Strength Training for Fat Loss Read online

  Better Sport Performance

  Two of the main performance criteria for athletes are how fast they can run and how high they can jump. That’s why most coaches and scouts use some sort of jump test and sprint test for sports such as basketball and football. Now, most of us aren’t making a living playing a sport, but we do enjoy playing sports with our buddies and family. Plus, it’s nice to know you can move your body in the way you want to perform whatever activity you want.

  Well, an effective fat-loss plan can help you run faster and jump higher! Imagine if you put on a backpack filled with 20 pounds of rocks and then sprinted 40 yards as fast as you could. Then you removed the backpack and ran the 40-yard sprint again. Do you think you’d run faster with or without the backpack? Of course you’d be faster without the backpack slowing you down because it’s simply more weight for you to move. The same applies to jumping—it’s obvious that you’d be able to jump much higher without the additional weight of the backpack.

  That imaginary backpack represents the real-life performance limitations of carrying around an extra 5, 10, 20, or more pounds on your body. In other words, if you lose 5, 10, 20, or more pounds of body fat, it’s like taking off a weighted backpack. When you lose the fat, you automatically become more athletic (run faster and jump higher). So, if you want to improve your sport performance, regardless of whether you’re a weekend warrior or an elite athlete, an effective fat-loss program like the one in this book could be just the edge you need to outperform the competition.

  Improved Strength

  I just explained how losing fat can improve your hustle (i.e., athletic performance). Now, let’s talk about how it can also improve your muscle.

  One of the most important aspects of physical strength is what’s commonly known as relative strength, which is how strong you are in relation to your own body weight. For instance, the person who can perform the most chin-ups possesses superior levels of relative strength because he can lift his own body weight for more reps than others can.

  When performing strength training exercises such as push-ups, pull-ups, squats, lunges, and step-ups, you’re not only lifting any free weights you may be holding, you’re also lifting your own body weight. The more extra body weight you’re carrying (i.e., body fat), the weaker you’ll feel and the less work you’ll be able to complete. Let’s go back to our weighted-backpack analogy. Put on that weighted backpack and try to do squats, push-ups, lunges, and pull-ups. You’ll do a lot fewer reps with the weighted pack on than without it. As another example, some people can’t even do a single pull-up because they can’t overcome their own body weight. Their training options in the gym become more limited, which can make their workouts less interesting and less effective. In short, the less excess body weight you’re carrying around, the more weight and reps you can hammer out in the gym to continue to build muscle and increase strength.

  Better Cardio Conditioning

  Extra weight won’t only hold you back in the sport performance arena and in the weight room, it can also hinder your ability to play an entire game or go on a long hike with your friends and family. Cardiorespiratory conditioning is also known as work capacity, which is your ability to keep going before fatigue sets in. Regardless of whether you are playing a sport or going for a hike, you must have the energy to be able to go the distance. It’s glaringly obvious that you’ll get tired and quit faster when you’re carrying around extra weight than you would if you had less additional body fat using up energy.

  Increased Energy

  We live in a world where we are inundated with energy drinks, most of which sell very well. It’s beyond the scope of this book to get into the pros and cons of specific supplements such as energy drinks, but I can tell you that we all only have so much energy to spend each day before we feel fatigued.

  As we’ve discussed, carrying around more body fat makes you work harder both in life and in sport. Therefore, the more extra body fat you’ve got, the quicker you’ll get tired and feel the need for an energy boost. Carrying around that weighted backpack at your office or around your house will drag you down just as much as it does in the sporting arena or in the gym. Following a fat-loss plan will help you drop fat, which in turn will help you to become more energy efficient. This will not only make you feel better throughout the day, but you’ll also save money because you won’t have to keep buying those expensive energy drinks to get you through the day.

  Healthier Joints

  Losing fat may help to minimize the risk of putting undue stress on your joints. You see, joints are avascular, which means they require regular movement (compression and distraction) to bring in nutrients and allow waste to leave our bodies. Put simply, our bodies respond to stress, and exercise and an active lifestyle can help us keep our joints healthy by giving them the movement they need. However, if you’re carrying around extra weight, it can make you less comfortable with being active and, therefore, lead to a more sedentary lifestyle that isn’t conducive to giving your joints the regular movement they need to stay healthy. Additionally, too much stress on our joints can cause them to break down and become less healthy. Considering the design and function of our joints, it is clear that carrying around excess body fat can turn otherwise-healthy activity and exercise into activity that overloads the joints beyond their capacity and place one at a higher risk of injury.

