Almost everyone who starts training (at least 90% of the people) say they want to lose weight. Especially at this time of year. What they really mean is they want to lose body FAT. In this issue of the Your Best Self newsletter, I’d like to share a great article written by one of the top fat-loss specialists in the world. Happy reading!

Curb Ivanic, MSc, CSCS

The Hierarchy of Fat Loss
By Alwyn Cosgrove, www.alwyncosgrove.com

With time being our limiting factor, how do we maximize fat loss? Is there a hierarchy of fat loss techniques? Yes, there is….

1. Correct nutrition. There's pretty much nothing that can be done to out-train a crappy diet. You quite simply have to create a caloric deficit while eating enough protein and essential fats. There's no way around this.

2. See #1. Yep. It really is that important. Several trainers have espoused that the only difference between training for muscle gain and training for fat loss is your diet. I think that's a massive oversimplification, but it does reinforce how important and effective correct nutrition is toward your ultimate goal.

3. Activities that burn calories, maintain/promote muscle mass and elevate metabolism. I think it's fairly obvious that the bulk of calories burned are determined by our resting metabolic rate (RMR). The amount of calories burned outside of our resting metabolism (through exercise, thermic effect of feeding, etc.) is a smaller contributor to overall calories burned per day. We can also accept that RMR is largely a function of how much muscle you have on your body... and how hard it works. Therefore, adding activities that promote or maintain muscle mass will make that muscle mass work harder and elevate the metabolic rate. This will become our number one training priority when developing fat loss programs.

4. Activities that burn calories and elevate metabolism. The next level of fat loss programming would be a similar activity. We're still looking at activities that eat up calories and increase Exercise Post Oxygen Consumption (EPOC). EPOC is defined scientifically as the "recovery of metabolic rate back to pre-exercise levels." It can require several minutes for light exercise and several hours for hard intervals. Essentially, we're looking for activities that keep us burning more calories after the exercise session.

5. Activities that burn calories but don't necessarily maintain muscle or elevate metabolism. This is the icing on the cake, adding in activities that'll burn up additional calories but don't necessarily contribute to increasing metabolism. This is the least effective tool in your arsenal as it doesn't burn much outside of the primary exercise session. Let's put this fat loss continuum together in terms of our progressive training hierarchy.

Five Factors for Fat Loss Training

1. Metabolic Resistance Training - Basically we're using resistance training as the cornerstone of our fat loss programming. Our goal is to work every muscle group hard, frequently and with an intensity that creates a massive "metabolic disturbance" or "afterburn" that leaves the metabolism elevated for several hours post workout. A couple of studies to support this include the following:

2. High Intensity Anaerobic Interval Training - The second key "ingredient" in fat loss programming is high intensity interval training (HIIT). Interval work burns more calories than steady state and elevates metabolism significantly more than other forms of cardio. The downside is that it flat-out sucks to do it!

3. High Intensity Aerobic Interval Training - The next tool we'll pull out is essentially a lower intensity interval method where we use aerobic intervals.

4. Steady State High Intensity Aerobic Training Tool - This one is just hard cardio work. We're burning calories, but we aren't working hard enough to increase EPOC significantly or to do anything beyond the session itself. But calories do count. Burning another 300 or so calories per day will add up.

5. Steady State Low Intensity Aerobic Training - This is just activity, going for a walk in the park, etc. It won't burn a lot of calories. It won't increase muscle or EPOC. There isn't very much research showing that low intensity aerobic training actually results in very much additional fat loss, but you're going to have to really work to convince me that moving more is going to hurt you when you're in fat attack mode.

Read the rest of the article here.

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