There are many different ways to achieve fat burning and muscle toning with your workouts. The tone or definition of your musculature depends heavily on your body fat percentage, so diet is an important component of any fat-burning program. Moreover, you can immediately increase the fat-burning potential of any workout by increasing the training frequency, decreasing rest times between sets and doing more cardiovascular exercise.
High-Rep POF Training
"Xtreme Lean" recommends positions of flexion, in which you train each muscle for three distinct stimuli: max force, stretch and contraction. For any muscle group, you would start with a compound movement, after one or two light warm-ups, by doing one or two sets of eight to 10 repetitions. For biceps, for example, you would do one or two sets of bar curls. Immediately proceed to a contraction exercise like concentration curls and do one 20-rep set. Next, you do one more set of bar curls, only this time you lower the weight to a six-second count on every repetition. Then choose a stretch exercise for the target muscle group, such as incline dumbbell curls for biceps and do one set to exhaustion for about 12 reps. Finish the muscle group off with one double drop-set of the contraction movement. For the biceps example, you do concentration curls again, with a weight you can do for about eight reps, immediately "drop" or lower the weight and do six more reps and then reduce the weight by 50 percent and grind out 15 reps to finish your workout.
Pre-Exhaustion Training
Pre-exhaustion training involves breaking one of the big rules of weight lifting. However, it can be very effective in the short-term for shocking your body and burning fat. Usually you want to do compound exercises first, followed by isolation exercises. In this example, you would do the exact opposite, pre-exhausting the target muscle with the isolation movement, in super-set fashion. Super-sets mean doing a set of one exercise and then immediately doing a set of another exercise with minimal rest. As an example, for the chest you would do a set of eight to 12 reps of dumbbell flyes and then do a set of eight to 12 reps on the bench press, resting 30 seconds or less between the two. That makes one full set, and you can do up to three per exercise. A full workout may include three super-sets per target muscle group. This training is very efficient and allows you to hit muscles from many different angles in a short amount of time.
Circuit Training
Circuit training comes highly recommended because it offers the best of both resistance training and aerobic exercise. These workouts train the whole body with several exercises back to back and very little rest between them. For example, you might do leg presses, leg extensions, leg curls, standing calf raises, pull-ups, bench presses, machine flyes, shoulder presses, triceps pushdowns and bar curls for eight to 15 reps per set. You would proceed from one exercise to the next as quickly as possible without resting. Once you have completed one set of each exercise, that makes one circuit. The circuit can then be repeated as is or you can choose different exercises. In all, you may complete two or three exercises in one workout. If you want to try circuit training, be sure to hit the gym at a low volume hour because it can be difficult to keep up the required pace if you constantly have to wait for the needed equipment.
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