach a plateau.
Your perseverance to stay on the program would be the most important key to achieve the body improvements that you want regardless of how hard it may be at the start.
Also, getting more than enough rest and eating right, actually eating more than ever have before.
Your diet is the most important thing whether you’re first starting out or a seasoned pro. The right diet will play a major part in your improvement; however a bad diet will undermine the effects of the workout.
Let me leave you with one more thought. As said by some of the finest coaches, bodyweight exercises are a prerequisite of weight lifting.
For that reason, you may want to start out doing bodyweight exercises.
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