Fat loss without the cardio

This is an area of much confusion among exercisers today. It has been drummed into us that exercising at a low heart rate for prolonged periods of time is the best way to enter the ever popular fat burning zone. You won’t have to look very hard to back up these theories; stickers on cardiovascular equipment in gyms, health and fitness magazines and maybe even a ‘fitness professional’ in a health club!

The title of this article may suggest to you that I have an alternative to achieving fat loss. Well, you are bang on, I certainly do! It may be a surprise to hear that I do not do any low heart rate cardiovascular exercise with any of my fat loss clients (male or female). That’s right, literally none!

Don’t panic, there is some method to my madness. The reason why the fat burning message has been misunderstood is very simple. If you exercise for an hour at the suggested low heart rate zone, you may well burn more fat than any other fuel, sounds good doesn’t it? However, the amount of fat actually being burned is insignificantly small, it just so happens to be more than the other fuels available for energy.

So the message on treadmills telling you to exercise at a low heart rate is not actually wrong, it is just misleading. They are correct in stating that fat will be the primary fuel being burnt, what they fail to mention is that the amount of fat being burnt is almost nonexistent. I am sure you have seen those early bird exercisers who do their ‘low heart rate fat loss’ cardio workout every morning and don’t seem to ever change shape. There is a very good reason for this, in reality they are as far away from burning fat as they could possibly be.

I have almost finished my rant about low heart rate training, so bear with me. It is not unusual for some body types to actually gain body fat by completing endless cardio (particularly running). The reason for this is that running can often cause an increase in our natural stress hormone cortisol, it can impair our hormonal profile and deplete muscle tissue, all of which will have a fat storing effect on your body.

The classic example of this is someone training for the marathon. You would be well within your right to assume that if you completed all the suggested miles in preparation to the race, then surely you are burning more calories than you are consuming. It is often the case that people lose no weight whatsoever for the above reasons.

I am now going to introduce you to my training model which is designed to maximise fat loss compared to wasting an hour a day doing low heart rate training. My model is called FUNCTIONAL FAT LOSS and incorporates all the key ingredients designed to maximise fat loss whilst exercising. Remember this fact if nothing else: YOUR MUSCLES METABOLISE FAT! This basically means that the muscles on your body play an incredibly important role in stimulating fat loss. My functional fat loss model is based around stimulating your muscles within a circuit and making them work the way they are designed to. Functional fat loss not only offers fantastic fat loss results, you can also expect to change your body shape and improve your cardiovascular fitness.

Let’s take the buttocks for example; everyone wants to have a tight backside don’t they? It is very important to know that your buttocks are made from muscles fibres which are designed to complete explosive actions like jumping, sprinting and squatting (we call these fast twitch fibres). It makes no sense whatsoever to expect to tone your backside by doing a slow paced jog every morning. This is simply because your buttock muscles are not designed for this. Instead of the jogging, try doing 10 sets of 10 second sprints, explosive squat jumps or lunge jumps. It won’t take you long to feel noticeably leaner.

My Functional Fat Loss model incorporates all of these science based principles about how to stimulate fat burning which is why we use weight training, circuit training, interval training, core training and kickboxing. If you have reached a plateau and can’t seem to shift any more fat, I hope this article has given you some food for thought.

Related content:

1. Functional Fat Loss Training
2. My Functional Fat Loss Formula
3. Fat Loss for women over 40
4. 6 week fat loss programme for men