Important Exercise Tweaks To Make Your Weight Loss Faster & Easier

While there are a plethora of health reasons that most inactive people should start and stick with an exercise program, most do it to lose weight.  From a lifestyle standpoint, they have probably tried various exercise programs and routines in the past but they just never saw the benefit of staying with it, particularly if their main focus was to lose weight and they didn’t achieve it.

And that’s because the exercise and fitness industry has failed to educate the public that exercise just isn’t some physical activity to do to burn a couple of hundred calories.  In fact, perhaps the biggest mistake most people make who want to use exercise as part of their plan to lose weight is to perform exercise that’s not really designed specifically for losing weight!

What?  You mean that any exercise I decide to do won’t necessarily help me lose weight?

Yes, that is exactly correct.  Not all exercise is designed to help you lose weight.

An Example Will Explain The Truth

Consider what happens when you decide you want to lose weight and join a local gym.  If you’re going it alone, you’ll likely approach your exercise using a treadmill, bike, elliptical, or some other gizmo and base it on the following premise:  The more I exercise, the more calories I’ll burn and weight I’ll lose.

 And that’s where everything goes wrong.  If you sit down and do the math, here’s what you’ll discover:

1. Exercise on the treadmill for 30 minutes;
2. Burn approximately 300 calories during that 30 minutes… if you push it hard enough;
3. Perform this activity 5 times per week.

Now for the math…

You’ve spent 5 sessions of 30 minutes each exercising on the treadmill.  That’s 5 X 300 calories used per session equal to a total of 1,500 calories burned.  So how much weight did you use?

Well, given that there are 3,500 calories in one pound of stored fat, that means that if all of the calories used during your exercise came from stored body fat, you lost slightly less than a half of a pound… for the entire week!

Of course, in addition to hopefully losing that half of a pound or less, you have to take the following factors into consideration:

1. It’s possible that only a percentage of the calories used during your exercise session came from your stored body fat.  In fact, it is quite well-known that during that 30 minutes of exercise each day, less than 50% of the calories used are from the “stuff” you’re trying to get rid of.  Anytime that you do just about any physical activity, you are pulling and using energy to perform from both carbohydrate (glycogen in your muscles) and fat (if your metabolism is efficient enough to transport it out of storage).
2. You might not know if you ate more or less during those 5 days.  If you ate more, then you probably won’t see much of a change on the scale at the end of the week.  If you purposely ate less, then you might, but if you ate too much less than what is required for your metabolism to run properly, most of that drop on the scale could be from water weight and not fat.
3. Your metabolism may not be working as efficiently as it should.  In other words, in this example, we’re assuming that your metabolism, your internal energy burning engine, is working at full throttle.  But, what most people don’t realize is that your metabolism secretly begins to slowdown starting at around the age of 30. If you’re already experiencing a resistance to losing weight, it could very well be your metabolism needs a tune-up.
4. While 2 ½ hours of exercise in a week may not sound like much, it could be overwhelming to your body in the beginning because it simply isn’t used to this amount of sudden, structured physical activity.  In fact, studies show that a new exerciser’s metabolism can slow down in the beginning because the mind-body see this new activity as a “threat” and can shift your physiology into “preservation mode” in which your body will hold onto stored body fat as a form of protection.

Reaching “Threshold” In Your Exercise Can Change Everything

Did you know that while you are sitting there reading this article, your body is actually converting some of your stored calories (fat) into useable energy so that your body can sustain all of your vital functions and you can continue to sit and read without dropping over and falling asleep?

You see, if your resting metabolism is optimized and efficient, it can easily pull fat from your stored fat cells, into the liver, and convert it to high-octane fuel.  It is a VERY POWERFUL mechanism that almost no one talks about… until lately.  That’s because the word “metabolism” is the new buzzword when it comes to losing weight and keeping it off since it is at the heart of the deeper hidden mechanisms that control just about every process that goes on in your body.

So if you’re going to exercise to help yourself lose weight, then you should do it in a way that not only obeys the laws of how your metabolism works, but is designed specifically for losing body fat.

Over 25 years of owning and operating a Metabolic Weight Loss & Exercise Center allowed us to develop and prove the perfect exercise approach for faster and easier weight loss.  Here are some of the tweaks you can use to shift your exercise (and metabolism) into a fat-burning beast:  

1. Perform exercise that challenges ALL of your muscles.  Walking, jogging, or even running on a treadmill will only fatigue half the muscles in your body.  This goes for using a bike or an elliptical too.  Instead, perform strength-building exercises against resistance.  You don’t have to become a bodybuilder to reap the rewards of this exercise approach.  If you don’t know how to do this, hire a personal trainer at your local gym and ask them to show you the ropes.
2. Use weight resistance machines to start.  Most brand name weight training machines are easy and safe to use, and will allow you to focus on the basic movements without having to worry about balancing the weight or performing it incorrectly.
3. Perform “compound movements” that work multiple muscle groups simultaneously.  Again, using weight resistance machines will allow you to perform exercises that require you use up to 5 muscle groups together to perform each repetition.  Some examples include chest press, seated row, and leg press.
4. Move the resistance in “slow motion”.  Slowing down the raising and lowering of the weight enables you to exercise all of the muscles fibers in each muscle.  Why does that matter?  Because you can get more out of the exercise session and do less.  Begin by slowly lifting the weight at a count of 4 seconds up, and then lowering the weight at a count of 4 seconds down.  Once you master this cadence of 4/4, then move to the next slower cadence or lifting and lowering at a speed of 7/7.  And finally, to achieve perfect performance, see if you can move the weight even slower at a cadence of 10/10.
5. Use a resistance (weight) that will allow you to reach “threshold” at around 2 minutes.  It’s not about how many repeititons you perform, it’s all about how long the muscles you’re exercising stay under tension. So reps don’t count, time does. Irrespective of how fast you decide to lift and lower the weight, you should pick a weight that you think will be almost impossible for you to complete a full repetition… at the 2-minute mark.  It will take some time to achieve the mental, emotional, and even physical discipline to perform this style of resistance training, but don’t worry… the rewards are tremendous.

Why It Works

It shifts your body’s ability to burn more stored body fat during the other 23 ½ hours of your day that you are NOT exercising by taking advantage of the sciency phenomenon called Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption (EPOC) in which your body naturally draws in more oxygen to burn stored body fat to help bring it back to “resting balance”.

In fact, with Threshold Metabolic Training, your body’s metabolism…

• Burns more calories DURING your exercise – 66% MORE calories (vs. traditional exercise).
• Burns more calories AFTER your exercise – 484% MORE calories (vs. traditional exercise).
• Results in LESS time time – BETTER results in less than half the time of traditional exercise!!
• Burns Fat MUCH Better – Threshold Metabolic Training has been proven to trim off 13% more total body fat while traditional workouts can actually force you to gain body fat.

The bottom line is that Threshold Metabolic Training is FAR superior at burning fat, shaping muscle and losing weight.  Why would you want to exercise any other way?