As you go about your workout program, one thing that you need to be looking at if your goal is primarily to lose body fat and firm up your muscles is intensity. While getting to the gym on a regular basis is going to be important for bringing out fat burning in the body. It’s the intensity that you workout with that really has the strongest influence on how much fat you are able to burn during each and every session, as well as after the session is completed.
Your workout intensity is going to directly influence something known as EPOC, which stands for excess post-exercise oxygen consumption and can use up a number of calories even after the workout is completed.
Those who are able to generate a high amount of EPOC will burn fat for hours after coming out of the gym, thus their overall rates of fat loss tend to be much more accelerated than those who don’t. Intensity is what will help you maximize this, so it definitely does need to be a primary focus.
Let’s get you started with five fresh ideas for how you can boost the intensity of your workout program, so that you can experience this enhanced fat burning effect for quick fat loss.
1. Triset Your Exercises
The first way to dramatically rev up your rate of fat burning as you go about the workout session is to perform trisets with your exercise selection.
What this entails is selecting three different movements and pairing them right back to back so that you aren’t taking any rest in between.
Typically you’ll want to perform an upper body exercise, a lower body exercise, and then one either type that is more isolation in nature when doing your trisets.
This gives you the best chances of maintaining a heavier weight despite the shorter rest periods. So for example, you might perform a squat followed by a chest press followed by a leg extension. Or, you could perform a bent over row followed by a lunge followed by a bicep curl.
Alternative between upper and lower body moves like this allows one area of the body to rest while the other is being worked, so it will reduce the accumulation of muscular fatigue, ensuring that you can give it your all with each exercise that you complete during that triset.
Once all three exercises in the triset are completed, then you’ll want to take a rest break of around one to two minutes before completing your second set of that triset.
2. Perform Timed Reps
The next way to kick-start your fat burning results is to perform timed reps. Time reps are where you’re going to go for a total exercise time rather than a total number of reps performed.
For example, you may always aim to hit twelve reps in the exercise that you completed, but now, you might try and complete the exercise for 45 or 60 seconds total.
If something happens and you reach a state of maximum fatigue before that 60 seconds is up, you should then rest for as long as you need to until you can carry on. The goal however is to continually keep doing that exercise until the very last second of the 60 second time period.
This is going to really cause your body to bring about a higher level of fatigue and lactic acid build-up, which will cause you to burn more calories during the recovery process. As an added benefit, you’ll also get cardiovascular improvements from this style of workout, so it could mean that you’ll have to do less overall cardio training as well.
3. Drop Set
The next technique that can help you accelerate your rate of fat burning in the body is the drop set technique. With this technique you’re going to choose one exercise, perform it until all your designated reps are completed and then drop the weight by about five pounds and then perform another set at that new, lower weight.
Once you’ve finished with that weight, you’ll drop it by five more pounds further, and then continue on with another lower weight to finish up the drop set.
So essentially with this technique you’ll perform three sets in one. With each set your muscles will have reached a new level of fatigue so even though you are continuing on with a lower weight, you’ll still be challenging yourself to a new higher level.
Again, due to the fact that you are working with such a high amount of fatigue, this increases the total number of calories that you’ll burn once the session is over.
4. Make Sure You’re Doing Compound Lifts
Compound lifts are another must that you need to be making sure you incorporate into your workout routine if you want to burn fat optimally. Compound lifts are going to hit the largest number of muscle fibers in the body and will therefore produce the greatest calorie burn both while you’re doing them as well as after the workout is completed.
To put this into perspective, think about which would have the greatest metabolic response on the body – getting up to walk across the room to go into the kitchen or tapping your pen against the desk?
Obviously getting up to go across the room would because you will use more muscles to complete the activity. The same thing goes with compound lifts. Choose them over isolation movements as they’ll always have you burning up a much higher total number of calories and at the end of the day, the number of calories you burn is what will determine whether you lose body fat or not.
The top compound movements to perform include squats, deadlifts, lunges, leg press, step-ups, shoulder press, bench press, bent over rows, and pull-ups.
5. Keep Your Rest Periods Short
Finally, the last way to increase your total rate of fat burning taking place is to make sure that you keep your rest periods short overall. If you aren’t going to implement any of the above techniques but do want to maintain straight sets during your workout, focus on keeping the rest periods short and snappy. 30-45 seconds is the most you should aim for, often trying to reduce it even further if possible.
This will force your body to work harder in that short time span, producing a higher metabolic response from the session. Just do keep in mind that at no point should short rest periods mean that you sacrifice proper form as that will just lead to injury and a lack of results as well.
So there you have five great ways that you can improve your rate of fat burning in your workout program and see an accelerated rate of results. Interchange these over time so that you’re always doing something new to provoke the change that you’re looking for with your workout performance and progress.
keeping rest periods short is one of the best ways to increase endurance and intensity!