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

As a member of a popular fitness center for a few years, I noticed countless others frustrated with their fat burning exercise routines and eating practices, working so hard and long but with virtually no improvement to show for it.

Several of my own friends and relatives would mention this new program or product they had just shelled out cash for that was the answer to their fat loss or fitness goals. They were so excited about it and couldn’t wait to get started.

Then, a few weeks later, the same happy-go-lucky people that were once jumping with joy about their new plan to burn fat and get a new body became downright discouraged. It was hard to watch.

I’d ask them how their fat burning plan was working and they’d tell me that it seemed pretty good at first, but they didn’t get the results they were expecting or they felt were promised. They quickly became tired of following the daily workouts and found following the strict eating guidelines almost maddening at times. So they hopped onto the next plan.

Even worse, they became so frustrated with following these so-called exercise gurus’ programs, that they fell even deeper into unhealthy eating habits once they stopped the program. Binging became their only form of satisfaction. Forget about maximum fat burning, and talk about moving in the wrong direction.

What’s worse is that all of these people were following the typically recommended exercise and fad diets that were all the rage. They were doing what everyone else was doing to burn fat fast.

After speaking with many of these friends and inquiring about their exercise routines, I noticed one common theme that kept popping up in our discussions…they were focused on the short term…their approach was wrong. They weren’t thinking of lifelong health and fitness, but instead they were thinking about burning fat and getting in shape for “swimsuit season”.

More specifically, they were also performing their exercise in a less than optimal manner. And then I noticed this with many others at the fitness center I worked out in. They just seemed to lack the fire or intensity in their fat burning workouts which I knew could turn their programs from nothing to something literally overnight.

But you know, you can hardly blame them, and you certainly shouldn’t blame yourself if you’ve fallen into the cycle of fad exercise and diet programs. We all want to achieve what we know in our hearts we’re capable of so badly, and that’s why we’re such easy prey to this “get fit quick” mentality.

Most people are approaching health and fitness in the exact opposite way that they should be, and they’re not going to burn fat because of it. If you continually think of using exercise and nutrition as ways to lose a couple of pounds, or get in shape for summer, you’re going to be disappointed with your results.

If you think of exercise, nutrition, and rest as separate things, you’re going to be disappointed with your fat burning and fitness results. If you think you need to spend hours a week in the gym or adhere to some strange unnatural eating strategy, you’re going to be disappointed with your results.

What all of these approaches will do, is put you into the fat burning and fitness cycle of confusion that so many are stuck in these days. If instead, you choose to forget what you thought you knew, and start off with the right approach, the approach that focuses on making changes in your lifestyle long term, you’ll instantly improve your results by 1000%.

When your approach includes combining proper exercise that takes very little of your time, nutrition the way nature intended you to eat that is simple to understand and follow, and the rest and recovery that is vital to lifelong vitality and energy, you’ll experience an awakening of both body and mind. Plus you’ll burn more fat, too.

If you choose the path most often taken by those looking to improve upon them selves, you’ll most likely end up like most of them. Confused, frustrated, unhappy, burnt out, injured, sick, or worse. Did I mention very uhappy with their fat burning progress as well?

Instead, you can choose to embrace a lifestyle that includes brief, progressive, and intense resistance training, eating a diet full of nutrient rich foods, drinking tons of water, and getting plenty of quality sleep and rest. But know that when you do so, you’ll be joining the select few who understand that one of the true secrets to life long fat burning and fitness is not found on a fad diet or in a bottle on the shelf of your local health store.

Claim your free copy of Rob Poulos’s “7 Secrets Of Permanent Fat Loss & Fitness” at his website: http://www.fatburningfurnace.com

Rob Poulos is a celebrated fitness author, fat loss expert, and the founder and CEO of Zero to Hero Fitness. Rob created the world’s most efficient method for fast and permanent fat loss with his “Fat Burning Furnace” system to help those looking to put an end to restrictive fad diets, long boring cardio workouts, and the need for super-human willpower for good.

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One of the biggest issues a lot of people experience today is how to lose fat fast.  And which are the best exercises to burn fat.

Life is super fast paced for most people these days.

Ever forgotten your cell/mobile phone?

You know how lost you’ve felt by not being able to contact people immediately? Yet only 20 years ago nobody but the ‘Gordon Gekko’ crowd had them.

So without a doubt society has changed.  It’s been known for years that we have been changing out lifestyle habits and progressively getting more and sedentary and less active.  We now have the ability to fast forward through commercials on TV…the world has changed and so has our demand for everything ‘now’.

Unfortunately I haven’t invented a pill yet that can give you all the results you want, let alone instant results (either way I’d probably be the richest person on earth if I did come up with it…hmm!).

The old school way that most people adopt is to try running to lose weight.  Unfortunately in the super fast paced world I just outlined, that’s not the most effective way of burn fat off.

So, what is the best fat burning exercise?

Well you have to challenge yourself.  Staying within easy limits will lead to small improvements initially but you’ll soon stop changing….that’s the problem with say running to lose weight, especially if time is short and you can’t increase the time you workout for, first up it works but soon your body becomes more efficient and burns less fat….dull hey!

So with society moving quickly, and with most people lacking the time for 90 minute sessions every day.  What is the answer?

Well it’s not the traditional fat loss method of running as mentioned above, but instead using the latest research from the past few decades and designing programs that utilise these scientific principles.

The science has taught us that you can get incredible results in very time efficient bouts of exercise as long as they are structured correctly.  We’ve come to understand that if fat burning exercises and the  fat burning processes can be manipulated in the right way, they can bring about amazing success very quickly.

Now let me just re state that.  I ‘m not saying that someone who can only do a limited amount of exercise could get as fast results as someone who can dedicate 90 minutes a day to exercise, but the relative gains from the extra time don’t warrant it if you are time poor.

Recent studies have reported that just 20 minute sessions enabled the participants to burn fat off at 9X faster speeds when compared to people who had done 45 minutes (steady, no change of pace).

By using these types of methods you can get almost as fast results in just 30 minutes a day as you can in one and a half hours a day.  The important thing is having a plan and consistently implementing that plan to burn fat off.

The plan needs to include a system that will challenge you, even if you do start really easily.  The best exercises to burn fat are those which require a lot of muscle to be used.

With the correct program that is progressive and coupled with a health dietary plan, fat loss can definitely be achieved in as little as 30 minute sessions.

As part of the 2009 Twelve Days of Fitness campaign I’m giving away my entire 5 week fat loss system for free.  Visit http://www.12daysoffitness.com to sign up for what will be the biggest give away in its three year history.

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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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