Narrowing Your Focus For Fat Loss

Jan 25, 2017

 by Stephen Conca

When it comes to Fat loss, and setting priorities for your health, you can simply adapt this philosophy to your daily routine.

If you want to succeed, get fit, lose fat, move and look and feel better, then you have to attack every day with a purpose. The focus has to be on all fronts, such as exercise, nutrition, rest and recovery. Are you going to hold yourself accountable?? Then, simply ignore the negativity from the on-lookers as you begin to enjoy success.

Diet is and will always be the best TOOL for fat loss and exercise is the best tool for changes in our musculature. In the past, nutritionists advised individuals to eat high carb, low fat diets.

The idea behind this was, well if you aren’t eating fat, how could you get fat?! This macronutrient (fats, proteins, carbs) split that was promoted for so many years only accomplished one thing…giving a new name for juvenile onset diabetes, yes we now have Type 2 Diabetes due mainly to this macronutrient ratio combined with inactivity.

People were instructed on eating 6-11 servings of refined carbs in the past, yet we told them to limit sugar intake. In the grand scheme of things our body won’t know the difference after all carbs are converted into glycogen and stored into our muscles for later use (energy).

Trainers then prescribed these aerobic workouts, where you hit the body from every angle thinking this was optimal for fat loss and becoming more defined.

The only reason we actually burn any calories at all during aerobic exercise is because of the demand for oxygen from the muscular system.

It really does not matter what activity we are performing – aerobics or anaerobics (weight training). It is the muscular demand that will determine caloric burn.

Let’s talk about muscular demand and how that can make someone who is a competitive swimmer very different from a competitive runner.

Both have very high levels of cardiovascular endurance but the two could never switch places for a competition and succeed without prior training towards that specific sport. We need to program the body based on the movements it is going to perform.

At first if our muscular system cannot handle the stress of thousands of repetitions then will have to condition that muscular system first.

By doing this we will automatically improve our cardiovascular fitness.

With overweight individuals, resistance training will be the first, safest and most optimal approach to fat loss. Resistance training can also become a cardio workout as will by manipulating set length and rest period ratios.

This will also be beneficial for the reason that we would not have to worry about overuse injuries that can occur with an individual who is untrained. Trying to purely address the cardiovascular system before doing any resistance training would be counterproductive to the individual and can stunt their ability to progress.

So the takeaway is if you want to lose weight, WEIGHT TRAIN!

Our muscle is our fat burning machinery, aerobic training does nothing to increase our fat burning machinery (can actually decrease your RMR and muscle mass).

Following an aerobic based training program will decrease the size of our “fat burning engine” and will also decrease the amount of fat it burns each time.

The basic concept of any fat loss program should be to burn as many calories as possible and either maintain or increase our muscle mass. Our main focus will be on burning calories, losing weight while trying to maintain as much muscle mass as possible!

Not sure how to lift weights appropriately? Not to worry, you’re not alone and it’s never too late to start! In a few weeks we’re about to start our Fit in 48 Program. More to come!