Why Your Exercise Routine May Actually be Slowing Down Your Fat Loss

This article is going to be a shocker to many of you. Why? Because chances are that if you’re exercising with the primary goal of losing fat, you’re probably doing it completely backwards.

If you’re not “enlightened”, you probably go on the treadmill (or some other cardio machines) walk or run for 30-60 minutes, and then, you may do some exercises for your abs, arms, and legs.

If you’re “enlightened”, and you’ve done your research on the internet, you probably go into the gym, do a solid full-body strength training workout that makes you ready to puke. Then, on other days, you do interval training, because you know that interval training burns more calories, and creates a greater “afterburn” effect than “steady-state” cardio… but your training is still wrong.

So if you’re not supposed to do long duration cardio, and you’re not supposed to do gut-wrenching strength workouts, what the hell are you supposed to do?

Here is what I recommend: do 1 tension-oriented workout (heavy weights), and 2 workouts that use higher repetitions, and moderate sets.

You may be asking what is the rationale for this? Think about it: you’re on a diet (if you’re trying to lose fat, you are on a diet, aren’t you?), so your ability to recover from exercise is already impaired. And you’re exercising more when you’re on a diet, instead of less? Seems a little backwards to me. But let’s examine what happens when you do that.

You may have heard of a hormone called “thyroid.” If you haven’t, thyroid is the key hormone that is responsible for the speed of your metabolism. The higher your thyroid levels, the faster your metabolism. You may have also heard of a hormone called “cortisol.” Cortisol is the hormone that is released during times of stress. But so what? Cortisol has several effects, one of which is the decrease in thyroid levels. Let’s count the different ways in which you’re triggering cortisol.

Firstly, you’re on a diet. That’s stress. Second, you’re really busting your butt in the gym. That’s stress. Third, you probably have a lot going on outside your diet and exercise. That’s a lot of stress. And none of it is doing good things for your metabolism.