This originally started as a single blog post but as with anything we do, in order to make it as understandable as possible we thought it better to break it down into a few manageable posts. It also means you can go off and work on these individually and by the end of the series you’ll have pretty much everything you need to get you results.
Though we’ve done similar posts before, we’re going to delve a little deeper into each subject in this mini-series.
Firstly, there’s been a wave of change over the last few years towards weight training for fat loss, and away from endless plugging away on treadmills and cross trainers, and for good reason. People are realising that there’s a difference between fat loss and weight loss, and strength training plays an important role in that. This is not to discredit cardio work at all, that’s still an important element of health, but from a fat loss perspective and time:reward ratios there’s a more efficient way of changing your body shape.
If your goal is fat loss then your primary objective ought to be reducing your bodyfat % while maintaining your current level of muscle, or in some beginner cases even increasing it.
Though we’ve done similar posts before, we’re going to delve a little deeper into each subject in this mini-series.
Firstly, there’s been a wave of change over the last few years towards weight training for fat loss, and away from endless plugging away on treadmills and cross trainers, and for good reason. People are realising that there’s a difference between fat loss and weight loss, and strength training plays an important role in that. This is not to discredit cardio work at all, that’s still an important element of health, but from a fat loss perspective and time:reward ratios there’s a more efficient way of changing your body shape.
If your goal is fat loss then your primary objective ought to be reducing your bodyfat % while maintaining your current level of muscle, or in some beginner cases even increasing it.
(Image from Borge Fagerli www.borgefagerli.com)
With this principle in mind the primary stimulus for muscle growth and/or maintenance is progressive high tension overload (being able to move more weight over time). This effectively boils down to technicalities in protein synthesis and protein breakdown, of which we’re not going to delve into until a future article, suffice to say your objective here is to move more weight.
Weight training for both sexes allows you to manipulate your body composition (the amount of body fat you carry vs the amount of lean mass you carry)
As with nutrition principles though, most people seem to think they need to go to extremes to find results, whereas the truth is that more quality and application will always trump aimlessly drilling yourself into the ground.
We’ll continue this with part two on technique in a few days.
Weight training for both sexes allows you to manipulate your body composition (the amount of body fat you carry vs the amount of lean mass you carry)
As with nutrition principles though, most people seem to think they need to go to extremes to find results, whereas the truth is that more quality and application will always trump aimlessly drilling yourself into the ground.
We’ll continue this with part two on technique in a few days.
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