Another good read from Craig Ballantyne’s Turbulence Training blog: turbulencetraining.blogspot.com

Today, I’m going to discuss a couple of things to do if you are getting close to your goal and need some advanced fat loss tips.

1) Don’t cut calories too much.
This is something that happens a lot as people get closer to their goals, and especially when people hit a fat loss plateau.

But you can’t do it.

Here’s why.

Among other things, your food intake and energy balance help to control your metabolism (most likely by altering levels of various hormones in your body).

When you cut your calories too much, you probably knock your hormones levels for a loop, causing them to send a collective message to your body that you are not getting enough to energy in…and therefore, that shuts down your fat loss systems.

Here’s one reader’s account of the pitfalls of an excessively low calorie diet…

“I’m on the weight loss track again. I found I wasn’t eating enough calories (1000 kcal/day). Filling up on veggies is good (and I love them), but they don’t have the calories. Eating walnuts/almonds helped get me there. Eating 1500+ is where I need to stay to lose weight and keep my energy up. I’ve dropped about 3 pounds this week.”
Holly, using the TT for Women program with great success

With men, I generally don’t think men need to go below 1800 calories per day, and with women, not much less than 1500 calories per day - Dr. Mohr covers this in greater detail in the Nutrition Guidelines that go with TT for Fat Loss. So you probably want to stay above those levels, and definitely avoid any sharp, sudden decreases in your energy intake.

2) Don’t exercise too much.
For very similar reasons as point #1.

Exercise intensity and frequency also help to control your hormone levels. If you over-exercise (i.e. tons of cardio everyday, weight training everyday, etc.), then your body doesn’t get a chance to recover and keep your hormones at the correct level.

After all, exercise is another form of stress on your body…and you all know how your body and mind can get messed up from too much stress.

Resist the urge to exercise for the sake of exercise. Don’t go adding 60 minute stairmaster sessions everyday before breakfast if you’re already on a well-designed, consistent workout schedule. That could be too much stress on your body.

Stick to structured, purposeful exercise as found in your TT program.

I’ve been around the exercise block so to speak, and I often know how much is too much for most fitness levels.

The longer I’m in this business, the more I realize that training frequently with an intense workouts is un-necessary - for both fat loss and for athletes.

Training with the same interval workout for 6 days of the week is not going to get you twice the results as training 3 days per week. Instead, use a variety of different workouts to increase your fat loss and performance.

And as I said the other week in an email about advanced fat loss, the best way to accelerate your fat burning is by adding in some bodyweight circuits (starting at 10 minutes per day and working up to 20 minutes maximum) done in the morning or evening. Use a different circuit each day - there’s an almost endless number of bodyweight circuit combinations you can do.

(If you do your regular workout in the AM, do your bodyweight circuits after dinner; otherwise, do the bw circuits first thing in the AM, and then do your regular workout at lunch or later in the afternoon or evening.)

After two weeks, take a break from this routine and allow your body to recover.

Two other things you can do during this two weeks of extra training…
a) Add 10 seconds to the length of each interval.
b) Add 1 set to each of the exercises in the first Superset of the workout.

So now you have more volume, performed at a high-intensity of course, but without over-taxing your hormonal system.

But remember, you should only do this increased training volume for 2 weeks. Then you need to take a break and reduce the training volume to normal - to allow your body to adapt and recover.

3) Eat 6-8 times per day.
In the past 5-10 years, it’s become common knowledge that we should all eat smaller, more frequent meals. In fact, one study from 2005 showed that doing so helped reduce cholesterol and burn more calories than eating 2-3 meals per day.

And so for our advanced fat loss approach, we’re going to bump that up to 6-8 meals per day.

Here’s how you would do that:
Breakfast
Mid-morning snack
Lunch
Afternoon snack
Pre-workout
Post-workout
Dinner
Evening snack

With each meal and snack (except pre- & post-workout) focusing on lean protein, healthy fats, and fiber-rich vegetables and fruit (for pre- and post-workout, stick with 20g protein and a half-serving of fruit).

Start your day immediately with 2 cups of water, 3 fish oil caps, and 20g of lean protein, and then have your a fiber-rich breakfast. This meal will help dictate your blood sugar for the rest of the morning and into the afternoon. So if you blow it on breakfast, you’ve might actually have blown it for the entire day.

(And if you workout at other times of the day, just adjust the schedule and move about the pre- and post-workout meals).

4) Eat more fiber-rich vegetables at each meal.
Ways to get more green include eating a green pepper with your omelet at breakfast, or spinach in your salads at lunch, etc.

Aim for 8 servings of green, fiber-rich vegetables over the course of the day.

5) Eat only protein, healthy fats, & fiber between meals.
For example, you could have a sample snack plan of 20g lean protein (from a quality shake or from chicken breast), 1/2 - 1 oz almonds, some more broccoli or spinach, or an apple. And enjoy some Green Tea at this time as well, of course.

CB

To find out more about Craig and his services, please visit: www.cbathletics.com