I don’t know about you, but I finally got tired of all those long tedious hours at the gym, day-after-day with little or no results, and started looking for ways to lose weight fast.

I totally understand that adding lean body mass to my body performs miracles for the metabolic process and losing body fat, not to mention providing a whole host of other benefits that allow me to live a life as healthy as I can.

Unfortunately, I recently learned that when I was doing my weight training or resistance training I was investing way too much time with each exercise, and yet, I wasn’t working hard enough. Consequently, I wasn’t burning a lot of fat. Apparently, it was highly unlikely that I would burn much body fat working out like this.

I recently discovered what 3 key factors I needed to apply for training lean muscle and strength. I had no idea how important they were and as a result, I completely ignored them. What are they? The individual three elements are:

-How hard you perform the exercise based on your current condition.

-How much and how often you perform any given exercise

-How much the demand progresses or increases from session to session

These three vital factors, intensity, volume and frequency, and progression are the three principles you must know to burn fat faster!

Most often, weight training goes on far too long and is carried out way too many times each week. It’s unfortunate, but most people weight train the same way they do their aerobic exercising. But these two forms of exercises are on opposite ends of the exercise spectrum. We regrettably treat weight training exactly the same as we do the supposed fat burning aerobic fitness exercises even though these types of exercises vary greatly. Actually, they’re complete opposites.

So how are they different? Well, in terms of our three key principles the intensity of the aerobic exercise should be low to moderate, the volume and frequency of each exercise should be high and there is little or no progression involved. Contrast that with weight training and you will find that anaerobic exercising must be performed at an intensity that is rather high, but lower in volume and frequency. There must also be a progression with each of these exercises in order to get maximum effectiveness from them.

No quantity of weight lifting that you do at a low or moderate intensity will give you significant benefit to your muscle and strength building except in the first few days of beginning your workout sessions. When we look at this from the 50,000 foot level, it boils down to a combination of ample intensity, combined with your trying to add to the number of reps in your exercise, and the quantity of the weight you use in each workout routine. This will help your body transform into the ultimate fat burning machine!

In addition, you must give consideration to other components when putting together an efficient and effective workout routine designed to maximize your exercise session yet minimize the time and effort you spend during your workout. For example, another important component of your workout is the period of relaxation following it. It is this period of relaxation following each session that is essential for getting stronger and more muscular.

Here is what happens when one handles weight resistance training properly. You are actually developing small injuries for your muscles and you need to allow the body to repair itself, after which it will overcompensate and build upon the muscle mass you already have. It is very important that you not exercise again before this repair process has a chance to finalize. Otherwise, the results, if any, are lackluster at best.

So getting the proper amount of relaxation between workouts is essential. Normally, this means a minimum rest period of one to three full days following your weight training workouts.

Now upon hearing the notion that one must add muscle to create the maximum fat burning circumstances, lots of people, especially women, start to think, “I am trying to lose weight and the last thing I want is to get bigger!” But this kind of thinking is unfortunate. Not only are they unlikely to lose the weight, but they are passing up on these body fat burning benefits as a result.

The truth is, most males and nearly all females do not have the required genetic traits which will cause them to look bulky or excessively-developed to other people by creating such gains in muscle mass. These are traits such as the make-up of their muscle fiber, their levels of testosterone, muscle belly length and so on. Read the rest of this entry »