PHOTO: FILE
As compiled from CNN News, ukaskmen.com, Men’s Fitness, Muscle & Fitness and Men’s Health magazine, follow these training tips to maximise your fat-burning results and you’ll be beaching with a six-pack in no time.
Lift before cardio
Your metabolism increases rapidly for extended periods, post-resistance training. By doing your cardio after lifting weights, you will increase your caloric burn by as much as 25 per cent. Also, doing cardio prior to lifting depletes your glycogen stores before you hit the weights, minimising any desired muscular strength and power gains. A University of Tokyo study, published in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, found that doing cardio after weight training burns more fat during the first 15 minutes of the cardio session than doing cardio before lifting.
Focus on high-intensity cardio
Adding bursts of high-intensity moves into your workout is a sure-fire metabolism booster, says Glenn Gaesser, director of the Kinesiology Program at the University of Virginia. Researchers at Laval University in Quebec also found that high-intensity interval training burns more fat than regular, consistent aerobic cardio. If you usually jog for 20 minutes, add a 30-second sprint every five minutes. If you’re not a runner, add a one-minute incline to your treadmill workout every five minutes. “Even if you just have 10 minutes for a quick workout, you can walk at a normal pace and then add in a 30-second bout of speed-walking every three minutes,” recommends Gaesser.
Circuit train
It’s definitely a cool social scene at your local gym but stop wasting time resting in between sets and chatting up with workout buddies. Do workouts in circuits and supersets. While a muscle group is recovering from a set, work another muscle group. For example, after doing a set of bicep barbell curls, hit the floor to do a set of lunges and then get back to doing your biceps without resting in between. If that’s too much strain on you, do ab crunches in between but don’t rest. This will keep your heart rate elevated for the entire workout and you’ll burn more calories overall. As few as 80 minutes a week of weight training done circuit style helps you lose belly fat, according to researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Go hard and make it quick
Staying at 80 per cent of your maximum heart rate for half an hour to 40 minutes can amp your metabolism for 19 hours afterward, research published in the journal Obesity notes. And doing a shorter workout at 75 per cent of your max aerobic capacity will give you a greater metabolic boost than sweating for an hour at 50 per cent of your heart rate, a Colorado State University reveals. Aim for shorter workouts that keep your heart racing. If you can sing a song or carry on a convo while working out, you’re doing it wrong since your heart rate isn’t amped up. Workout tip: Squats and deadlifts are key exercises that work the entire body by burning a tonne of calories in a short period of time.
Lift dumbbells... slowly
Strength training can help you trim major fat, research reveals and doing super-slow (versus normal speed) reps increases strength by 50 per cent. Plus, using dumbbells activates more muscle fibres than using machines, explains Gregory Haff, a professor in the exercise physiology department at West Virginia University. Also, slow down the negative stroke of your reps. At least, on one set of your big compound exercises, use a one-and-a-half-seconds up, four-to-six-seconds down tempo. Slow down the negative on every rep, such as, on bench presses, speed up, then lower it slowly on every rep. This creates more muscle trauma, and that’s a good thing for fat burning.
Lift heavy
Set one day a week, where you train with heavier weights than you usually use. When you lift heavier, your sets will be smaller but you’ll challenge your muscles, and the result is lean, strong muscle mass. While cardio may burn more calories during exercise, your beautiful lean muscle mass will burn more calories for 24 hours after your gym session. Also, muscular men burn fat tissue almost exclusively, while cardio fans, who don’t indulge in heavy lifting, burn both fat and some muscle, according to a University of Alabama study. Lifting will help cut the fat and make sure you tone up.
Have a carbohydrate strategy
For all those guys who are on high-protein diets and their post-workout meals look like shakes, carbs are not the enemy. Completely eliminating carbohydrate will surely help with weight loss but you’ll also be left feeling irritable and lethargic. “Carbs are essential for life as our brain and CNS require them continuously to work properly. Not consuming carbs will allow for any muscle mass to be metabolised to provide us with energy,” says trainer-dietician Tim McComsey. It all comes down to consuming them correctly, not cutting them completely. “To get lean, a balance of the right amount of carbs first thing in the morning and after workout is ideal,” says McComsey. By carbs, we don’t mean chocolate and gaajar ka halwa, but foods, such as whole grain bread, the occasional pasta and steamed rice.
Compiled By: Umnia Shahid
Published in The Express Tribune, March 28th, 2015.
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