  Furthermore, carrying around additional body fat can increase the risk of developing osteoporosis1 and joint disease.2

  Healthier Weight

  In this day and age you don't have to be a cardiologist to know that carrying extra body fat (i.e., being overweight) can place more stress on your heart and put you at greater risk of dealing with health concerns such as diabetes, increased blood pressure, high cholesterol, and increased risk of heart attack. Maintaining a healthier weight by following the nutrition strategies and workout programs provided in this book can obviously lead to improved heart health, lower blood pressure, lower cholesterol, and lower risk of heart attack.

  In other words, losing excess fat results in not just a body that looks good on the outside but one that is also healthier on the inside. Of course, certain genetic factors play a role in health concerns such as heart disease,3 but that doesn't mean that we shouldn’t do everything we can to minimize that risk.

  Less Stress

  Let's face it, we all want to look good, and there's nothing wrong with that. We have enough things to worry about in our lives, from work to finances to time management, that worrying about the way we look can be an additional stressor.

  The good news is that not only can the workout and nutrition strategies in this book help you look better and feel more confident, they can also help you reduce stress in two other ways. One, they give you a user-friendly, easy-to-follow system that's based on sensible eating and fitness principles, not fads that will go out of style in a few years. This way you don't have to worry about the confusion created by conflicting information and constantly changing fitness and diet trends. This book gives you the simple, sensible, and scientifically-based direction you've been looking for. You just have to put in the work, which brings us to the second benefit: The workout strategies in this book can help reduce stress because exercise is a great way to relieve stress. As you'll see as you get into the exercise chapters, this book provides more than enough exercises and workouts to keep you interested.

  Less Anxiety and Depression

  Studies dating back to 1981 have concluded that not only can regular exercise improve mood in people with mild to moderate depression, but it also may play a supporting role in treating severe depression. Other research has even found that exercise’s effects lasted longer than those of antidepressants.4

  In regard to anxiety, research has shown that physical exercise reduces anxiety in humans by causing remodeling to takes place in the brains of people who work out. This evidence suggests that active people might be less susceptible to certain undesirable aspects of stress and anxiety than those of sedentary people.5

  Better Sleep

  Sleep is the way our bodies rest and recover. And, in addition to elevating mood and reducing stress, research has documented the benefits of exercise to improving sleep patterns,6 which can help you become more alert in the daytime and also help promote more sleepiness at night. Let’s face it, if you're regularly exercising, especially using the programs in this book, your body will need to rest and recover, therefore making it more likely that your sleep will improve.

  Now you can see why the value of a great fat-loss program goes far beyond just helping you look great in a swimsuit. It’s one of the most valuable things you can do to improve the way you move in life, in the gym, and in sport and to keep you feeling healthy and reduce the risk of developing joint problems.

  Chapter 2

  Strength Training and Fat Loss

  Health and fitness can be viewed in three aspects: the mental, the physical, and the chemical. For any physical fitness program to be completely successful, especially one geared toward fat loss, it must be complemented by good nutrition (i.e., the chemical), and it must be something that you can get excited about and want to keep doing (i.e., the mental), because no program will work without consistency no matter how good it is.

  This chapter covers the mental and the physical aspects. We’re going to discuss not only why the workout concepts and techniques described in this book can improve your physical appearance and functional ability but also why they are more exciting than many traditional methods (such as cardio and bodybuilding training) and therefore may be just what you need to stay mentally engaged and look forward to every workout. Put simply, you’re about to discover why the Strength Training for Fat Loss training concepts and workouts are safe, super effective, and designed to be enjoyable enough to keep you coming back for more!

  Muscle: Metabolically Active Tissue

  Muscle is metabolically active tissue. In other words, muscle is the physical location in your body where stored body fat is burned (i.e., used as energy). More muscle requires more energy, so the more muscle you have, the more calories and fat you’ll burn over a 24- hour period of time, even while you sleep! Although the exact number of calories burned for 1 pound (0.45 kg) of muscle is debated to be between 30-50 calories per pound, we can safely go on the low end of this: 30 calories burned per pound of muscle. That means that adding just 5 pounds (2.3kg) of lean tissue would result in losing one pound of fat every month—without any changes to your diet. And, a 10-pound (4.5kg) muscle gain would effectively double the metabolic effect.1 While a gain of 10 pounds of muscle seems like a huge deal to some people, the truth is that it's actually a trivial amount of muscle when spread over an entire body.

  Put simply, humans are just like cars. If you put a bigger motor in your car (i.e., add muscle mass), you’ll burn more fuel (i.e., calories) while driving (i.e., doing activities) than you did before. You want to be opposite of your car in that you want to become fuel inefficient, because the more fuel you can burn to perform a given activity, the better!

  This is why strength training and maintaining muscle mass through proper training and eating strategies is critical for fat loss.

