This guest blog post was written by fitness and nutrition author Rob Poulos I have his permission to share it with you.

Ask ten people what type of exercise they should be doing to burn fat and fire up their metabolism and they’ll all probably tell you the same thing. They’ll tell you that you need to do 30-40 minutes of moderately-paced aerobic exercise on a treadmill, elliptical machine, stair climber, etc. for 3-5 times per week.

They’ll probably also tell you that more is better…4 times per week would be better than 3, and 5 times per week would be even better.

People will tell you this because that’s been and continues to be the mainstream recommendation for fat burning by many fitness professionals. Get in a certain target heart rate and stay at that heart rate for 30 minutes or so, several times per week. I am here to tell you there is a better way.

Sure, you’ll burn some calories while you’re running to nowhere on a treadmill, but you won’t make a complete physique transformation with this type of exercise alone.

In fact, this type of exercise can actually be counterproductive to burning fat. Here are just a couple of reasons:
Long duration, lower intensity aerobics calls upon your stored body fat for energy during the sessions. While this may sound good, this can actually cause your body to create more body fat in reserve after the workout is over to have ready for your next workout. Yikes!

What’s worse, this type of exercise when done frequently as typically suggested, trains your cardiovascular system to be efficient. Again, while this sounds good, your heart and lungs can actually reduce their capacity for work as they are getting more efficient at doing easy work (your long duration, low intensity aerobic workouts), which reduces their ability to handle stress.

This can lead to a host of other problems including higher change of heart attack. You are only working within your current aerobic capacity because you’re never challenging it to go beyond what it’s capable of. And anything that is easy will not yield results even close to what’s challenging for the body to accomplish.

Instead, you should be challenging the body to increase its capacity, so that it is stronger and able to deal with stress more easily. How is this done?

The fastest and most efficient way to rev up your metabolism, burn fat faster, and develop lifelong health and fitness is to add lean muscle to your body through resistance training – period. You want life changing results in the quickest possible time? Get stronger and build some muscle. When you add lean muscle to your body you’ll be literally turning your body into a fat burning machine!

Let’s say that you were eating the amount of calories that allow you to maintain your current bodyweight, but began to add lean muscle to your body through proper resistance training…you’ll need to use some of those calories you’re eating to feed the new muscle, creating a calorie deficit in your body.

In addition, when you stimulate your body with proper resistance training like I teach my students, the repair and growth process will call upon your stored body fat for energy. This calorie deficit combined with the repair and growth process will allow you to burn fat all day long, every day. You’ll even get these fat burning effects when you’re sitting around doing nothing at all.

Also, properly conducted resistance training actually increases your heart and lung’s capacity for work. By placing intense demands on your body, it is forced into being ready for anything you throw at it. This makes you more resistant to cardiovascular health problems that plague most people…even those that exercise with aerobics frequently.

And the beauty is I’ve discovered that you don’t have to spend much time working out to get the fat loss effects, and strength and muscle gains that will create this environment…you can actually get it done with 2 or 3 weekly workouts that last between 20 and 30 minutes, and even less time at an advanced level.

And it’s easy to make this type of exercise part of your life because of its efficiency…and it will help keep you lean and healthy for the rest of it…muscle is the stuff that fat burning furnaces are made of! That I can promise you.

For more info on Rob’s program **click here**

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This guest blog post was written by fitness and nutrition author Craig BallantyneI have his permission to share it with you.

If you are looking for a fat burning workout routine that gets you maximum results in minimum time, then you have come to the right place.

So many people are

– Eating well
– Exercising regularly
– but TICKED OFF they aren’t making progress.

That just means they haven’t found the right fat burning workout routine. Fortunately, I’ve spent over 16 years developing the best fat burning workout routine that you can do in the comfort of your own home.

First, let’s go over 3 common mistakes that are holding you back from burning fat.

1) Your perception of your nutrition "success" doesn’t match the reality of what, when, and how often you are eating. To learn the rules of fat loss, you need to read (scratch that, you need to
STUDY), Dr. Chris Mohr’s Fat Loss Nutrition Guidelines.

2) There is no variety in your training.

3) You need to up the intensity of your fat burning workout routine.

Let’s face it. Human beings like to stick to a routine. We don’t like change. We like our comfort zone – some more than others. But if there is no change in your workout from month to month, then your body will not change either.

That is why I insist on changing your workouts every 4 weeks as you do in the TT workouts.

