Become a Fat Burner by Shifting Your Exercise Routine

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Welcome to the Virgin Diet lifestyle show with your host, celebrity nutrition and fitness expert and New York Times best selling author, JJ Virgin.

I like to think of muscle as your metabolic spanx. You know what I mean by that is it holds everything in tighter and it boosts your metabolism because muscle requires more energy just to exist on your body and requires more energy to recover from weight training than that steady state endurance training. You know, the elliptical that you did that you could do forever. And the cool thing is when you're doing resistance training, you burn sugar. Now that might not sound good, but think about it. If you're burning a bunch of sugar off when you're exercising, then your body has a place to store the carbohydrates, the sugar from those carbohydrates you eat afterwards. And it turns out that that the fuel you use during exercise is a fuel you store afterwards. And if you're storing sugar, you're actually burning fat. So this is a good thing. Now the fastest way to restore insulin sensitivity is by doing resistance training. Because your muscles that first place you can start to get more insulin sensitive. What does that mean? If your body can hear insulin better, you don't have to have as big of an insulin output when you eat carbohydrates, which means your insulin stays lower. And when your insulin's lower, you can actually access stored fat for fuel. This is good. Also, resistance training helps your body handle stress better, just like burst training does. And you know, with stress it really is being able to tolerate it. Plus, resistance training protects your bones. You know, one of the things that happens as we age is if we are not doing things right, like taking our vitamin D and balancing our hormones and having a lot of plan and doing weight training, we tend to start to lose bone mineral density. You don't have to, but one of the biggest ways it can protect your bones is with resistance training. And here's a myth that I am going to burst. We hear so often that people who do a lot of resistance training or weight training are less flexible while in Reality, when you do resistance training correctly, which is big ranges of motion, wisdom, which is what I'm going to teach you in this podcast, in this show, is that it actually improves your flexibility. Okay? So the big takeaway on all that, of being stronger, of being more flexible, of handling stress better, is it translates to you being better at doing everything all day long. Plus, I gotta say it, it makes you look better naked. Yay. And it's fun. It's way more motivating to do resistance training because you can actually see yourself getting stronger. One day you're lifting 10 pounds, and next thing you're lifting 15. Cool. It is so fun to see that and measure your progress. Remember, what you measure, you can improve. So one thing I want to just give you a reminder of is as you're doing resistance training, one of the ways you want to monitor your progress. Of course, you're looking at how much you're lifting. Check your body composition. It is not enough to just do scale weight here. It is not just what you weigh, it's what that weight is made up of. So you need to check your body fat and everything else. So body composition is key. Get one of those scales. It gives you not just weight, but also body fat percentage and also, of course, your waist and hip measurements. And you are going to be so thrilled to start to see this transformation that happens over time again as you build those metabolic spanx and you'll be able to throw the other ones away. All right, so let's talk through how to do resistance training correctly. And I will tell you, hint, hint, it doesn't involve little pink weights or these machines that are bolted to the floor. First off, you want to lift the heaviest weight you can handle safely in good form. You never sacrifice form for weight, but you also. It should be difficult. It shouldn't be easy. Okay. This is not. If you're just beginning, though. I'll talk about that in a bit. But as you are doing this, and you're doing this on a regular basis, you're always going to lift the heaviest weight you can handle safely in good form. Next, for building muscle, 8 to 12 repetitions is going to be best. That's called hypertrophy. What I like to do is two to four sets of eight to 12 repetitions. So a repetition is a one time through a move. So eight repetitions, you moved through it eight times. And then what I have people do is take a break for about 60 seconds and then do another set. If you take too long of a break, you let yourself totally recover. And if you don't take long enough of a break, then you really just kept going. And the deal is you want to give yourself enough of a break, but you don't want it to go too long because your body is only going to improve the muscle fibers that you contract. And so by taking a break, you let your body recover, but you don't let those muscle fibers totally recover. So next time you do another set, you're going to pull in more muscle fibers because you're never pulling in all of your muscle fibers within a muscle. You're pulling in a percentage. So repeated sets means you bring in more and more muscle fibers, so you're stimulating more of your muscles so you're getting better. Improvement.

