I’m often asked why, when people come to me for personal training to lose fat, I don’t recommend doing tonnes of cardio, but instead recommend resistance based training. How is it possible to get mind-boggling results time after time without running clients into the ground? After all, if you want to lose weight you need to expend more calories than you take in, right?

True, but it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Firstly, you need to do A LOT of cardio to burn any significant fat… Much, much more than people realise. As you’ll know if you have my FREE 5-part Fat Busting Blueprint, unless you’re doing an Ironman event, the amount of actual fat you burn in a cardio session is pretty poor. I won’t go into the figures here, because I laid it out step by step in there.

By the way, if you don’t have my Fat Busting Blueprint yet, it’s free, so get yours now by sticking your details in the box on this page. You can go do it now… I’ll wait…

Back? Great.

Resistance based training is often misunderstood. We do it primarily to maintain, or build some lean tissue because that’s how we sculpt and tone a shapely physique just the way we want it.

After all, who wants to diet to be a thinner fat person?

No-one.

But what a lot of people don’t understand is that if you don’t resistance train effectively while dieting, most research suggests up to 25% of your bodyweight loss will be lean tissue. So what you have to remember is that by resistance training properly, the workouts are not just helping you tone and sculpt your muscles, by doing so, they’re helping you lose more fat.

Around 25% more fat.

See if, following the 25% rule detailed above, you took away the workouts and lost 10lbs in 6 weeks, in those 6 weeks you’ll have lost around 7½lbs of fat. However, you’ll have also lost around 2½lbs of muscle, and in doing so you’ll have lowered your metabolism making it perpetually more difficult to continue to lose fat. (Did you know 1lb of muscle on your frame can burn anywhere between an extra 25 right up to 100 calories daily?)

However, if you follow an effective resistance training programme and lose 10lbs in that same 6 weeks, all goes well you’ll have lost 10lbs of fat instead of 7½, or possibly more if you’ve built a pound or two of muscle.

See, 1lb of muscle is only about half as big as 1lb of fat, so losing 10lbs of fat will make a much bigger impact in how your physique looks than losing just 7½lbs within the same 10lbs of bodyweight. Plus you’ll now be a step closer to being lean and toned, rather than a step closer to being thin but still flabby…