Here we are in second month of this project – Achieving and Maintaining Lifelong Leanness.

You are now getting enough sleep to wake up without the alarm and not feel the late day drag. Your food choices have minimized or eliminated empty calories like alcohol, sugary and processed foods, fried fast food, sodas, cakes, cookies and candy, and emphasized instead produce and protein. Your workouts are consistently centered on short, high-intensity blocks and, finally, you’re drinking enough water to keep your urine pale to clear throughout the day.

If the above statements are not true for you, recommit to the areas in which you still have opportunity. If it’s two or less, move on to the next step below. If it’s three or more, work on those and proceed with today’s step when the paragraph above describes your habits, more or less.

Strength Training for Fat Loss

To get the biggest bang-for-buck regarding fat loss while working your muscles, train mostly large muscle groups with compound movements (push-ups, lunges and lat pull downs all qualify). Compound movements engage two or more joints and multiple supporting and stabilizing muscles, requiring more effort and a higher calorie burn. They also increase your overall strength more than isolating exercises (like hamstring curls and lateral shoulder raises), raising your capacity to burn even more calories going forward. Even better? Combining multiple movements (like squats with shoulder presses or biceps curls with reverse lunges).

Also effective is interspersing short, very high intensity cardio circuits of two minutes or less between each strength set.

Finally, doing full-body muscle endurance work actually blends the best of cardio and strength work to create a blistering calorie burn and heavy volume for the muscles. We have clients do pushes, pulls and presses while pulling a weighted tire (loaded with dumbbells) across the parking lot or do string sets of one rep each that repeat several times before a break, then repeat the block 2-3 times.

This type of training is very demanding and a solid base must be established before moving to this level of difficulty. But when you’re ready, it’s a fat-burning furnace.

Learn more about how to get and stay in great shape? Contact Dan at Tri Valley Trainer