Losing weight and burning fat is one of the most difficult tasks to achieve at the gym. Everyone’s body is different, reacting better to some forms of training than others and shedding weight faster or slower than the average person. Bar the obvious weight-loss methods of eating healthy and consuming less calories than you burn through exercise there is a whole world of tips, tricks, diets and methods that are meant to help you get shot of that excess fat, but it’s difficult to know which of these is likely to work for you.
The four tips we’ve listed below promote creativity within your workout, ensuring that you’re working at close to your maximum for strength and development, forcing more muscle damage and making your body work harder to make repairs and burning fat at the same time.
1. Decrease your rest period time
Stop flicking through your mp3 player during your rest period! A 2011 study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, found that EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption) was higher when the subjects only had one minute’s rest between sets as opposed to three minutes. This ensures that your body is constantly working at a high level, boosting your metabolism and continually burning fat both during and after exercise.
2. Incorporate more total work
Most people will set themselves a reps limit when they’re training. So once the idea that 10 reps is the maximum most people will stop at 10, even if they feel physically able to do a few more reps. Next time you find yourself in this situation don’t stop, push yourself to do those few more reps as just doing one or two more per set could give you the equivalent of 15 to 20 more per workout, the same as two extra sets in the same amount of time. This is another way of boosting your bodies metabolic rate by making it work harder.
3. Concentrate on your body’s biggest muscles
A 2011 study showed that subjects burned around 75% more total calories from 5 sets of leg presses VS 5 sets of chest flies. The reasoning behind this is a simple one: the more muscle mass that you use. The more calories you are likely to burn. If your goal is to lose fat to get leaner, you’re better off including all lower-body exercises in your routine like deadlifts, lunges and squats, rather than doing any split routines.
4. Increase your movement between sets
When you are alternating between two exercises why not try adding a third exercise during your rest period, one that will not exhaust the muscles that you’re already working on. Try a set of jumping jacks or jump squats between two upper-body exercises for example. If you’re smashing through a heavy lower-body exercise for straight sets, try adding a core exercise such as leg raises between your sets of squats.
