I just read an interesting article by Men’s Fitness called 101 Ways to Lose Your Gut.

Some highlights:

Mix up your movements. When you lift, perform supersets in which you alternate between sets of lower-body and upper-body exercises. That way, your lower body rests while your upper body is working. “This allows you to work your muscles maximally with very little downtime between sets for a faster, more effective workout,” says Craig Ballantyne, C.S.C.S.

Hit the weights. If you’re lazy, it’s not as bad as you think—just 10 minutes a day of lifting, three days a week, will help. Harvard research shows that 30 minutes of weight training per week has a greater reduction on waist size than almost any other variable.

Have breakfast every day. Research from Harvard and Boston’s Children’s Hospital shows that obesity rates are 35%-50% lower in people who eat breakfast regularly, compared with folks who don’t. Nutritionists believe a.m. meals help regulate insulin levels and hunger, so you’re less likely to overeat throughout the reminder of the day.

Do sprint intervals. Interspersing short, all-out sprints with brief periods of rest is the most effective form of cardio for fat loss, says Stankowski. Try a 2-to-1 “work-to-rest” ratio. That is, sprint two times longer than you rest. So if you run a 150-yard sprint—a good distance to start with—in 20 seconds, rest 10 seconds, then repeat 3-7 times.

And my personal favourite:

Get off your ass. Do every exercise standing instead of sitting. “You’ll expend up to 30% more calories,” says Joe Stankowski, C.P.T. The solution for the bench press? Dips.

I received the following question today via email:

Q: What’s up with being down on cardio? It seems like a relatively new position for trainers, and I’m wondering what’s behind it. I saw recently that someone was debunking the large metabolic burn rate previously quoted for muscle versus fat tissue, that the burn rate isn’t so high (but still higher than non-muscular tissue). Just wanting to understand.

I responded directly to the person who emailed me that question, but I figured I’d also post my answer here as well:

A: I’ve personally always hated cardio. I only learned in the past year or so that it’s completely unnecessary for fat loss, so since I already hated it to begin with, knowing how useless it is only makes me even more passionately against it.

The reason myself and plenty of other personal trainers believe that cardio is pointless has nothing to do with the metabolic rate of muscle vs. fat. The reason is that long slow cardio doesn’t burn as many calories as circuit training and high-intensity interval training (in half the time as you’d spend doing cardio). And there’s virtually no post workout calorie burn (EPOC) from doing long slow cardio, but circuit training and HIIT produce an elevated metabolism for up to 48 hours post workout. That’s the main reason that personal trainers who’ve stayed current in their training methodologies are against cardio.

I wrote a short article for Craig Ballantyne’s blog on how to ensure that you get results from your fat-burning workouts.

If, in that past, you’ve struggled to workout regularly, and you’re trying to get yourself into a solid routine of consistent exercise, I want you to focus on answering the following question:

What type of exercise will you enjoy enough to consistently stick to your workout program, and put forth a genuine effort each and every time you workout?

There’s no shortage of fat loss articles on the Internet. Check out any random fitness website or blog and you’ll find countless articles about how you can achieve the fat-burning results that seem to elude so many people.

But something is missing from most of those fat loss articles. Very few of them address the most important factor to achieving fat loss. Sure, they all cover exercise, nutrition, motivation, planning, etc, but that’s not rocket science. Most people will see great results if they just improve their diet a bit and perform a few basic weekly workouts.

But those other articles almost always leave out the most critical factor to achieving results:

You must enjoy your workout program otherwise you’ll never stick to it with any amount of consistency. And if you don’t stick to your workout program and exercise consistently, it doesn’t matter how effective the program is, you will not see any substantial results from it.

My entire philosophy as a personal trainer is geared towards ensuring that my clients enjoy their workouts. Because if you enjoy your workouts, you’ll not only exercise more consistently, but you’ll also exercise more intensely when you do work out. And exercise consistency and intensity are two of the most important components to a results focussed fat-loss program.

So rather than trying to determine how you can improve your exercise consistency and raise the intensity so that you see the results you’re striving towards, simply focus on answering the following question:

What type of exercise will you enjoy enough to consistently stick to your workout program, and put forth a genuine effort each and every time you workout?

