Fat Burning 101

As a trainer, I'm always being asked about weight loss. Most of the people I work with are really concerned with losing the extra fat around the midsection. They always want to know what abdominal exercises they can do to tone the tummy. Well, guess what, abdominal exercises aren't going to burn the fat that covers your abs. You can do abdominal exercises all day long, and have great toned abs, but won't know it until you burn that layer of fat covering them.

The popular theory lately has been that you can burn just as much fat doing resistance training as you can doing cardio. Yes, it is true that you can burn more calories with resistance training, but it comes from muscle glycogen, not fat. Yes, if you do massive amounts of weight training, you will lean up, but it is because of the muscle you build burning the extra calories at rest, not because weight training burns fat. It's no secret that if you burn more calories then you take in, then you will lose weight, but if you want to burn that extra fat that you are carrying around in a more timely manner, you have to do cardio as well as resistance exercise. The resistance exercise will build muscle to burn extra calories at rest, and the cardio will burn the extra fat you are carrying around now.

 A lot of people don't want to do cardio. I admit it, I don't like cardio. I prefer to see my muscles moving, working, lifting weights. However, I know that I lose the extra layer of fatty insulation by doing cardio, not to mention the benefits to the heart of doing cardio. So, how to get the best cardio workout in the shortest amount of time so I don't have to do as much of the type of training I don't like doing? Simple, do the weight training first!

 Anaerobic exercise, such as weight training, only burns muscle glycogen while you work out. Aerobic exercise, on the other hand will burn muscle glycogen until those stores are depleted, then go into fat burning. If you do your anaerobic exercises first, your glycogen stores will already be depleted so when you do your aerobic exercise, you will go straight into fat burning. For example, if you just do 60 minutes of cardio, you'll probably burn glycogen for the first thirty minutes and only burn fat for 30 minutes. If you were to replace that first 30 minutes of cardio with 30 minutes of resistance training, then you will get the benefits of weight training (building muscle to burn extra calories at rest), and you will get the full 30 minutes of fat burning from your cardio workout.

 So, if you want to lose fat, and maintain a lean body, it takes a combination of resistance training and cardiovascular exercise! Just remember, don't work the same body part two days in a row so your muscles have time to recover.

 

My Before Pictures

    

 

My After Pictures (12 weeks later)