Getting the Biggest Fat Loss Bang for your Buck!

If you have been around me for a while, you know I’m not a big fan of calories in X calories out model out there, mostly due to the misleading nutritional parameters that some “weight loss” programs try to sell, standardizing calorie counting, etc. What I’m talking about here is how to generate a higher caloric burn to help you with fat loss.
 Thanks to the fantastic pros from Metabolic Effect (Jade Anthony Teta, Keoni Teta, Jill Coleman, Jillian Sarno Teta, Gary Leake), I learned the best way to help my clients. Nutrition is key and it has to be part of it to make it work, but for now we're going to restrict this talk here to the exercise part. Actually, more specifically to what happens AFTER you exercise. This is the BIGGEST bang for your buck, aka EPOC.

EPOC stands for excess post-exercise oxygen consumption. Here is a relatively simple way to understand EPOC.

After you exercise, your body consumes oxygen above resting level to go back to pre-exercise state, a rest state. That is part of an increase in your metabolism, represented by several chemical reactions in the body. Why would you want your body to use more oxygen after you finish exercising? Because your body burns calories to consume oxygen and it’s pretty nice to keep doing that even AFTER you are DONE exercising too, right? For every liter of oxygen consumed, approximately 5 calories are burned.

This is not a guess, it’s science. Elliot et al. (1988) did a study concluding that that lifting heavy weights DOES make you burn more calories during the after-burn period. This is how it was done. Think about 3 groups of people, doing the following:

1) Aerobic cycling - exercising for 40 minutes at 80% of max heart rate.

2) Circuit training – 4 sets of 8 different exercises, 15 repetitions  each time, at 50% 1RM, which is pretty much 50% of the maximum weight a person can lift when doing 1 repetition (with good form).

3) HEAVY Resistance training – 3 sets of 8 different exercises, doing from 3-8 repetitions at 80-90% of the maximum weight the person can lift with 1 repetition in good form.

At the end, group 3 with heavy resistance training burned the highest amount of calories during the “after-burn” period, from EPOC (Excess post-exercise oxygen consumption). So heavy weights topped the list burning 53 calories, circuit training came right behind with 51 and cycling burned 33.5 calories.

Other studies after this one reinforce that, also showing that the intensity of the resistance training plays a role on the EPOC behavior.

Higher intensity will generate greater after-burn.

When the Metabolic Effect concept jumps into this game, the gains are even bigger. Putting together the high intensity resistance (yes, with heavy weights!!), short bouts, and letting your body self-regulate when it’s time to rest, will “wake up” the fat burning hormones. How do you know you are on track? When your weights feel heavy, you feel the heat (yes, break a sweat!), you go breathless, and feel the burn! That’s where you want to be.

This is one of the reasons why sometimes people say I’m a “tough trainer”. But if you watch me training my clients, you won’t see me yelling all angry bootcamp style. The high intensity resistance training I teach my clients speaks for itself. They know they can go heavy and push hard, because they can choose when to rest, recharge and come back stronger. So they just do it. :) At the end, yes they say I “kicked their butts”, but we all know they did it themselves, they owned their workouts and did it all knowing that the results will keep coming. I’m just happy to “plead guilty” on that one. :)

If you need help, getting a personal trainer is one of the best investments you can make on yourself.

Now, I can give you the “toughest” workouts ever, but keep in mind that the ONLY way to be successful with fat loss is to combine the correct fat loss nutrition FOR YOU (!!) in addition to optimal exercising. You are unique and should always remember that when finding your way to a sustainable fat loss lifestyle. Find your purpose, set your goal and go for it.