Is your routine lacking something??? Maybe you aren’t getting the results that you think you should? Here are 4 tips complements of “Muscle and Fitness For Her.”
1 Warm up before you lift.
If you can find just 10 extra minutes before you lift to do a moderate warm-up on a treadmill, stationary bike or other form of cardio equipment, you’ll be getting a leg up on fat-burning, as research shows that you can burn up to 150 additional calories by doing a brief cardio session before weight training.2 Go heavy.
Common gym-speak says you should do light weight and high reps to burn more calories and fat. Not necessarily. Studies have shown that training with heavy weight (doing sets of around 6 reps) will keep your metabolism higher and elevated for longer after the workout
, both of which will result in greater fat-burning potential.
3 Extend your sets.
Burning more calories via lifting means squeezing in more work in roughly the same amount of time. This is where techniques like drop sets and rest-pauses come into play. Say you’re doing a set of six reps to failure on a given exercise. After the sixth rep, either decrease the weight and immediately rep out to failure again (drop set) or rest 15-20 seconds and do a couple more reps with the same weight (rest-pause). Extending sets in this manner will help burn more calories and fat.
To avoid overtraining, though, limit such techniques to the last set of each exercise.4 Do intervals.
Any cardio is better than none, but intervals, where you alternate intense bursts or sprints with less intense jogging or walking, have been shown to burn more fat than cardio sessions done at a constant slow to moderate intensity. Try going for 20-25 minutes at roughly a 1:1 ratio of intense to slow/moderate intervals (i.e., sprint for a minute, walk for a minute and keep repeating).
Adria Ali
(CES, PES, CPT, BS)
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