Adjusting Weightlifting for Greater Fat Loss and Strength Building

Fitness can have two ultimate outcomes in terms of physical changes beyond obvious health benefits; gain muscles or lose fat.  When you first start working out both seem to occur simultaneously until you reach a point of fitness where additional fine tuning is necessary to continue to reach your goals. This is called the plateau and breaking that plateau requires messing up your routine.

The body adjusts and the last 5-6 lbs of fat can be the most difficult to lose as it is thoroughly embedded around your stomach. Muscle building requires extra calories and while you may be getting bulkier you will also find that some fat is sneaking in.

Let us say that you work out 2 hours a day and you want to lose more fat but not necessarily lose any muscle. Your normal routine is 1.5 hours weightlifting and .5 hours cardio. It could be beneficial to switch the ration to .45 hours weightlifting and 1.15 hours cardio.

You can cater your fitness program to your needs such as 1 hour light, high repetition weights and 1 hour cardio. You will need to adjust your workout so that you are focusing on the problems and target areas by forcing your body to adjust again.

There is a need to lower the weight level and do more repetitions. This will help speed weight loss without necessarily depleting your muscles. You are in maintenance of muscle and losing fat mode so you want to make sure you keep your muscles stressed enough so calories are not taken from them.

You may also find that high repetitions allows your muscles to improve strength during these periods because you are creating tightly woven muscle fibers based on the higher repetitions. Your muscles are becoming more endurance with additional strength.

Once you have achieved your weight-loss goals you can readjust your work out back to a pro-growth model.  What you are likely to find in this cycle is that you are creating the best of both worlds. Adjusting your body so it doesn't adapt as well as ensuring that you are thin and have a great physique. There may be a little fluctuation going on but you can control that with the type of workout you are engaged in.

Muscle:

-High protein meals
-High calories
-Low fats
-Higher weights
-Lower Cardio

Weight Loss:

-High Protein meals
-Lower calories
-Low Fats
-Higher repetition weights
-Higher Cardio

Articles may be distributed with attribution to authors Dr. Murad Abel