  Muscle Gains Through Strength Training

  Now that you understand why you need muscle to effectively burn fat, the questions then become “How do I gain muscle?” and “How do I keep (building) muscle while losing body fat?” It’s no secret that the most effective method for gaining muscle is strength training. However, even fitness professionals seem to misunderstand the set and rep schemes that have been shown in the research to work best for increasing muscle (hypertrophy). You’ll often hear people around the gym spouting off advice like, “Do low reps to bulk up and higher reps to get lean and toned.” Unfortunately, that common advice is false. Here’s why.

  First, being “cut” as men often say and “toned” as women often say just means that you are lean which comes from fat loss. Second, most of the men seem to be comfortable with training to gain at least some muscle mass, but many women unfortunately think they'll get “bulky.” This is just plain silly, since women have significantly less testosterone than men. So allow me to speak specifically to women for a moment.

  When you talk about “toning,” “enhancing,” or “shaping” certain areas of your body, what you're really talking about is muscle. Put simply, muscle creates the shape of your body, and therefore more muscle equals more muscle tone. You can't build a perkier, rounder, or sexier anything without building muscle.

  And, ladies: To build that muscle, you need to stimulate muscle tissue, and tiny dumbbells just aren’t the tools for the job. Instead, women often benefit from the type of heavier lifting that they're more accustomed to seeing men do. Not to mention that, as I also stated earlier: Muscle is a metabolically active tissue, meaning it burns fat. Put simply, more muscle means a faster metabolism!

  Third, your muscles don’t become leaner by doing any kind of rep scheme, because muscles only have one way to develop: They either get bigger and stronger (hypertrophy) from strength training, or they get smaller and weaker (atrophy) from a lack of activity. Or, they stay the same. In other words, your muscles form the shape of your body, and being lean (having low body fat) simply allows you to better show off that shape.

  Developing Your Muscle Base: The Foundation of Success

  Building muscle is like building a house: They both begin with laying the foundation. For the metabolic strength training concepts and workouts in this book to be maximally effective and as safe as possible, you must first possess a strength training base. Developing a training base is the foundation that you build on, and the better your foundation, the more you can build on it. You wouldn’t put on your shoes before you put on your socks. So follow the correct process—don’t just skip ahead to the stuff that looks the most fun—and you’ll get the best results possible. Spending 3 to 5 weeks developing a strength training base has several benefits:

  Strengthens your muscles, joints, ligaments, tendons, bones, and so on.

  Helps you become familiar with performing basic strength exercises using optimal form to prevent training-related injury.

  Improves your body awareness and the ability of your brain to better utilize your muscles. This is known as increasing neuromuscular coordination.

  Increases your metabolic engine by adding muscle. (Remember, muscle is metabolically active tissue, and more muscle means you burn more energy both while you train and while you sleep.)

  Chapter 9, Fat-Loss Workouts, provides a workout plan for developing your training base if you don’t already have one. Unless you’re currently performing strength training a few times week, use the base training workout plan before starting the rest of the metabolic strength training workouts, also included in chapter 9.

  Adjusting Sets and Reps for Muscle Gains

  One of the keys to building muscle—to develop your base—is creating the stimulus to elicit muscle growth via the sets and reps you use. Different set and rep schemes have been shown to elicit different physiological and neurological responses. Here’s an overview of the stimulus that each rep scheme creates.

  One to 6 Reps

  One to 6 reps per set are great for increasing muscle strength (i.e., force production) through primarily neurological factors such as increased motor unit recruitment. Additionally, this rep range serves as a nice middle ground for improvements in muscle strength and size. These rep ranges help your body bring more muscle into the game every time you use your muscles to lift a heavy load or explode in a sport event. If you think of your body as a computer, training in this rep range would be like upgrading your software so your computer runs programs (i.e., movements) faster and more efficiently.

  Eight to 15 or More Reps

  Eight to 15 or more reps per set have been shown to primarily stimulate increased muscle size (hypertrophy) through primarily physiological changes in muscles and connective tissues. Because this range uses a higher number of reps and lower loads, it creates more metabolic stress as well as an increased muscle pump, both of which have been shown to help increase muscle cross-sectional area (i.e., help you gain muscle). So, it’s the higher rep ranges above 6 reps (8-15 reps) that are generally most effective at helping you gain muscle because it creates more of a physiological response. To go back to thinking of your body as a computer, this rep range helps to more-so upgrade your hardware.

  The two set–rep schemes just described are not mutually exclusive. Mixing both schemes can have a positive effect—if you have strong connective tissues and bigger muscles, you can lift heavier loads (in the 1-6 rep range), and if you’ve become stronger and better able to use the muscle power you have, each rep you perform (in the 8-15 rep range) will be more effective than if you didn’t have that improved neurological ability to recruit your muscles. Furthermore, although both rep ranges can facilitate positive improvements, you can certainly emphasize the rep range that best fits your goal. Additionally, a range of 6-8 reps can serve as a nice middle ground between the two rep ranges for improvements in muscle strength and size.