The Fat Burn Revolution (7 page)

You should also be starting to realise why, for most people, adding muscle to the body should be an essential aspect of their fat-loss attack plan. Hopefully now you also fully understand why it
is not a good idea for you to measure your progress on this programme by weight alone.

will you turn into Popeye?

If you’re concerned that gaining muscle will make you look too big and bulky, please put that out of your head. This is something that tends to worry women more than men,
but ladies, I can assure you that getting big muscles is very hard for us to achieve even when we try to. It definitely does not happen by accident when we’re not specifically training for
that aim. Guys do get that ‘ripped’ look they usually want by following the Fat Burn Revolution because their bodies produce more testosterone and they gain muscle more easily. Women,
on the other hand, get lean, firm and shapely.

I’m not saying anything sexist or controversial here, by the way, these are just simple biological facts. If you’re old enough to be reading this I’m sure you’ve noticed
that male and female bodies are different! So it shouldn’t be all that shocking to hear that both sexes can follow the same programme, but men’s bodies will react to it differently by
increasing muscle size at a greater rate than a woman’s body will.

Successful female bodybuilders usually do an astounding amount of training and follow a very strict diet, usually involving periods of eating a large quantities of calories during carefully
planned muscle-building phases and regularly swallowing a range of supplements. What I’m basically saying is that women who train and eat to get bulky do not do what you will do while
following the Fat Burn Revolution.

Another common concern I’ve come across, again usually among women, is not wanting to use weights in leg exercises because they think they already have ‘bulky’ legs. In fact,
what they’ve almost always actually got is fat sitting on top of muscle. They find it hard to accept that it’s fat because it looks and even feels like it’s all muscle, but it is
not. Believe me, I’ve seen this many times on many women, including myself.

I put weight on a while ago when I had a calf injury and I went to see a physiotherapist who looked at my leg using an ultrasound scanner. I was really surprised when I looked at the screen and
could see quite a thick layer of fat on top of the muscle. My calves had felt quite hard, so I didn’t think I had much fat in that area, but there it was. When I lost the fat (with weighted
leg exercises as part of my training) my calves shrank and I’m very happy with the shape of them now.

I
f you’ve been exercising for a while, chances are you’ve experienced reaching a progress plateau. This frustrating phenomenon has been
the cause of many an abandoned fitness goal. It is also the reason why going to the same exercise class or following the same routine for months on end does not tend to get people the body they
want. Training consistency is a wonderful thing, but never changing the way you train is not.

Typically it goes like this. You decide to start a new fitness regime and find a workout/class/DVD you like the look of. At first it’s great, the fat starts coming off and it seems like
you’ve found ‘The Answer’. After a few weeks you start getting used to the moves, it all feels a lot easier, and doing the workout begins to feel comfortable. So, great,
you’re getting fitter, right? But here’s the thing, pretty soon you start to notice that it isn’t shifting any more. You probably don’t worry much about that at first, after
all, you know this training works, so you resolve to keep going and stick with it. However, the weeks go by and still nothing changes and doing the same routine starts getting boring, especially as
you’re not being rewarded with any results. So, your willpower starts to wane and you lose interest. Who could blame you when nothing is changing? Before long the sofa becomes a much a more
appealing option and, after several missed weeks, workout time becomes TV time and eventually you don’t even think about exercising any more. Sound familiar?

Let’s move on from that depressing scenario. I have good news. Can you guess what it is?

Your workout schedule will change every 4 weeks, so your body will be constantly challenged throughout the programme.

Yep, that sequence of events is not a problem you’ll have on the Fat Burn Revolution programme. There may be occasional weeks when you don’t lose weight, or even any body fat, but
there will always be a way to increase the intensity to ensure your progress is not stalled for long. Plus, by changing the workouts every four weeks, your body will not be given time to get
comfortable with the demands you’re placing on it. Remember what I said about continually challenging yourself and it never getting easy? You’ll thank me for it after 12 weeks!

running into trouble

I know I’m labouring the point a little now, but I really want to embed this message in the very depths of your being: comfortable workouts are not going to get you the
results you want. I’ve already mentioned the muscle-reducing dangers of endurance-type exercise like leisurely running, cycling or swimming, but there’s more. Before I go on, I want to
stress that I have nothing against these types of exercise, I enjoy them all myself, I have completed several marathons and even used to be the editor of a magazine for recreational runners. But
the fact is that steady-paced running is not great for fat loss.

The typical story is similar to the sorry tale above and, unfortunately, the ending is often even sadder. It goes like this:

1
You take up running and you shed some weight and get fitter. Woohoo!

2
After a few weeks or, if you’re lucky, months, the results slow down as you reach a plateau.

3
So, you decide to push yourself more, maybe to complete a race, after all it’s good to have training goals, everyone knows that. You increase your
training time and up your mileage.

4
You see some more gains, but these plateau out even more quickly. Your body, being the wonderful machine that it is, just keeps adapting to cope with the
strain.

5
It’s not easy to fit in more training and increased mileage, but you’re not going to quit, it’s all about pushing through the pain,
right?

6
And so you carry until you eventually have to stop because your body can’t take it any more and you get ill or injured.

7
You are forced to stop training and you gain even more fat.

Fun times eh?

Believe me, I’ve been there myself so I know how frustrating and confusing that cycle can be.

Any type of long, slow-endurance exercise, when done regularly and taken to extremes, will cause the body to become more endurance-focused. It will then want to store energy as fat to ensure it
has plenty of reserves to get through all the miles it is expecting and it will release those fat stores very sparingly.

Unfortunately, the problems don’t end there. Endurance sports involve such repetitive movements that, unless you have perfect biomechanics (i.e. you have faultless posture and gait), which
almost nobody does, the more miles you do and the more often you train, the more likely it becomes that those imbalances and imperfections in your gait are going to lead to pain and injury. Even if
that doesn’t happen you’re at risk of general overuse injuries and then there’s the damaging effects excessive endurance training may have on the heart and endocrine system... I
think you’re getting the point now!

Running, cycling and swimming can be fantastic in small amounts, but many people (including me) get carried away and keep upping their mileage without realising that their training is at odds
with their health/fitness/fat-loss goals.

W
hen you train using high-intensity cardio, plyometrics and challenging resistance sessions, as in the Fat Burn Revolution, the body prefers to
store fuel as glycogen in the muscles. This type of fuel can be quickly released to enable the fast-paced, power-driven activities it is used to performing.

The intense training will prime your body to burn off fat stores long after you’ve finished exercising.

How will this get rid of the fat on your body? Because of the ‘afterburn’ effect. You are going to train so hard your metabolic rate will go through the roof and it will stay high
even after you finish training while your body adapts and recovers. This will cause you to burn more fat for 24–48 hours after exercising, depending on how intense the training was. Of
course, you also get the health and fitness improvements that come as a result of working your heart, lungs and muscles harder.

You may have been told that exercising at a comfortable pace is best for fat loss because you are working in the ‘fat-burning zone’. This is just plain wrong. People who say this are
confused by the fact that training at low intensities causes the body to use more fat than glycogen for fuel while you are exercising. But what they don’t realise is that high-intensity
exercise causes more fat to be burned in total when you take account of afterburn. Plus, with this type of training, the next time you eat, the calories from your food will be used to replace the
glycogen you used up rather than stored as fat.