The secret to losing weight without cardio
Hours and hours of cardiovascular exercises are often combined with dieting in an effort to lose weight and sculpt that lean body you desire.
But there’s an easier way to lose weight than spending much of your time each week doing cardio and dieting. By concentrating on the two workout secrets below, you’ll sculpt a lean, healthy body that you can maintain over time.
1. Workouts should include high volume and short rest periods.
If your main goal is to lose weight, then you want to work on increasing your resting metabolic rate (RMR). This is the number of calories your body burns at rest. Your RMR makes up the majority of your daily calorie burn. If you can increase your lean muscle mass through weight lifting, then you can increase the number of calories you burn at rest.
If you want to increase your lean muscle mass, focus your weight work on compound (multi-joint) exercises like bench presses, pull-ups, squats, and deadlifts.
Further increase your fat burning by keeping your rest periods between sets to 60 seconds or less and your rep range between 8 and 12 reps per set. This will increase the buildup of lactic acid in your body, which will lead to the release of growth hormone. The release of growth hormone will help build lean muscle mass and burn fat.
Mix it up every once in a while and use 3-6 reps per set to build strength or use 13-20 reps for even more metabolic burn. Control your lifting rhythm with a 3-6 second lowering (concentric phase) and an explosive lift (eccentric phase).
2. Use sprint sessions to lose weight fast.
Running builds up lactic acid in the body in a similar way to lifting weights with short rest periods. The accumulation of lactic acid comes from the maximum muscle application during exercise. It is this buildup of lactic acid that leads to the release of growth hormone, which helps burn fat. Growth hormone is lipolytic, which means it increases the breakdown of fats and metabolizes glucose and amino acids.
Running also builds lean muscle through this all-out effort. The key is to train at or near your maximum effort (80-90% of maximum effort) for the best fat loss results. Start by training at a 1 to 4 work to rest ratio and slowly build up to a 1 to 1 work to rest ratio. For example, do 12:15 second sprints with 1:00 rest between sprints for a total workout of 15 minutes.
Avoid traditional aerobic cardio. Cardio aerobic exercises actually prepare your body to use the least amount of energy to do the most work. Look at any world class sprinter. They are well built and slim. On the other hand, distance runners are lean, without much muscle mass. You’ll see much better weight loss results with three 20-minute sprint workouts each week than with three-hour jogging or cycling sessions.
These two secrets will take your weight loss to the next level fast. In fact, I’ve seen people lose a lot of weight simply by incorporating short rest periods between sets into their weight training.
If you’re serious about losing weight for good, you’ll want to check out the book, The truth about ripped abs. This book is packed with resistance-training exercises, high-intensity cardio training (think sprinting and HIIT training), and nutrition tips that are guaranteed to burn off body fat and keep it off.