It’s very common for people to get discouraged when they’re not seeing the results they desire from their fitness program. It’s important to know that burning fat and getting in shape is not always a precise process, and it requires tracking and adjustment of your program and diet based on what results you are or aren’t getting. If you’re not seeing the results you desire from your fitness program then you must make some adjustments, usually to your diet, but adjustments could also mean increasing your exercise volume if you’re only exercising one or two days per week.

Nutrition is a huge part of fat loss; the most important part. Most trainers agree that exercise is 20 to 30% of the fat loss equation, and diet is 70 to 80%. Generally what that means is that if you’re exercising regularly and not seeing results, you have to make some changes to your diet before you’ll see results. That doesn’t necessarily mean big changes. Sometimes just eliminating a few high-calorie indulgences from your diet each week is enough to start to see noticeable fat loss results.

So if you’re not seeing results from your fitness program, either increase your exercise volume, perhaps by adding a session or two of interval training to your existing exercise routine, or make some adjustments to your diet. If you’re already exercising three or four days per week and you’re not seeing any fat-loss results, then adding more workouts isn’t the answer. You’ll need to make adjustments to your diet in order to start seeing results.

If you’re stuck on what changes you may have to make to your diet in order to see real fat-loss results, I suggest you pick up a book called 5-Factor Diet by Harley Pasternak. It’s only 10 bucks at Amazon and is the best nutrition book I’ve ever read, with by far the most simple, practical, and easy to follow nutrition program. Here’s a short video review of Harley’s 5-Factor Diet book:

Insightful blog post from Jason Ferruggia on why you should just say no to calf isolation exercises.

The reality is that almost all forms of bodybuilding training are detrimental to sports performance. When you start doing calf raises regularly with bodybuilding set and rep parameters, you’ll notice that your calves start to burn more when you are running or jumping rope or doing dynamic warm up drills or calisthenics.

I did a workout at my apartment gym today. It’s a pretty nice place. Nothing like typical globo gyms and health clubs. My apartment gym is almost always empty, or with just one or two other people, so it’s a pretty comfortable place to exercise.

With that said, something about my apartment gym that’s no different than globo gyms is that at my apartment gym I still see the same low quality personal trainers that you find at any big box fitness franchise.

Today I saw a trainer putting a women through a workout that consisted of stability ball crunches, leg extensions, hip abductions, and triceps kickbacks. I can’t possibly imagine any scenario where that’s a beneficial workout for anyone, and for most people that type of a workout is almost a complete waste of time.

Crunches are horrible on your spine, and a completely ineffective way to develop functional core strength. The only people who should be using the leg extension machine are meathead bodybuilders and rehab patients. The hip abductor/adductor machine is possibly the most useless piece of equipment at any health club. And there is not a single more useless triceps exercise than kickbacks.

A simple rule of thumb when evaluating the quality of your personal trainer is that if you’re a healthy person looking to burn fat and improve your overall fitness, the majority your exercises should be compound (multi-joint, multi-muscle) exercises done with bodyweight or free weights for resistance. If machine exercises, or isolation exercises, make up a large part of your exercise program, chance are you have an inept personal trainer.

It’s very common for people to ask me for my thoughts on the P90X home exercise program from Beachbody, so I figured I’d share some thoughts on the topic here.

First, there are lots of things to love about P90X. Tony Horton, the instructor, is truly the master of motivation. Working out for results is all about giving it your best effort, pushing yourself hard, and improving from workout to workout. Doing that at home, where you don’t have anyone else around to motivate you, is so much easier with Tony Horton coaching you through your workouts. Definitely one of the best things about the P90X program is that the DVDs include the master motivator, Tony Horton, to coach you through each workout.

Another great thing about P90X is that it’s based around classic bodyweight exercises that to this day are still by far the most effective exercises to burn fat and get you fit. No gimmicky exercises in P90X, just the most proven effective exercises that will get the job done.

The main thing I dislike about P90X is the high volume aspect of the program. The main program in P90X includes 6 workouts per week, with workout times that usually run anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half. P90X also has a “doubles” program that includes a whopping 9 workouts per week with one rest day (i.e. 3 days per week the program calls for two separate workouts per day; one in the morning, and one in the evening).

Whether we’re talking about 6 or 9 workouts per week, there’s simply no reason anyone needs to exercise that often. And you certainly don’t need to exercise for 60 to 90 minutes to get amazing results.

Now granted, Beachbody markets P90X as an “extreme” exercise program, so they don’t exactly shy away from that aspect of their program. They acknowledge that it’s a tough, hard program, and not for everyone. But I question why they’ve chosen to put so much effort in marketing such an over the top, high volume exercise program to the masses, rather than one of their lower volume programs such as 10 Minute Trainer. I think that one of their lower volume programs would be significantly more appropriate for the vast majority of people who see Beachbody infomercials on television.

If you’re a busy person who struggles to find time to exercise, P90X is NOT going to work well for you. You might be able to stick with P90X for two or three weeks, but few people will be able to complete the entire 3-month program, and even less people will be able to continue such a high volume exercise routine beyond that. The average person who’s just looking to improve their fitness and get in shape (i.e. the average person who sees a P90X infomercial) will be best served by finding a 3 or 4 day per week workout program that they can stick to indefinitely, and therefore make an ongoing habit of regular exercise.

Cool video from Ross Enamait demonstrating exercises you can do at home using a couple of furniture slider pads.

I put together a website showing how to perform all of the best resistance bands exercises. Learn how to perform great fat-burning resistance band exercises such as forward lunge + chest fly, squat + reverse fly, y deltoid raise, woodchopper, and many more. Visit my resistance band exercise library for more videos.

Great post from Alwyn Cosgove on why “cardiovascular programming is an ass backward concept”.

If cardio training doesn’t transfer well from one activity to another – and it only ‘kicks’ in because of muscular demand – why don’t we program muscular activity first – in order to create a cardiovascular response.

Quality advice from the New York Times on how to burn fat with heavy resistance training.

The Bottom Line:

For better tone, try fewer reps and more challenging weights.