Do not: Use High Repetitions to Burn Fat
Increasingly accepted is the notion that moderate repetitions (eight to 12), rather than higher repetitions (20 to 25) are more effective for fat-loss, and this is true. Burning fat requires, on average, 15 to 40 minutes of continuous aerobic exercise (intensity dependent). Tacking on an extra 10 or so repetitions, thereby increasing the set by a few seconds will not, on this basis, hasten the fat-burning process.
Training with heavy weights and lower reps, though, will likely build a larger degree of muscle mass and, as a result, stimulate the metabolism to burn more fat over the long term (muscle is a metabolically active tissue and takes more energy at rest to sustain, thus creating greater demands on the body to maintain it should the building process be ongoing). Higher reps may be useful during the bodybuilding pre-competition stage—to refine muscle to bring out greater detail, as one school of thought has it—but ultimately do very little to build the muscle required to transform the body into a fat-burning machine.
Do not: Overdo training
To attain your ideal physique, it’s important to give everything you have over a defined period of time before easing off to let the body recover and grow. Depending on the individual, three to four 45-60 minute weight-training sessions and an equal number of cardio sessions per week are optimal. Any more—for the natural athlete in particular—and this could constitute overkill, in which case progress may actually decline rather than improve. If you train too often, for too long, while not achieving correct nutrition and rest outside of the gym, you may even encounter over-training, or at the very least, a continual feeling of lethargy which makes training a major ordeal, not the passion it should be. It is thought that over-training (which in its full manifestation is very rare, with a milder form of it usually being presented) will lead to many of the markers of ill health: depression, lack of vitality, suppressed immune function and injury, certainly not positive attributes for anyone seeking greater physical progress.
Do not: Under-train
Although training too often may lead to a reversal of results, insufficient training intensity and duration will likely provide you little return on investment. When you hit the gym, give it absolutely everything and ensure that no scheduled workouts are missed. Experience shows that if a muscle is not stimulated in an intense manner within a 48-72 hour period, it will begin to atrophy (shrink), making it extra important to hit each body part once every three days (this can be better accomplished through dividing the muscle groups—one-two per day—rather than training the body as a whole; more intensity can also be applied to each grouping this way).
It’s all about finding the perfect training balance for maximal results: not too often, but often enough to "stimulate, not annihilate" as the great bodybuilding champion Lee Haney once said. Once the perfect routine is found, stick with it while aiming to further increase intensity over the long term to prevent training stagnation.
Check back for instalment three, where we will explore why cheating on your diet will place you on the fast track to fat gain, and why training layoffs can impede progress.
William Lee is an acclaimed concert violinist, health and fitness expert, book author and psycology researcher.