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Next thing that you're going to do is you're going to take a 48 to 72 hour rest between the time that you work a muscle and the next time you work it. All right, so here's the deal with that. If you is you should never be sore at a joint site or sore to the touch. This is the way your body's telling you, hey, overdone, you did too much. Right? And probably the single most important thing with an exercise session is really the recovery from it. I see people who are just overdoing it and it's like a bell shaped curve. You don't get more by doing more. It's really about doing the optimal amount. Work hard, recover hard. So 48 hours to 72 hours in between working that specific muscle group. And I'm going to talk about how I divide the body up here in a moment. You want to make sure you warm up before you exercise. And that can be as simple as running up a flight of stairs, doing some jumping jacks, jumping on either the treadmill, the elliptical, stationary bike. But get your core body temperature up and warm up some. And then as you're doing your exercises, you really want to work through a full range of motion with them. And that's how again, you're going to increase the flexibility. But you want to do that without using momentum. You'll see people at the gym, oh my gosh. Sometimes I feel like I want to walk through the gym with blinders on because I just, I've trained myself not to say anything ever, because they did not hire me and they probably don't want my advice. In fact, I've been told that, so I learned the hard way. But I see some of the silliest things at the gym and some of that is just swinging, the swinging of weights, using momentum, where you've got a weight that's too heavy for you. If you're using momentum, you are using, you're not using your muscle right, you're using the momentum. You want to use your muscle and you want to breathe through the exertion.

Don't hold your breath.

So I have divided the body into four parts. There's upper body pulling. That involves your latissimus dorsi, that's that big swimmer's V, your biceps and your shoulders, especially the back of your shoulders and the top of your shoulders, but especially the back of your shoulders. And that would include things like pull ups, pull downs, bent over rows, one arm rows, upright rows. And if you'll notice with all of those things I just said, there they were all multi joint exercises. I focus on exercises that pull more muscles in because it's going to be more realistic to what we do in daily life. And it's also going to involve your core more. More on that in a bit. Upper body pushing uses your chest, your chest, your triceps and also your upper back and shoulders. And those are things like push ups and overhead presses and dips, hips and thighs, glutes and quads in bodybuilder terms. And those would be things like step ups and lunges and squats and plies. And then power core are things that involve both your abs and your erector spinae. And that is things like soccer sit ups and crunches and back extensions. Now, if you are just starting out, I want you to start out easy. You can always take it up, but if you go overboard, you're going to get sore and then you're not going to want to come back. So start with one to two sets. Go easy, it should feel easy, medium, never hard. Then the next time you go to the gym and track this, write it down, you will go to two sets and take it up a little bit and pretty soon you'll be doing your two to four sets of the heaviest weight you can handle in good form, 8 to 12 repetitions. Now, once you get more advanced, there's a couple different things that I love to do. One of them is called super setting. And super setting is where you take opposing muscle groups like upper body pushing versus upper body pulling. So I'll do a set of say push ups and I will do that set. Then I'll do a set of bent over rows. Then I'll go back and do a set of push ups and I'll do a set of bent over rows and back and forth. That's super setting. Another thing I like to do is something I call focus fatigue. I often do this and that's where I'll focus within one area. So let's say I'm doing upper body pushing. I'll do push ups, I'll do dips, I'll do overhead presses. I will just keep doing things in that group until I'm just done. And that doesn't take long, let me tell you. And that's really your goal. The goal is not to spend hours at the gym. The goal is to go all out, go hard and then go home and celebrate. And then there's endurance training. And I will throw this into the mix where I will do two sets of repetitions for 60 seconds. So obviously I'm lightening the load about 20%. And then I will throw in once a month or so, neural training, which is three sets of the heaviest weight I can handle for six reps, and that's generally about 20% harder. One of the things I really advise is working with a trainer. Now, this doesn't have to be three times a week. In fact, what I advise is working with a trainer either once a week, once every two weeks, or once a month so that they can check your progress, monitor your body fat and your measurements. Remember, not just weight. I had this one client, by the way, just fun one. She came in, she wanted to lose fat. She wanted to lose weight. She told me, well, Vicki dropped 4% body fat in a whole clothing size. But Vicki didn't lose any weight and she was so upset she didn't lose weight. I'm like, Vicki, you dropped 4% body fat. She dropped, I think like 2 inches off her hip, an inch off her waist and whole clothing size. Isn't that what you want? She goes, yes. I'm like, okay, so just remember that. What's the real outcome you're looking to achieve? But what a trainer can do is keep revamping your program, keeping things fresh, changing things around for you. And so it's not something you have to do every single three times a week. That's cost prohibitive. Remember, it could be once a week, once a month, and you could do that with a friend. Even better. For some of my favorite workout routines, text 58885 and enter JJWAITS1. That's the number one space, your first name space and your email address. Again, you text to 58885 and enter jjwaits1. Space, your first name space and your email address. In the Sugar Impact Diet, I help you clear up the confusion around sugar and take back the control that sugar has over your life. In just two weeks, you'll lose your sweet tooth and shrink your waistline. Why wait? Start those two weeks today.

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