Want To Burn More Fat During Your Workouts? Do This
Who doesn’t want to burn more fat during their workouts? That’s like asking someone if they want more money in their bank account.
Well, unfortunately we can’t help you fatten your wallet. But we can help you shed some fat. Here’s how.
Go fast.
Strength training is by far the best thing you can do from a training standpoint to help you burn fat. It’s better than walking, cardio, yoga, pilates, and everything else in between. But how you lift weights can take your fat burning efforts to the next level.
Studies have shown that performing explosive movements like med ball throws, jumps, and other forms high intensity exercise are phenomenal for incinerating fat. It’s no wonder why a vast majority of team sport athletes walk around sporting low body fat levels. Sure, genetics play a factor for these guys, but the consistent exposure to powerful, fast bursts of movements without a doubt plays a part in this.
via Human Kinetics
Start incorporating more med ball throws, slams, jumps, bounds, skips, sprints, and speed lifts into your routine. Your body fat levels will drop just as fast as you’re training.
HOWEVER….
Be careful with combining speed and power with fatigue. The whole point of training for SPEED is to move FAST. Guess what you can’t do when you’re fatigued? If you said, “move fast”, congrats, you are a regular Rhodes scholar.
Fatigue introduces technique breakdown. Technique breakdown introduces risk for injury. See where we’re going with this?
Don’t perform 60 consecutive tuck jumps in a workout for the sake of burning fat. You’ll get hurt. Don’t be stupid.
Slow it down.
“But didn’t… didn’t you literally just tell us to go fast?”
via GIPHY
Yes, yes we did. And while moving fast burns fat very effectively, moving slow does so too… but for different reasons.
Lifting heavy weights and performing explosive movements recruit a very high number of muscle fibers and motor units.This means you trigger an anabolic response in the body which counteracts the natural catabolic (muscle breakdown) state your body wants to be in when trying to get shredded. In addition to this, you prime your nervous system which helps preserve your foundation of strength.
And remember, getting strong burns fat.
Anyway, lifting weights slowly helps burn fat via increased time under tension. This means your muscles are under stress for longer periods of time, which means they need to expend more energy to accomplish the task. More energy expended means more calories burned. More calories burned means more fat lost.
You can go slow by slowing down the eccentric (lowering) or concentric (contracting) portions of the lift, or even both.
Metabolic resistance training.
MRT can be defined a bunch of different ways, but we’ll let Eric Cressey, one of the best in the fitness industry, define it this way:
“any strength training session that employs a series of (predominantly multi-joint) exercises while utilizing little (i.e., under 30 seconds) to no rest between sets.”
So think of MRT as circuit training centered around strength training movements utilizing free weights and bodyweight. But unlike circuit training, which is a bit more aerobic in nature (think steady state cardio), MRT is more anaerobic in nature (think intervals). This, unfortunately, means it’s harder.
However with the increased difficulty comes an increased rate of fat burn. As long as you’re willing and able to work harder, metabolic resistance training burns fat like no other. But just be careful to select the correct movements when doing metabolic resistance training. You want these movements to be self limiting, meaning you can’t perform too many reps past the point where your technique breaks down. Pushups or goblet squats would be a good example of this. Barbell snatches would not be as you could power through fatigue and grind out several ugly reps when you probably should stop.
High intensity cardio intervals.
These are essentially the exact opposite of the low intensity steady state (LISS) bouts of cardio most people perform nowadays. Just like metabolic resistance training, high intensity cardio intervals are not exactly easy, but require a much shorter amount of time to perform than LISS. But even though the duration of these intervals are not that great, the caloric expenditure and fat burn are.
High intensity intervals can be thought of as sprints. You can interpret this to mean literal sprinting, or simply performing any sort of cardiovascular activity (say, cycling) as hard as you can for anywhere between 5-15ish seconds.
Keep in mind though, these intervals are usually done with 100% all out effort. Anything less and it’s not exactly a high intensity interval, you know?
A post shared by Chris Sanchez (@cpsanchez89) on Nov 19, 2018 at 12:09pm PST
You can choose from any number of modalities when it comes to high intensity intervals: sprints, cycling, rowing, versaclimber, sled pushes, shuffles, suicides… whatever floats your boat.
So how do you put it all together?
Glad you asked. Here’s a sample workout you can try out.
A1. Med ball slam 3×10
A2. Box jump 3×6
A3. Mobility drill based on your needs
B1. Trap bar deadlift 3×5, 1×10
C1-C4 done for time: 20 minutes total, 0-30sec rest between each movement
C1. Goblet squat x8, 3.0.1 tempo (3 seconds down, 0 sec pause, 1 sec up)
C2. Pushup x10
C3. TRX row x10
C4. Double KB racked farmers walk x25yd
CAN’T YOU JUST FEEL THE FAT MELTING OFF JUST BY READING THIS??
Give this a try and let us know how it compares to your regular routine geared towards fat burning!