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Time Saving Tips for Real Results

If you look at weight loss as an athletic event, you are, after all, trying to change the way your body looks and performs - it follows that you should frequently change the way you exercise, focusing on one goal for a while (building muscle, say), then another (burning fat), until your body does what you want it to.

There's nothing worse then wasting your time in the gym. If you want results, here are some time saving tips to help you make your training efforts more productive, whether your goal is
increased muscle mass, less fat, greater endurance or a combination of all three.

A Cycling Approach

Try creating a simple four-week training cycle in which you alternate between heavy, medium and light training sessions for each body part. Each heavy day, push your limits in order to build strength and muscle, leaving your medium and light days for developing tendon and ligament strength as well as cardio endurance. A cyclic approach such as this one will allow you to gain muscle mass and strength, while keeping your metabolism churning so you continue to get leaner. And youll be a lot less likely to over train in the process.

Add Fuel to Your Metabolism

If you want to maximize your muscle-growing or fat-loss efforts, never, ever, skip breakfast. Additionally, make sure that breakfast consists of complete proteins and complex carbohydrates, the best sources for adding fuel to your metabolism at the beginning of the day, following a long nights inactivity.

Faster Fat Loss

To boost endurance and accelerate fat loss, add one long run a week (one or two hours) to your training efforts. Speed doesnt matter on these runs. Build distance very gradually, increasing weekly by no more than a mile or 10 minutes.

Fastest Workout

If you're short on workout time, the most expedient approach calls for training your upper and lower body using two exercises considered the kings of resistance training: squats and bench presses. Doing both at the same workout will engage more major and ancillary muscle fibers than any other two exercises you can do. After a 10-minute warm up, do six sets of eight to 10 reps of each exercise (do the benches first). This workout will heighten your bodys anabolic drive, which translates to more muscle.

Fat Intake

If you eliminate all fat from your diet, you may lose that gut, but only temporarily, and at the expense of muscle gain. The great fat-acceptance cycle has been spinning for generations, from zero tolerance to occasional monstrous greasy binges. The best plan focuses on moderation. This means eating a reasonable amount of daily fat, but choosing unsaturated sources (known as omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids) such as salmon, mackerel, natural peanut butter, olive oil and avocados, and avoiding saturated artery blockers such as red meat, salad dressings, mayonnaise and butter. You need healthy fats to regulate hormone production, reduce muscle inflammation (especially after training), protect your joints, and provide the satisfaction you get from eating a big, well-deserved meal. Experts advise an equal balance among the three types of fats. This provides the medically desired 2:1 ratio of unsaturated to saturated fats, and will provide the greatest benefits these fats have to offer.

Integrate Circuits

To most men, circuit training, moving quickly from one exercise to the next with very little rest in between is the misbegotten offspring of weight lifting and aerobic exercise. It's not as good as either of those forms of exercise for building muscle or strengthening your heart, so why bother? Because for weight loss, circuits are hot. You'll incinerate calories, add some muscle, gain strength, and do all this faster than with traditional weight lifting or cardiovascular exercise alone. One more benefit: Because of the intensity and then the volume of repetitions, you'll improve muscular definition.

Intensity Fix

If your muscle growth is starting to lag, the easiest way to change your intensity level is to shorten the rest interval between sets.

Loosen Up

To keep from tightening up, spend 10 minutes after every run doing long, gentle stretches that work your calves, hamstrings, lower back and shoulders. Stretching between every set of an exercise to enhance muscle growth. After the age of 30, its especially important to include upper-body stretches.

Multitask

Multi-joint exercises such as bench presses, squats, dead lifts, overhead presses, and chins allow you to manage more weight than you can with isolation movements. This not only leads to gains in muscle strength, size and density, but also results in increased growth hormone and testosterone levels.

Protein Intake

Protein is the building block of muscle, so if you're lifting heavy you'd better be eating heavy. According to a study in the Canadian Journal of Applied Physiology, if you're interested in putting on muscle, you'll need between one and a half to two grams of protein per kilogram of body weight a day. This translates into 0.68 to 0.90 grams per pound of body weight. For the metric-challenged, one gram of protein per pound of body weight will ensure optimum protein synthesis without risk.

Power Up

If you can't get in five or six small meals per day, eat between-meal protein shakes. This will keep your energy levels up, your amino-acid pool steady and your muscles growing.

Priority Training

If you notice that one body part, or portion of a body part, begins to lag in development compared to the other muscle groups, try a priority-training approach. Always train the weak or slow-growing muscle first in your workout. For example, if your rear deltoids are slow-growth muscles, do rear laterals first in your shoulder workout, not last as you normally would. Of course, warm up the entire deltoid complex with light overhead presses before you launch into your workout.

Recover Faster

Eating immediately after a workout and then again two hours later is one of the best habits you can adopt for your growing muscles. The first two hours after a workout is a window of opportunity in which your muscles replenish and store glycogen at almost twice the rate they otherwise do. A combination of protein and carbs will expedite energy uptake faster than if you ate them separately.

Run Off Fat

Expand your aerobic capacity and fat-loss potential by combining prolonged sub maximal training--thats between 60 percent and 80 percent of your maximum heart rate--with high-intensity interval training. The resulting physiological adaptation help to reduce lactate accumulation by preventing its formation and assists its clearance.

Train In Stages

Most of us find a workout that works for a month and stick with it for the next 10 years. But a muscle that's asked to do the same thing over and over again will eventually use fewer fibers to do the job. So let's say you bench-press every time you train, and you always use 135 pounds, and you always do three sets of 10 repetitions. At first, your muscles will respond the way you want them to - by getting bigger and stronger. But eventually they'll get used to the routine and start using less and less muscle mass to do the same thing.

That's why serious athletes constantly change their workouts over the course of a year. To become faster and stronger, they change the exercises they do, the amount of weight they lift, how many sets and repetitions they perform, and how much rest they take between sets. They change everything they can, to make sure that their muscles never grow so accustomed to exercise that they stop responding to it. If you look at weight loss as an athletic event - you are, after all, trying to change the way your body looks and performs - it follows that you should frequently change the way you exercise, focusing on one goal for a while (building muscle, say), then another (burning fat), until your body does what you want it to.

Wet Carbs for Weight Loss

One of the best ways to lose fat is to increase your intake of carbs, wet carbs, that is. Foods that are high in fiber and loaded with water typically have very few calories, which means you can scarf them with impunity. Moreover, the body expends tremendous energy processing this type of carb. Studies have shown that eating a lot of food is one of the keys to feeling satisfied, and satisfaction is the key to sticking to a weight-loss program. To keep your weight low and your satisfaction high, focus on foods such as cucumbers, grapefruit, tomatoes, cantaloupe, grilled fish, strawberries, yogurt, and vegetable soups, all of which contain an abundance of fluid and fiber.