How to turn your body into a fat burning machine

Short answer – a faster metabolism! Don’t diet to keep your metabolism from slowing down. Do strength training to build muscle and increase metabolism. Do high intensity training to get fitter and increase metabolism. Get enough sleep so that your body can recover properly. Eat for performance so that you have energy to exercise and enough protein for your body to recover after a training session. Don’t forget to also eat for pleasure so that you don’t feel deprived.

It's because we lose muscle as we get older and muscle loss slows down your metabolism. When you have a slow metabolism, you burn fat slower so that’s why you can’t keep on eating the way you have when you were younger without putting on the extra kilos.  When do we start to age? A steady decline takes place around the age of thirty, but the effects of this decline only become obvious around the age of fifty.  If you want to slow it down you need to build muscle to have a fast metabolism. 

Exercise at a higher intensity (above 80% effort level), by overloading your cardio-vascular system, stimulates your body to create physiological changes to speed up your metabolism and burn fat more effectively during exercise and at rest. You will burn fat while doing low intensity exercises but it won’t stimulate your body to get better, speed up your metabolism and burn fat long after your workout.  Your respiratory quotient also changes so your body has a greater ability to burn fat. 

Strength training overloads your muscles and if you build muscle your metabolism speeds up which means you burn fat faster and for longer, even at rest. Lifting heavy weights stimulate physiological changes in your body so that it works better. Your calories burnt per day can increase with 10%. Your muscles, bones and joints get stronger. Your bone mineral density increases which can prevent or reverse osteoporosis. It can also prevent or reverse diabetes 2 and obesity. It’s the best medicine!

1. Stimulate (overload) the body

2. Recover (rest and nutrition)

3. Super compensate (increase strength and growth)

4. Repeat and progressively overload (continually increase the intensity applied to the body as the body adapts to previous load)

What physiologically needs to recover?

Gains are made whilst resting and recovering between training sessions.

The systems (muscular, nervous and hormonal) that are placed under stress need adequate and quality recovery from a high intensity weight training.

If you do compound exercises you can work all the muscles in your body with as little as 3 exercises.

You only need three types of compound exercises:

LOWER BODY -  Squats, Lunges, Deadlifts - works your front legs (quads), back legs (hamstrings), glutes, calves, core. 

UPPER BODY PUSH - Bench Press, Pushups, Dips - works your chest, shoulders, back arms (triceps), core.

UPPER BODY PULL - Lat Pulldown, Seated Row, Single Arm Rows, Pullups - works your back, shoulders, front arms (biceps) and Core. 

Balanced, healthy food in moderation. Eat more fruit and veggies. Eat one small piece of your favourite thing every day to avoid deprivation.  Watch fat intake. Junk food in moderation. Drink one litre of fluid for every 25kgs of bodyweight plus 1 litre for every hour of exercise. Alcohol in moderation. If fat loss is your goal, couple of Alcohol-Free-Days. Sugar in moderation. Eat more fibre so that you visit the loo at least once a day. Eat low GI to control blood glucose levels. Move more!!!