Whether you want to lose weight or tone your body up you need to know every available technique to speed up the fat burning process. First get the very basic idea.You can do hundreds of crunches per day for your abs but you will never get a six-pack or a flat rock hard ab if you don't lose your extra body fat. For reducing extra fat you have to do both cardio and weight training together. Against the vox populi I want to emphasize that doing cardio exercises alone are not the most effective way to lose extra weight. Many websites and fitness pro demand that cardio exercises are the only way lose extra weight. But it’s not true. People can't be more wrong when they say cardio exercise is the only available weapon to fight the excess body fat. It is true that 20 minute cardio exercise will make you lose more calories than a 20 minute weight training session. However the story is not ending here itself! It is more important how much calorie you are burning throughout the day rather than you are burning calorie in a 60 minute workout session.
How does weight training play an important role here? To speedup calorie burning you need to boost your metabolic rate; with higher metabolic rate you will burn more calories and lose extra fat much faster.
It’s all about metabolism!
Metabolism signifies the rate at which the body uses energy for doing all sort of functionalities to sustain life, plus all energy we need for day to day activity and digesting our food. So you see it can be divided in 3 parts.
- First is RMR or resting metabolic rate. This is the energy we need to continue all basic functionalities needed to sustain our life, and that adds up to 65-70 % of total metabolism.
- Second is energy we need to do our daily physical activities like walking, working, exercise etc. This adds up to 20-25 % of total metabolism.
- Finally the energy we need to digest our food; that is called thermic effect of food. That is around 10 % of total metabolism.
As you can see the RMR is having the highest contribution towards the total metabolism you should focus more in increasing RMR to increase metabolism rate. After doing 20/30 minutes of cardio exercise the RMR remains high for next couple of hours. Whereas after doing effective weight training with mostly multi-joint workouts the RMR remains high for the next 1/2 days. An intense training session cause breakdown of your muscle tissue and later on during rest hours recovery process happens for the muscle tissue. Your RMR appears to increase during this recovery process. Also during the recovery process of your muscle, every time your muscle tends to become stronger and bigger increasing your lean body mass which in turns again will boost the overall metabolic rate. To the female readers let me tell you please don't be afraid to do weight training; you won't get bulked up with huge muscles. The female hormone doesn't support that. Instead you will get a lean, toned, sexy figure. So don't just limit your endeavor to cardio exercise, rather you combine both cardio exercise and weight training for maximizing your effort to lose extra body fat.
Effective workout strategy!
- Instead of doing long boring cardio exercise with steady pace, do the exercise varying the pace from very fast to slow movement. Say for example if you are running in a trade mill instead of running in 9 km/hr speed for 10 minutes, split the total session stated below.
- Initially warm up for 3 minute walking in 6-7km/hr speed
- Run for 1 minute in 14 km/hr speed
- Walk 2 minute slowly in 4 km/hr speed
- Run for 1 minute in 16 km/hr speed
- Walk 2 minute slowly in 4 km/hr speed
- Run for 1 minute in 18 km/hr speed
- For weight training try to do mostly multi-joint exercise which target on more muscle group than single joint exercise. This way more muscles you will work on and later on recovery process for more muscles will definitely increase RMR higher unlike after performing single joint workout. Some multi-joint exercises are squats, lunges, dead lift, dips, bench press, pull ups, chin ups.
Now with accurate knowledge about workout strategies you are ready to get the maximum out of your effort. Check out the workouts technique to discover the correct way of performing the different exercises.