Tag Archive | "burn fat"

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Fat Burning Exercises

Posted on 22 November 2009 by Personal Fitness

Fat burning exercises, or exercises that burn fat while you do them tend to be a low intensity long duration cardio type exercises. I recommend you not do these because they do not promote building muscle or burning fat after the exercise is over.

Standard cardio exercises like walking, only burn fat calories while performing the exercise. The better fat burning exercises to do would be interval training, where you have short bursts of moderate to maximum effort followed by longer active rest periods. For instance you could sprint for 1 minute and then walk for 3 minutes and repeat this 4 minute interval 5 times for 20 minutes.

The advantages are; shorter workout time, burn more calories (in the form of carbohydrates), build muscle, increase endurance and burn fat calories for the next 24 – 48 hours. Your body will respond by using it’s fat stores to replace the burned fuel for the next day or so. By increasing your muscle mass you can burn more calories while your sitting around.

If you want to look like a sprinter then train like one. If you want that marathoner look then go for the long duration low intensity cardio.

I think the best fat burning, use every muscle in your body, weight lifting exercise there is, is the clean & jerk. If you only have time to do one exercise in the gym, this is it. Check this out. Your moving a weight from the floor to overhead, 7 or 8 feet. Any other lift you’re only moving the weight a couple of feet, if that. Plus you are using about every push and pull muscle in your body.

Try 3 sets of a weight you can do about 10 reps with, or go for time and try three 60 second rounds and see how many reps you can get in each round. Either way this is one killer workout.

For those of you who don’t know what clean and jerks are, it’s sort of like a deadlift, an upright row and a squat press all rolled into one. There is a technique to doing olympic clean & jerks, and I’ll leave that to those guys. My form is not perfect, but I do them for reps, not competition.

To burn fat, stick with the big compound exercises that work the whole body. Clean & Jerks, squats, deadlifts, and to a lesser degree, pullups, dips and benches. For instructions on these exercises, and others, check out, the No Nonsense Muscle Building program by Vince Delmonte.

For a total body workout that requires a minimum of equipment and time and a maximum of full body muscle recruitment, I recommend, Turbulence Training. The only equipment that you have to have for body weight exercises is your body, so you don’t even need to belong to a gym. Craig Ballantyne will set you up with workout routines that focus mainly, but not entirely, on bodyweight exercises to get you moving, and burning calories and building muscle, without having to join a gym or buying a lot of equipment. Turbulence Training will show you that bodyweight exercises are the best fat burning exercises.

If you’re not eating a healthy diet with a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, lean protein and healthy fats, none of your exercise will ever show on your body. You can put down a thousand calories in a few minutes, but you’ll never burn them off that fast. Don’t try to out train a bad diet, you’ll lose every time.

Try out those clean and jerks for 3 sets of 10 and see how you feel and know that all that work might have burned 50 – 100 calories. You’ll think twice about what you shove down your gullet.

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How To Build Lean Muscle

Posted on 17 November 2009 by Personal Fitness

How to build lean muscle simply comes down to how much protein and calories to ingest. It’s a known fact that you need protein to grow muscles and that when you weight-train, you build lean muscle at the expense of fatty tissue.

You have to eat right to lose the body fat and replace it with muscle. But here’s something else to consider, if you’re not eating right, then you have no reason to be in the gym; you’re actually harming your body if you do.

Here is what you need to do to build lean muscle – keep a daily food journal that counts the fat, protein and carbohydrate calories you are consuming each day.

The minute you’ve done this, you can now establish a strategy to prevent you from gaining fat while increasing your muscle mass at the same time. The second thing you need to do when learning how to build lean muscle is to determine what your daily protein intake needs to be.

If you weigh 165 lbs, and you want to weigh 185 lbs, then you need to eat like someone who weighs 185 lbs, and the key to that is consuming 1.5 your body weight (or goal body weight) in grams of protein.

So the guy who weighs 165 lbs, but who wants to weigh 185 lbs needs to consume 225 g A DAY to reach that weight and build that lean muscle mass.

225 g of protein is a lot, but not if you’re used to eating that much food. If you eat 5 to 6 meals a day and take in 45 grams of protein in each one, you’ll get to your goal. You will need to maintain your eating level to preserve the weight. Once you’re eating right, you‘ll need to establish a weight-training routine that gradually builds as you graduate up the scales.

Of course, eating right also means eating smart and by this, we mean selecting menu items that are high in protein, vitamins & minerals, especially Omega-3s (good fat) and low in bad fat. To get the required dosage every day, you might want to try taking a quality protein shake although chicken, tuna and other fishes are also good options.

Carbs, you can take in all the carbs you want just as long as you’re getting the protein that you need, because you’ll be burning lots of carb calories during the workouts which requires an intense cardio routine.

There are lots of healthy carbs on the grocery store shelves, like fruit, vegetables, nuts, and grains, so don’t think that carbs are solely from fastfood. Carbs from junk foods are basically useless, meaning, you will have to get yours from other sources such as fruits and vegetables.

Your goal will be to stay off the junk food, eat the necessary amount of protein everyday and consume quality carbs and fat later.

Now you know the key factors involved in how to build lean muscle mass, don’t forget to take a multi-vitamin every day while you’re working out. This will help you push yourself forward by refilling all the minerals and nutrients you’ve used.

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