Discover the answer to that question, and you’ll find that the other important components will also fall into place.

Perhaps home workouts are the answer for you. What’s great about home workouts is that by saving yourself the travel time to and from your gym (as well as packing your gym bag, changing, waiting for equipment, etc), you’ll find that you can do your entire home workout in roughly the same amount of time that it would take you just to travel to and from your local health club. So convenience is a huge part of enjoying your home workouts. When you realize how convenient and simple home workouts are, you’ll be less inclined to associate negative thoughts with your exercise program.

And don’t be fooled into believing that you need to invest in a lot of expensive home gym equipment in order to have effective home workouts. In order to have a balanced total-body home workout, all you need are some simple and inexpensive pieces of portable exercise equipment.

If you’re trying to find an answer to the question of how to enjoy your workouts, check out my YouTube channel for a variety of home exercise videos showing how simple and fun home workouts can be.

If you enjoy the videos, don’t forget to subscribe to my channel and that way you’ll be kept up to date with all my new videos that show you how to burn fat at home with minimal equipment, and hopefully have a lot of fun in the process.

A basic overview of circuit training:

Circuit training is a great workout that incorporates intervals of both strength training and aerobic exercises. Since there is little to no rest in between sets you are able to get an effective workout in less time.

Great post by Craig Ballanytne on his success secrets for fat loss.

Fat loss is easy once you understand how hard it is, …and it’s hard if you think it is easy.

Fantastic article by Robert Adams about common fitness training mistakes:

Many women and men train using too often just their preferred machines, which limits their range of motion and does not work their muscles in an efficient and effective manner. Ultimately this can limit the engagement of small stabilizer muscles that give you maximum benefit throughout your fitness training program.

Great article by Deborah L. Mullen:

Contrary to what many people think, strength training is as important, maybe more important to successful fat loss than aerobic exercise. The reason lies in the amount of calories that are burned when you aren’t exercising. Depending on the intensity and your weight, an aerobic workout (walking, cycling, stairstepping) will burn approximately 300 calories per hour. If the exercise is strenuous enough (which is unlikely in the beginning exerciser) the resting metabolic rate (RMR) will be elevated temporarily up to a few hours afterwards. Compare this to strength training which elevates the RMR permanently. The RMR accounts for 60 to 75 percent of your daily calorie expenditure, so even a modest increase will help burn off more fat.

Craig Ballantyne, one of the world’s foremost fat loss experts, posted an article today on his Men’s Health blog about three great bodyweight exercises for fat loss.

Bodyweight exercises help you burn fat shockingly fast, without any fancy equipment. Here are 3 kick-butt bodyweight exercises you can do anytime, anywhere to burn fat, stay energized, and avoid overeating.

I see too many people at the gym sitting on the recumbent exercise bike, reading the latest issue of Us Weekly, and barely peddling fast enough to power the LED display. If your goal is fat loss, and you’re able to read a magazine while you’re exercising, you’re not working hard enough (not even close).

High-intensity interval training (HIIT) involves a series of maximum intensity efforts followed by low intensity recovery periods. A study at Laval University in Quebec, Canada suggests that HIIT trainees lost 9-times more fat than those who performed traditional aerobic cardio sessions (i.e. 20-60 minutes of long boring cardio).

Example HIIT workout on the recumbent exercise bike:

• Begin with a light 3-minute warm-up at 60 RPM
• Increase the intensity to 100+ RPM for 30 seconds
• Reduce the intensity to 70 RPM for 1 minute
• Repeat that interval system 3 to 6 more times
• Finish with a 3-minute cool-down at 60 RPM

Depending on your fitness level, you may need to adjust the difficulty by either increasing/reducing the length of the work/rest periods, increasing/reducing the intensity of the max efforts by peddling faster/slower, or raising/lowering the resistance on the exercise bike. The goal during the work period is to work as hard as possible, so that by the time the rest period arrives, you have no choice but to slow down so that you can recover and allow your heart rate to come down.

If you’re not seeing results from the time you spend in the gym, it’s possible that you’re doing too much low-intensity cardio, and not enough high-intensity interval training.

For high-intensity workout programs in Vancouver that produce real results, check out our outdoor boot camp program.