The Power behind Fat loss

When most people try and lose weight, get fit and healthy, they normally go and join a gym.

Have you been a member of a gym before?

Typically, when you go and join a gym, the membership adviser will sell you the membership and then get you booked in with the fitness instructor to write you a weight loss program.

Now I’ve been really fortunate to have visited many gyms and even more fortunate to be able to assess what we are doing as an industry in terms of our exercise prescription. Unfortunately we are doing really poor, it doesn’t matter if you are joining for weight loss, toning, sports specific, muscle building, fitness or injury rehabilitation, the same program is written for everyone and it typically looks like this; you are going to warm up on the bike for 5 minutes, then go on the treadmill for 10 minutes, the cross trainer for 10 minutes,

 maybe the rower or the stepper for 10 minutes, do a few weights, a few crunches or ab work, stretch and leave.

Sound familiar?

If you train this way then your calorie burn off is only 2 hours, which means that you are burning calories for 2 hours after your workout. If you do what we call interval training where you are going hard, easy, hard, easy, hard, easy, your calorie burn off will be 7 hours after, so you have boosted your metabolism up to burn calories for longer. Now what I do with my clients at Studio Twenty 3 is interval training, resistance and cardio, all put together in a particular way, with certain reps, sets, tempo, time under tension. Basically,  with my clients, their calorie burn off is up to 72 hours after the workout. So 72 hours after the workout, they are still burning fat, which is why the results I get are so good.

Now even if you get this bit right, this is where most people fail with regards to exercise and fat loss. It takes 29 minutes of high intensity cardio training to burn something called muscle glycogen (the sugar in your muscles). You cannot burn fat until you have burnt all of this sugar. Imagine we have 2 pots, the first pot is the muscle glycogen and the second pot is the fat pot. So for 30 minutes high intensity cardio, you are only burning fat for 1 minute, it takes 29 minutes of high intensity cardio to burn all of the sugar in pot 1 before you burn fat. If I get you to sprint on a treadmill for 30 minutes, you will only be burning fat for 1 minute, which is why most people in the gym using the cardio equipment, really do not get to burn fat and therefore generally do not change shape.

Here is the key thing; it takes 3-4 minutes of high intensity resistance training to burn the muscle glycogen. Therefore after 3-4 minutes of the resistance based exercise you have burnt that sugar pot, therefore you can go into the second pot which is the fat pot and burn the fat for the remainder of the session. Now that has got to be put together in a certain way, like I said earlier with certain reps, sets, tempo etc. You cannot just stand there and do some bicep curls for 3-4 minutes and expect to burn all of the sugar in the muscle, it has got to be structured in a certain way.

You only have a window of 45 minutes, after 45 minutes of exercise women stop producing oestrogen and men stop producing testosterone, which means after that period of time you will fall off the edge of the shelf and you can no longer metabolise fat as energy. The only thing you can burn is muscle, which is counterproductive for fat loss because the more muscle you have the more calories you burn at rest and you do not want to burn the muscle.

Ideally, what you want to do is 3-4 minutes of muscle glycogen burning with 41 minutes fat burning. So not only will you get 41 minutes fat burning within the session, you will get 72 hours after the session, which is again why I get some amazing results with my clients.

There are some sample workouts for you to follow. You can do these workouts at your own intensity and level, as you become fitter and stronger you will be able to push them to a higher intensity.