You won’t succeed by doing the same thing over and over again. Would you get ahead at work by doing the same tasks you did as the first day on your job? No way. You have to take on more challenges.

With variety in your training, you will continue to apply "turbulence" to the muscle, and making your body use lots of energy (i.e. calories and fat) during the recovery period to repair the muscle and replenish the energy used. That will "jack up" your metabolism.

If your body is used to the training, the exercises, the sets, and the reps, it will give a "ho-hum" response and your metabolism will flat line. And that’s why you need to raise the intensity of the workout as well.

Slow, boring cardio doesn’t jack up the metabolism like intervals. And research has shown that 8 reps boost your post-workout metabolism more than 12 reps. So you have to safely add a little weight (try using 5% more weight with perfect form, of course), and decreasing the number of reps per set by 2. That’s a good place to start.

And if you’ve been doing a machine circuit, then stop, and give this sample free weight Turbulence Training workout a try.

Warm up with a bodyweight circuit. Do 8 reps per exercise, and go through the circuit twice.

Sample bodyweight circuit:

i) Bodyweight squat
ii) An easy pushup
iii) A bodyweight row if possible, if not, do stick-ups

Then do 20 minutes of total body strength training done in supersets.

ie.
1a) DB Squat
1b) DB Press

Do each exercise with a weight that allows only 8 reps. Do not rest between the squat and press. Rest 1 minute after the press. Repeat the superset 2 more times.

Next superset:

2a) Split Squat
2b) DB Row

Do each exercise with a weight that allows only 8 reps. Do not rest between the squat and press. Rest 1 minute after the press. Repeat the superset 2 more times.

Then you can move on to intervals:

Start with a 5 minute warm up.

Then do 6 intervals of 60 seconds at a "harder than normal cardio pace" with 60-90 seconds recovery (at the easiest pace possible).

Finish with a 5 minute cool down and then stretch tight muscles only.

That’s it. You are all done.

We don’t do slow cardio in the Turbulence Training fat burning workout routines. It does nothing for men or women who are short on time.

And of course, always train safe and don’t do anything you are not comfortable doing…but if you are fit and healthy, you can increase the intensity, change the variables, and burst through
your fat loss plateaus.

Sincerely,

Craig Ballantyne,

Author, Turbulence Training – The Fastest Fat Burning Workout Routines

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I was talking to a client the other day about there training and the need to increase the amount of work they are doing if they are going to continue to get the results they were looking for at the start.

Now there is a lot of really good things this person should be doing to there nutrition and eating plan in order to stimulate the body to burn fat all day but he likes his alcohol.

Now I’ve given him a ‘talking to’ about his drinking and hopefully some of it will have stuck. I only had to mention the ex client of mine who unfortunately died a couple of months ago due to kidney and liver failure – he really did ‘work hard, play hard’ – and unfortunately left a wife and two young children behind.

So to increase this clients metabolism so that he burns through fat for longer periods of time I have introduced some new, extra, training sessions that only last around 20 minutes.

I know a lot of you will be aghast, sat at your PCs and wondering whether or not I’ve just made a typo, but I assure you that in 20 mins you can do a lot to increase your fat loss potential.

Yes you don’t start burning fat for 15-25 mins after starting exercise, but the important distinction here is that you don’t ’start’ burning fat until you have moved it from the fat sites into the blood and too the muscles. However, you do continue burning fat after you finish the exercise and it is not the amount of fat you burn during the exercise that’s important but the amount you continue to burn afterwards.

This is the beauty of using short intense cardio interval sessions for fat loss.

You burn more in the 24 hours after than you would if you’d done slow cardio for an hour.

This well known, but misunderstood, phenomenon is called EPOC (Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption) and what it means is that if you cause a metabolic disturbance in your muscles (as you do during interval training) you will continue to burn up fat for at least the next 24 hours sometimes longer.

Lot’s of smart trainers use these tactic when writing and designing workout programs that get people results. Alwyn Cosgrove of www.coachcosgrove.com calls if ‘Afterburn Training’ and Craig Ballantyne refers to it as Turbulence Training . These are both great examples of how to use EPOC to benefit you the most.

I am currently using these exact techniques and tactics to try and shift some excess body fat I have accumulated recently. I am also using my new ‘Fat Burn In 30′ system because I am struggling with time and really want to get the best all day fat burn that I can.

Stay tuned for more of my ‘Fat Burn In 30′ workouts.

Remember, train hard, train smart, make every rep count.

Alex

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