Hi everybody, Kris Stokes here from Custom Fitness, your personal trainer in Amarillo, Texas. I wanted to talk to you today about how to lose fat faster by minimizing your cardio. If you have questions or would like some tips that could help you accomplish your goals in your time, give us a call: 806-322-3188.
I’m betting if you have fat you’d like to have gone, you’ve been spending some time on the elliptical or the crosstrainers, possibly doing some running or walking; those kinds of things. Most of the time we spend hours and hours everyday doing cardio, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t see changes from that. Pay attention to that, next time you go in the gym; watch those people that you see come in and out of the gym everyday and see what changes you see in their bodies. Most of the time over weeks or months you don’t see a huge change in their bodies if they are doing hours of cardio.
Cardio a great thing, I’m not trying to knock that at all, we do need the cardiorespiratory exercises to strengthen our hearts to help us stay healthy and fit. We’re kind of going about it the wrong way. Today, I’m not going to take you out and show you, but I will talk to you about how to emphasize your fat-burning ability during your cardio sessions.
The reason that we’re not seeing those results that we want to is that our cardio sessions are going so long that our body is no longer using fat for fuel. As a personal trainer in Amarillo for almost two decades I have seen people be so motivated only to become dejected by doing the same cardio for hours at a time and having nothing to show for it. A lot of us can go 45 minutes an hour on those kinds of things some people even longer in order to burn fat, but is it really? Actually it is working against yourself. I say that because you start to store fat at that point of plateaued cardio rather than burning it. Prolonged cardio makes your body think that you’re in an emergency situation. Hmm, well if extended cardio doesn’t burn fat, what will?
In order to burn the fat we have to change the way they were thinking — kind of revamp our open-mindedness, if you will, and allow ourselves to try something new. When you try something new, doing it once isn’t going to show you any results. You’re going to need to do it repeatedly, aim for about 3 to 4 weeks of it, and you’ll start to see some payoff from your effort. You’ll start of feel results immediately, on the scale you’ll start to see some differences pretty quick, but actually noticing them in the mirror does take a little bit longer.
To lose fat faster what we want to do is to change our idea of how to do cardio. This change can be applied to any cardio based exercise (i.e. running, elliptical, swimming, rowing, jumping rope, etc.). With your cardio of choice in mind, you are going to do it for 12 minutes. That’s right, 12 minutes; no more hours. At the end of those 12 minutes we are going to alternate between intervals. First you need to warm up. It may or may not be part of your 12 minutes, maybe just kind of get the body to move for 2-5 minutes to get everything going and get it ready. That 12 minutes of cardio we’re going to call that Sprint training. I know that we’re kind of sounds scary some people get a little put off by the word sprinting and brings back bad memories of highschool track or some gym room trauma; this is not that kind of thing.
The goal of a sprint is to get our heart rate up higher than it is when we are resting so that that way than our body can burn the fat that it needs to.
I’ll explain the process:
- Warm up for 2-5 minutes
12 minutes of Cardio Sprint
- Now this is not a sprint the whole time. Remember earlier I mentioned intervals? What you are going to do is go for 2 minutes at a pace where you can talk but not sing. That point is when you’ve at the right cardio push, your right endurance level. is it you could talk with not sing during your cardio.
- At the end of the 2 minutes we are going to go into a 10-second Sprint. That’s as fast as you can go 150% effort. (yeah we passed 110% effort a loong time ago). You should be able to ,at that point, get out only one or two words like, “help me!” but nothing else. You should be breathing hard enough you wouldn’t be able to carry on conversation or sing a song. You’re really putting all your effort into that 10 second sprints; going all in, as hard as you can go. ***Those sprints don’t ever go above 20 seconds. If you can go longer, you are not giving your 150%.***
- Lather, rinse, repeat. We go right back into another 2 minutes of being able to talk, but not sing. We can slow it down but not to a lolly gag walk and then we speed it back up again, go another 10 seconds, go back down to the 2 minutes go back up to the 10 seconds.
Throughout that 12 minute sprint your body will go into what is called: Fight or Flight mode. You may have heard of that. Where your hormones are going to respond a little different than in a relaxed environment. So Fight or Flight mode is kind of like your body now thinks that there’s a mountain lion running after you and you’ve got to get away. In order to do that you have to burn off as much fuel as you can so your body can move faster. As you’re burning that fuel that’s going to cause you burn more fat. The fuel burning will actually persist a little bit longer after your cardio session than what your normal cardio would. Your fat burning ability is going to be elevated for the next 12 to 15 hours due to the fact that you were doing the intervals of cardio. Add in some great metabolic resistance training with that and I can actually raise your metabolism for the next 36 hours.
We’re going to talk a little bit more on resistance training tomorrow so feel free to tune in for that for more info. In the meantime, if you want to know how to lose fat faster, you’re ready to get rid of that extra fat, and you want to have some help with that, that’s what my team and I do here. We are Custom Fitness, we are personal trainers, health coaches, and nutrition coaches. We work with you on exercise, nutrition, and lifestyle modifications. Right now through the end of June — which is coming up pretty quick– we are offering half off your first month. If you, or anybody you know, is interested in getting that kind of help, actually getting to your goals, starting to see results within, say, the first two weeks (which is what a majority of our clients are seeing) by eating real food, doing real exercise, and learning some new habits, we would love to help you out. Our phone number is 806-322-3188 or drop us an e-mail at info@customfitness.biz. We look forward to being YOUR personal trainers in Amarillo. Have a great day.