1. How many times a week should I work out if I want to lose weight?
Weight loss is not necessarily a measure of how many times you work out but rather how effective you make your workouts and how clean you eat. Nutrition accounts for 80% of fat loss and unless your diet is clean you can work your butt off in the gym without seeing lasting and exciting results.
Weight loss should always come from fat loss, not the loss of muscle or water. That requires that you build muscle mass (muscle takes up almost half the space of fat but weighs about twice as much) to get leaner and smaller and to eventually keep your body at your ideal weight and body fat. You also want to ensure that your cardio workouts burn fat, not muscle. There's a fine line between doing enough cardio to burn fat and too much cardio that results in muscle loss.
2. Diet>Exercise or Exercise>Diet, when it comes to slimming down?
Diet accounts for 80% of any fat loss. No matter how much you work out, you can actually undo the work you do at the gym by eating the wrong foods or eating at the wrong times. A fat burning diet is key in slimming down and my clients are typically amazed after my "Fat Burning Nutrition" Workshops to learn that they have been eating too many carbs in the form of fruit, granola, yogurt, and other so-called healthy carbs to get their bodies into fat burning mode. The most successful clients in my Slim & Strong program are those that combine proper fat burning nutrition with effective exercise and they easily drop 10 lbs in the first 4 weeks.
3. How many calories do I need to burn per workout in order to shed pounds?
Weight loss is not so much about the calories burned during a workout as it is about the long-term changes you create with a workout and how you eat before and after a workout.
If your goal is fat loss, perform your cardio first thing in the morning on an empty stomach. Your dinner the night before should be low in carbs and contain about 20-25 grams of protein (depending on your muscle mass), such as grilled chicken and broccoli. This ensures that you burn more calories from fat. After finishing your workout do NOT replace the burned calories with lots of carbs, but rather continue to eat a balanced carbohydrate diet (about 30 grams of carbs per meal 5x a day) with protein to ensure your body is continuing to burn fat for energy - not carbs. The only way to change the shape of your body is to burn body fat and not the carbs you feed your body.
Also, in the long run, strength training is more effective than cardio. While you may burn only about 450 calories during an hour-long strength training workout vs about 600 during an hour of cardio (based on a 150 lb woman), you are actually creating a much more intense after burn effect with the strength session. The after burn is the amount of calories burned in the up to 48 hours after finishing your workout and can amount to about 20% of calories burned in addition to the calories burned during the lifting session. Your fat burning remains increased and fat burning hormones are elevated, which makes the hormonal effects of strength training much more effective than the effects of cardio.
Aim to work at 85-90% of your maximum heart rate (220-your age) for the majority of your cardio workouts to boost your metabolism, create a high after burn and burn more calories from fat. Make sure that your strength training sessions move swiftly from one exercise to the next - without waiting 30 seconds to a minute to lift. Efficiency is key in increasing your heart rate as you lift.
4. We all know that muscle weighs more than fat, but does that mean I should be gaining weight even though I’m eating right and working out?
Most people who start exercising and eating clean will notice an immediate drop in weight simply due to the added activity. Sometimes the body weight plateaus as your body drops fat and adds muscle at the same time. If this plateau lasts longer than a few days then chances are your nutrition is to blame and you're eating too many starches, sugars and too much fat. Going clean typically does the trick and should result in fat loss and muscle mass gained.
5. What is the ideal cardio to strength-training ratio for slimming down?
The most effective way to burn fat is to include both aerobic (running, swimming, biking) and anaerobic (strength training, sprinting) workouts. Boot Camp workouts are typically set up in high-intensity-intervals and are ideal for fat loss and creating a high after burn effect, muscle gains, and calorie expenditure from fat.
Aim to include at least 2-3 strength training sessions per week with 2-3 cardio sessions per week (at 85-90% of your maximum heart rate). Or, take boot camp workouts that provide a high-intensity-interval class model as they combine strength training and cardio.
6. How can I achieve tone without bulking up?
The common notion among women is that lifting weights will make them bulky. This notion has been perpetuated for an eternity by trainers such as Tracy Anderson and is far from the truth. Women don't have nearly enough testosterone to get bulky and would have to spend hours a day in the gym, supplementing intensely, and lifting massive weights to look anything like a muscle head.
To achieve sexy and sleek tone you need to build up the muscle with weight lifting or weight bearing exercise - the heavier the weights, the quicker your muscle responds. At the same time you need to burn the fat that covers the muscle. Not even a million sit ups a day will help you get that six-pack if it is covered by body fat. To see muscle tone your body fat should be lower than 22% and again, your nutrition makes all the difference.
7. Apart from body-fat percentage, how can you accurately measure slim results?
Your body fat percentage is the best measure of progress, along with a tape measure. You could theoretically start at a weight of 150 lbs with 30% body fat and 4 weeks later still be 150 lbs but have 25% body fat. The key change to look at is the change in lbs of fat vs lbs of muscle.
A body fat of 30% would equate to 45 lbs of fat and 105 lbs of muscle.
A body fat of 25% would equate to 37 lbs of fat and 113 lbs of muscle.
The change is clear: more muscle - less fat = higher metabolism and a leaner body even though the scale didn't budge. What would you prefer? A change only the scale or a change in inches, body fat and your clothes?
I always suggest that my clients pick a tight-fitting pair of jeans as their measure of progress. Once they fit into it easily right after it comes out of the dryer you should see their happy faces!
Lastly, you should measure your progress also by how you feel. Is your energy better, are you feeling more confident and stronger, is your skin clearer, your concentration improved and your sugar cravings are gone? Isn't that worth a lot and yet we tend to rely on a simple number on the scale to tell us how well we did...
For more tips on fat burning, see http://slimandstrongin2009.blogspot.com.
