In today’s PT Intel, personal trainer Christian Schenck drops by to share the 4 pillars to successful weight loss. You can find him online here, as well as on his YouTube fitness channel.
1. Workout
Workout is the number 1 thing that you should do to help you lose weight. Doing exercise turbocharges your metabolism, recharges your fat metabolism, burns sugar, increases insulin sensitivity, and heck, makes you look BETTER!
Now, from my experience, the BEST style of training to help you lose weight is High intensity training. I’m NOT talking about doing curls hard for 30 seconds then do forearm work afterwards, NO NO NO NO NO!
I’m talking about doing between 20 seconds and a minute of big movements, and 10 seconds of an isometric hold( Time under tension) movement in the same body group. For example( My personal favorite) doing 20 seconds of body squats and 10 seconds of holding the bottom of the squat, for maybe 6-8 rounds.
2. Eat
Along with working out, food intake is going to determine your body fatness. Like the saying goes, “Abs are made in the kitchen”; you can’t be stuffing your face with Twinkies, gummy bears, Big Macs, and Coke, and expect to lose weight if you are under your caloric intake. You have to eat good food! Fruit, Vegetables, Nuts, Seeds, Berries, Beef, Fish, Poultry, and Water Baby!
Intermittent fasting is something that you should do as well. Intermittent fasting, in a nutshell, is for 16 continuous hours in a day, that includes sleep, and for 8 hours you eat your daily allotted calories. I have recently came across a TON of studies about the benefits of this, including increased insulin sensitivity, increased GH in both men and women to help recovery after hard workouts, and a huge increase in testosterone in males!
It is really important to make sure that you are eating enough calories to sustain a 1-2lb per week weight loss goal, but not so restricted that you are starving. The reason you don’t do that is because when you are so restricted your leptin levels go down, which signals your body to go into starvation mode. When it gets to this point you basically hold onto whatever you eat and store it, while tanking your metabolism and increasing your weight.
3. Sleep
Studies have shown that if you sleep less than 6 hours a night, your GH, and metabolism decrease IMMENSELY. Without these two working for you, you can kiss your weight loss goals goodbye. I recommend a minimum of 6 to 8 hours a week.
Now there are some studies that show when you sleep MORE than that, you have a higher risk of being overweight as well.
4. Commitment
This stuff takes time, it is hard, you may not always want to go do your workouts, you WILL not always be able to stay on a strict diet, you will fail some times, BUT it is those that hop right back up and get back on the path that are going to reach their goals.
SEE ALSO: How to Set Fitness Goals that Don’t Stink
Edison failed over 1000 times when trying to create the light bulb, when asked about his “failures” he simply said,” I did not fail, I just found 1000 ways to not make a light bulb”. You NEED that same mindset.
