When it comes to health and fitness, your primary goal is probably fat reduction. If you’re like a lot of individuals out there then you’re in the pursuit of an improved physique and in order to achieve it you’re going to need to reduce the level of overall fat in your body.
There’s a massive amount of advice out there about what you should do when it comes to training for fat loss, but what is the most effective approach?
The Regular Approach & Its Effectiveness
Let’s start with what approach is normally taken and how effective this is. In almost every gym around the world, gym-goers are ‘ticking the box’ by attending the gym and spending hours upon hours using cardiovascular equipment, while usually watching TV overhead.
The intensity of these workouts are more than often extremely low and if not then the person is so familiar with what they are doing that the stimulus on the body – the actual part where is understands and will actually burn that fat – is basically zero. Not good at all.
There’s the idea that this approach to fat reduction/loss is optimal and is one of the most engrained training myths in the fitness industry, and a massive reason why at MPT we change things up for every new training period: it’s important that your body sees variety.
The Correct Exercises
For your body to use fat for energy it’s essential that the correct exercise and exertion is placed on your body. The typical approach of using steady, moderate cardio training is not necessarily useless, but it’s far from what would be considered both optimal and effective. You don’t want to be wasting your time on the most drawn out approach, so that means taking the optimal route towards your weight loss goals.
If you’re doing cardiovascular exercise to lose weight then its always going to lose effectiveness after a few sessions because your body has a natural ability to adapt to the training.
Our bodies are a highly intelligent organisms that look to perform an activity using as little energy as possible. When we perform the same mundane moderate intensity cardio workouts each session, our bodies become incredibly effective at doing that regime over and over again, and that means the energy used decreases – yep, not great.
When aiming to reduce body fat we want the total opposite to happen – we want the body to want to use extra stored fat as its energy. That means we should be looking for our exercises approach to ramp up the metabolism and trigger responses in the body to use up vast amounts of energy.
What Are The Best Approaches?
There are many different methods to more effectively reduce body fat, but these tend to get drowned out in the louder voice of the cardio junkies and a lack of knowledge as well as people wanting to take the easy route are two key reasons why we don’t see it more often.
Plodding along on the treadmill for half an hour, or cycling along nonchalantly while you watch Taylor Swift get her grove one, is a comfortable, steady state cardio that you will like but it won’t help you get very fat with your goal.
What work? Intense cardio that requires sometimes near maximum effort. There are literally dozens of effective approaches to fat loss training. One of the most effective is the use of German Body Composition Training, a method that involves using a super-set approach by pairing together a lower and upper body exercise.
This leads to a great fat burning environment for the body by exciting the body’s lactic acid energy pathway. This, in turn, decreases blood pH levels and causes the brain to accelerate the use of fat as an energy source.
This leads to higher levels of growth hormones being released and causes, most importantly, for fat to be metabolised. Just because you lift weights it doesn’t mean you’re going to get big and it’s one of the best ways to lose that excess weight.
Simple German Body Composition programme
Below is a simple GBCT workout regime that you can use to effectively shed that excess weight.
(You should complete all of the A sets before moving onto the B sets, and the same for B to C sets.)
A1: deadlift – 8-10 reps, 3 sets, rest 30-45 seconds
A2: upright row – 8-10 reps, 3 sets, rest 30-45 seconds
B1: squat – 12-15 reps, 3 sets, rest 30-45 seconds
B2: dumbbell chest press – 10-12 reps, 3 sets, rest 30-45 seconds
C1: leg extensions – 15 reps, 3 sets, rest 30-45 seconds
C2: kneeling dumbbell rows – 10-12 per side, 3 sets, 30-45 seconds
It’s important that the weight you select allows you to complete the reps, but reaching a point of just below than your maximum effort.
