This muscle helps to boost your metabolism and burn more fat. This is because muscle is denser than fat and therefore needs more nutrients to stay healthy.
Muscles take these nutrients from your fat stores and burn more fat.
As well as knowing this, we all need to know the 3 key elements to an efficient workout program, these 3 elements are:
- Intensity
- Volume & Frequency
- Progression
Intensity is basically how hard you need to work to perform an exercise based on the difficulty of that exercise.
Different types of exercise need different levels of intensity to get the most out of your workout.
Volume is the amount of reps you perform e.g 10 reps or 10 minutes running, Frequency is very similar but is judged by how many times you do 1 exercise over a period of time e.g 10 reps, 2 times a day, 5 times a week.
Finally progression is about moving forward and making your workouts slightly harder so your body has to keep adapting.
Where many individuals go wrong is weight training, they think that if they do hours of weights their bodies will be forced to burn fat. This is in fact totally the opposite,
To get the best out of your weight training and to keep up an effective weight loss routine you need to remember one thing. Short and sweet, keep any weight training to a high intensity but very small volume and frequency for optimal results.
When it comes to progressing with weights you want to aim to either improve your amount of reps or the weight you push every week.
Aerobic or cardio exercise is different to that of weight training, where as you do high intense workouts in small amounts, in aerobic you aim for a medium intensity for a longer period of time. So for best results in your cardio aim for a run every day but keep the same distance because with aerobic exercises you don't need to progress as much as with weight training.
Even if you lower the weights and perform exercises at a low intensity for longer periods of time you won't see any benefit beyond the first week.
Your overall goal for any weight training should be to improve the weight you are lifting to keep you gaining lean muscle and strength.
A very important aspect that a lot of people don't think to involve in their workout program is rest.
A decent rest period including sleep is as important as how heavy the weight is you are lifting.
We need our sleep for weight loss because this is our repairing stage, when we do any type of physical exercise we are actually causing injuries to our muscles.
These are tiny little tears in our muscles and when we sleep and rest these muscle fibres rebuild themselves to be stronger and thicker, Thicker and stronger muscle burn more fat to get more energy.
Upon hearing that you need to add muscle to your body for effective weight loss, many people, especially women start thinking "I don't want muscle, I want to lose weight." But this is very unlikely to happen because we aren't made to pack on muscle like the guys you see on tv. Many of these men & women take muscle building supplements along with high intakes of protein and carbohydrates, this helps them maximise their muscle building potential.
The muscle you want is pure lean muscle, which will actually be compact and thinner than fat. It will also replace most of the fat on your body, in turn making you look a lot slimmer.
Remember to implement these 3 key elements into your regime and you will have put yourself into the best position possible for effective weight loss, if you don't you will limit your ability to burn excess fat and ultimately gain the body you deserve.
