Fitness-program
Getting fit and lean requires more than having a great training program. After all, substantial weight loss and great abs are made in the kitchen. But even if you train hard and eat healthily, if you don’t have the right mindset, your progress will be at risk. Building a healthy and strong body isn’t a short-term project that you can complete and then return to your old ways – it’s more of a dedication to living, eating and thinking healthy in the long term.
When it comes to fad diets and suspicious-sounding supplements, the majority of the victims to their incredible claims are women. Actually, it seems that every third woman doesn’t have the much-needed patience and knowledge to sculpt her dream body and her efforts go to waste as the boomerang effect of inadequate dieting kicks in. So let’s just tell the truth: significant weight loss and firm muscles are the result of hard work in the gym, hard work in the kitchen, and plenty of willpower and self-discipline. The bad news is that there’s no way to get around those things, but the good news is that when equipped with the right science-backed methods, you can accomplish a lot more with the same amount of effort.
Let’s get started.
Stop focusing on fat loss
Here’s the thing: many behavioral studies have shown that when you focus solely on burning fat and design your whole program around that goal, you’re more likely to fail. Illogical as it may sound, it’s actually the truth. When all you care about is the calories, you end up consuming more of them. How does this happen?
First of all, focusing only on restrictions is just too stressful. Second, it involves a ‘push’ motivation, meaning that you’re actively pushing yourself away from a source of discomfort or anxiety (the image of you being overweight forever), which can be a very powerful motivation, but it’s nowhere near as powerful as its counterpart, the ‘pull’ motivation, which involves tapping your desire to achieve something really worthwhile, lasting and meaningful.
So when you gear your workout towards fat loss, you’re not giving yourself the opportunity to enjoy that activity and give it some real depth and importance, and this often results in rewarding yourself for your hard efforts with food. Exercise becomes just this annoying thing you have to endlessly perform in order to prevent putting on fat, which means that your motivation will inevitably diminish. But if you try to focus on working out for the goal of building strength and muscle, you can transform your gym hours into a more enjoyable experience and greatly increase your overall motivation, which in turn will certainly yield better results.
Research has shown that weight training leads to greater fat loss, improved body composition, and of course, stronger, shapelier figures. In addition, strength training is the best way to boost your production of fat-burning hormones and enhance your metabolism, thereby triggering optimal fat burning during and after the workout!
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