Are you looking to burn body fat?
Have you been training consistently but still not seeing the results you were hoping for?
It is wedding season, summer seems to be upon us and you may already be incorporating weight training in your daily routine!
If you are currently training in the gym 3,4 or even 5 times a week you were probably expecting to see body fat fall off and be replaced by a lean, muscular physique!
Whilst this is the goal, it may not be happening for you right now!
But don’t worry!
I have 5 amazing training solutions you can apply to your programme today, to help you take your fat loss goal to the next level!
Here are 5 Training Solutions to optimise your progress in the gym!
- Intention!
You have probably been told that it is more than enough to move a weight from A to B to see a result in the gym.
‘Just lift heavy things, move more and you will lose fat…’
I call this the bro science manifesto. These same guys come back a month later blaming a bad back, a torn rotator cuff or any number of obscure injuries for their lack of progress… then they go and do it again.
Don’t be that bro… Train with intention!
Train with the focus on contracting your muscle!
Ask yourself before every rep… what is this exercise meant to do?
If I am performing a chest press, where should I feel it?
If I am feeling it in my shoulders or triceps then what do I need to change?
This was key for Minash in his journey, check out his progress:
2. Intuition!
Your mind will play tricks on you when it comes to training for fat loss. If you have had a long day, your stressed out, your calories have dropped a little or you’ve done a little extra cardio, you will benefit from logging your sessions!
There is simply no way that you will remember every rep of every set and every time you increased or decreased the weight through multiple sessions per week. When you feel a little low, tired or slightly demotivated, you better believe that will impact your perceived ability to lift a weight!
Over time, consistently misremembering this information can have a negative impact on the overall weight lifted in each muscle group, which, as you may have guessed, leads to a decrease in lean muscle and reduction of the total work you perform through a session!
I use the Rep Count App (link here) to ensure I never miss a rep, weight or comment like ‘that last rep could have been better’. This leads to weekly micro progressions… an article for another time!
3. Intensity!
Training with intensity is often misunderstood. Training with intensity does not mean all out failure on every rep of every set, grunting, slamming weights around and dripping in sweat…
Training for an hour to make your body feel like you’ve been hit by a brick wall is also not the meaning…
So what does it refer to?
It actually refers to a measuring the weight you use and developing an understanding of what this is compared to your 1 rep max…
Is this applicable?
Probably not right now, but it does lead to an important point! This being the rate of perceived exertion!
If you are monitoring the weights you are using and the reps, it’s a good time track how easy or difficult this felt on a scale of 1-10 (1 being the easiest, 10 being incredibly hard).
This scale will help you recognise wasted sets and eliminate them from your training sessions!
Wasted sets are the one that you know you had a lot more to give on!
For example, if you are performing working sets of 30kg dumbells on a chest press, you get 10 reps and you record that as a working set, knowing full well you had at least another 5-10 reps in you left to give, you just wasted a set.
What I would recommend in this circumstance is classing this as a warm up set and increasing the load for your next working set!
4. Implementation!
I wrote a detailed guide on how to set up your training plan in the Lean Muscle Blueprint, if you didn’t check this out then here is the article CLICK HERE https://www.juggysidhu.com/blog/how-to-increase-lean-muscle-part-1
Implement this strategy for setting up your training plan to increase fat loss and improve muscle gain!
There are few ways you can make your sets more demanding and more focused in the ‘metabolic stress’ segment of your session…
Rest pauses- use a brief resting period of 5-10s during a set if you feel your form is beginning to slip or you are about to reach failure. Extend the set by using up to 2 rest pauses!
1 and ½ Reps- This works amazingly on lower body movements like a static lunge or even a hack squat. With the lunge as an example, you will lower to the floor, press half way up, the lower to the floor again before driving up for a full rep! Try this… its brutal!
Structure completely changed the way Parm thought about training!
5. Increasing!
The fat loss style training I see regularly involves a mixture of… increasing reps, increasing sets, increasing quantity and increasing cardio!
The desire to constantly increase everything you are doing is born of an unrealistic goal or a very short sighted approach.
When you are pushing up cardio and creating a calorie deficit through food intake, your ability to repair and recover will be impacted.
This is right about the time that most injuries will occur, or you burn out!
So, take a measured approach to everything you do! If you can train three days a week in the gym, perform cardio and increase your non exercise activities, like walking, gardening and cleaning and lose 2lbs then do it!
If you train 7 times a week and still only lose 2lbs, then you have essentially just wasted a lot longer in the gym, reduced your ability to recover and made the effects of the cardio and calorie deficit a lot harder on yourself!
There is so much more to go through for training for fat loss!!! I cannot wait to share this with you in my membership area launching this Summer! If you are interested in learning more about this, contact me HERE and add 'ACADEMY' to your message!
