Tips For Creating A Fat Loss Work Out

Last week we discussed goals directed to muscle building, this week I’d like to focus on fat loss. I wanted to focus on muscle building first to emphasize the fact that if you are new to exercise and looking to lose weight you will still want to incorporate muscle building, and perhaps add more cardio. We need to have muscle on our bodies to burn fat, and having more muscle will help our bodies burn more at rest too. This circuit training type of workout shown today can still be a good place to begin from, but keep in mind the importance of proper nutrition. This is still key when it comes to our fitness goals whether it be to build or to lose. When it comes to losing it is preferred to be in a caloric deficit on top of your workout routine, meaning you are expending more calories than you are taking in. This shouldn’t be a drastic decrease and varies from person to person depending on fitness experience and daily activity levels.

For weight loss we want to do more cardio and tracking our caloric intake can also be a big help here with apps like myfitesspal. As mentioned for muscle building eating enough protein to build muscle is important, during a fat loss phase it’s still just as important to keep this rule so we maintain our hard earned muscle.

I’ll show a basic framework of what a fat loss workout would look like, also keeping in mind everyones goals and what works for their bodies are different so your workout may still look different than this, this is just a framework I have created that tends to be successful.

We will still want to do our warmup cardio ad exercise’s ad start with a compound lift. When you are not focusing on muscle building you can do more with dumbbells rather than the barbell as there will be less single sided training. Using the dumbbells rather than the bar will still keep a little bit of need for individual stabilization between sides.

Focusing on our compound lifts with a bit lower weights the muscle building and higher reps will help maintain our muscle mass and burn high amounts of calories at the same time. The more muscles we use at once the better, think about how much harder a squat to overhead press is versus a bicep curl.

Of course we still want to make sure we include our core and stretch portions as they are still major factors in seeing progress. Training our core will help work on our posture, something we need when we are incorporating more cardio. Things like running or cycling can be tough on the postural muscles and make us want to slouch while we go, practising good posture in our exercises will train our bodies muscle memory to learn this position during all movements.

Here are an example of a “leg day” and a full upper body workout based on this structuring:

A reminder that these are just examples! I’m not recommending these to anyone and there are TONS of different combinations that will be better from person to person… a lot of things can get out when focusing on fat loss so when someone has specific areas they need to target that is still kept in mind. One of the fun things about exercising and why I love being a Personal Trainer is just putting different workouts together for different bodies. Its kind of fun!

Hope that helps!

Happy exercising,

Robyn