Whether you are a beginner or a well-seasoned veteran needing alternate training methods to add variety, increase intensity, or overcome a frustrating plateau to lose weight, the following 5-part article will help you lose weight and achieve the best possible results in the shortest amount of time.
But before you read this below article, you should first take our FREE Fitness Analysis! You'll receive specific recommendations to lose weight based on your responses to our brief questionnaire. You'll also receive the new e-book, Big Fat Lies absolutely FREE of charge. Click here to get started and lose weight!
Avoid Overtraining
If you feel burnt out, weak, and/or sore, you are probably overtraining. Not providing your muscles with enough rest will often prevent you from making improvements to lose weight. Training the wrong muscle groups on consecutive days will also counteract your good results. Doing too many sets and exercises per muscle group will also cause overtraining.
Remember that weightlifting, especially in an intense program, produces what’s called "tissue microtrauma," those tiny tears in the muscles that temporarily decrease strength and cause varying degrees of muscle soreness. It is absolutely necessary to provide ample rest time between successive training sessions. Muscles generally require about 48 hours for the resting and rebuilding process before you work them again.
Another example of overtraining is doing duplicating movements of several similar exercises for one specific muscle group. It makes no sense to do three sets of Bench Press with a barbell and then do three sets of Bench Press with dumbbells or Push-ups. Each of these exercises requires exactly the same movement and works the same specific muscle. Instead, it would make much more sense to do bench press for overall middle chest (either barbell, dumbbell, or machine); do incline bench press for upper chest; and do dips for lower-outer chest, for example.
Prevent Getting Stuck in a Plateau
For long-term success, you need to learn how to overcome training plateaus if you want to lose weight. Ideally, you want to always be going through a momentum phase in which you try something new and "shock" your muscles, forcing them to make gains and in helping you lose weight. Eventually however, you will come to a point in your training where you either get bored or stop seeing results.
When this happens it is absolutely crucial that you change what you are doing; this is when you need to get creative by incorporating something new into your program. You can make effective changes in your program in many ways: try new or alternate exercises, change the order that you train your muscles or the order of the exercises, try the very effective techniques we teach within our award-winning Online Fitness Program, and so forth.
Be sure to check out Part Five for additional strategies to lose weight! And don’t forget to take our FREE Fitness Analysis for personalized advice to lose weight and to receive the new e-book, Big Fat Lies, absolutely FREE!
