Many people dedicate all is life to find that magic pill, that shortcut to finally have the body of their dreams.

But as you learn and search for a solution, with the time, you realize what’s really matters.

That’s it. I’m talking to you about fat loss.

And what’ means? Is just change your body composition, losing fat while maintaining muscle.

While weight loss is about generate calorie deficit (like bank balance, spend more than you earn), fat loss is about lower the proportion of body fat to lean tissue, improving overall body composition.

As you see this is a bit more challenging.

Some people have a decent amount of muscle but have not that “toned look” because they have a fat layer above. And they think if they focus on losing fat then they would lose muscle too.

If you take the decision to get the leaner aspect you may want to get as fast as you can. But actually, you must take the time if you want to keep muscle mass.

A drastic calorie deficit is unwise to achieve the toned look. Also keep your protein levels high is important to maintain muscle.

Let me tell you some hints that may help you.

First, weight training is crucial if you want a fit looking. The toned physique people desire doesn’t come with lot reps and low weights, comes from heavy lifting and low reps. To retain muscle while in the calorie deficit needed to reduce body fat will require regular strength training.

Second, have more muscle can accelerate the fat loss process, as increased lean muscle increases your resting metabolic rate (in other words, you are burning more calories when you’re in resting state). The more muscle you have, the higher your basal metabolic rate. This means the easier for you will be to keep the weight off once you’ve decided to move into maintenance.

Third, you don’t need to run out of breath and sopping sweat for a workout to be effective. Your body can function with many different energy systems, and we should train them all. There are times to finish sopping sweat, and there are also times to focus on training with quality and control.

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Too Many Calories

Some people say as long as you avoid carbs you can eat more, but this is false because the fewer calories consumed in carbs are consumed in other nutrients.

I know, change the eating habits could be hard for someone.

That’s explain why there is a lot of products trying to evade this and look for an easier solution.

Too Much Fat

Please don’t make the mistake of the no-carbs diet. Some people think that cutting carbs is all you have to do and don’t worry about anything more. Lamentably you can’t just eat bacon and expect to get ripped.

Fat contains a lot more calories per gram than protein or carbs (more than twice). So, in the end, what’s matters is the total of calories beyond the source. If you eat more than your body requires then you will never get in shape.

Also don’t mistake this with a low-fat diet. Because this is as negative as too much fat.

For a healthy body, healthy fats must represent about 20%-30% of your total calories.

Remember, always keep in mind the total calories related to your sex, age and daily activities.

And don’t demonize all carbs because the good ones have an important role in your body health.

Only must reduce refined carbs.

Starving

The most effective way to lose weight is by a calorie deficit, which means consuming fewer calories than you expend.

But if your calorie intake is too low, your body could go into starvation mode. It will start to store fat because it thinks it is not going to get anything.

Your body will simply decrease its metabolic rate so it is burning fewer calories to conserve its energy stores.

The worse thing is this. When your body needs to fuel your daily activities then it will have to get it from somewhere else. Then your body begins to breaking down your lean muscle mass to convert it to glucose and burned for energy.

Training Without Enough Resistance

If you’re changing your eating habits trying to lose fat by a calorie deficit, the strength training goal is maintaining muscle mass. And this is a very important thing to keep in mind.

When your goal is weight loss, with the main focus on fat, the resistance training helps to avoid muscle loss. The reason is in the weight loss process is very hard to control what are you reducing, so this type of workout is very useful to avoid this effect.

Too much Cardio

Contrary to the popular belief cardio is not the main form of training to lose fat.

In fact, excessive cardio leads to an overproduction of cortisol which drives to more abdominal fat.

Cardio is good as a complement of resistance/weight training, but not the main focus.

Sleep

If you don’t sleep enough your insulin sensitivity goes down and your cortisol up.

Both affect negatively the fat loss, and in an extreme form can lead to fat gain.

Another important factor is the growth hormone which boosts during sleep time. If you want to get his benefits then more sleep will be necessary.

Some tips that may help you for better sleep: no caffeine before 6 hours you go to sleep, don’t workout too late and avoid screens (computer, TV, smartphone) two hours before sleep.

Stress

Do you know cortisol? If the answer is no let me explain.

When you get stressed your body produces a hormone known as cortisol. This hormone could raise up the amount of fat in your body if is not controlled. The effect even can counteract the benefits of diet and training.

So, the important thing here is to have good stress management. This may vary among people but there is a lot of options like yoga, meditate, walk at green areas, a pet, avoid negative people, or whatever makes you feel less stressed.

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Here’s an easy fix: Replace carbohydrates with avocados. New findings show that its unique mixture of fiber and fatty acids enhance satiety, reducing the urge to snack.

It’s no secret that Americans usually love eating carbohydrate-rich breakfasts, such as bagels, oatmeal, and hash browns (to name a few). Carbohydrates alone won’t keep you satiated for long, however, especially if these foods lack enough fiber.

In addition, fat helps increase fullness, something which avocados are rich in.

A study published in Nutrients examined this in detail. By giving participants a breakfast containing avocados, they found that it greatly reduced hunger.

If you’re struggling to eat fewer calories too, then this too could work just as fast.

To enjoy, try serving sliced avocado with a nutrient-rich breakfast, such as eggs with vegetables or oatmeal. The combination of fiber, fat, and other nutrients will provide the perfect energy boost to keep you active–but full–for up to several hours.

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The second interpretation is that you’re mentally and physically strong, prepared for anything life throws at you. You’re “built” to endure the stress, pressures and difficulties that come your way throughout your time on this planet. Almost like you’ve created a bulletproof mental and physical fortress, capable to deflect any negatives, that attitude-altering artillery shot at all of us every day.

Correct weight training can give you both of those—and opposite to popular belief, it doesn’t take joint-busting, spine-crushing poundage to make it happen.

Actually, exercise with max weights can be a negative, especially as you get older. Sure, if you’re a young ego-driven dude searching for a monster bench press, heavy training  is the way. Low reps and lots of sets will build your strength to the extreme (but not necessarily lots of muscle) just be careful. There’s a accumulative cost. Some people still dealing with injuries sustained during early powerlifting years.

I’m not expressing powerlifting or power bodybuilding are bad training models. Just that throwing around heavy weights is NOT necessary for you to build an impressive bodybuilder-type physique, a body so muscular that people comment on the size of your arms or the width of your back or the vascularity streaking down your forearms. You can get a muscular look for life, and it doesn’t take soft-tissue damage or as much work as you may think (if you train smart).

Whether you’re 18 and just starting the muscle-building journey, or a 50-something trainee who’s been lifting for decades, lifting smart means exercise in the most efficient, safest and fastest ways to build muscle and burn fat.

I my opinion, Old School New Body is a no-B.S. program. I believe its goal is you to have all the ammunition you need to own a physique that turns heads and raises eyebrows and one that supports your health and wellbeing.

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Actually, there are no studies connecting muscle soreness to hypertrophy. But don’t stop reading yet. You will get some good stuff from being a little sore (and you’ll probably even desire it). But first, you need to know what provoke muscle soreness.

It’s believed that the pain is produced by microtrauma in muscle fibers, and it’s mainly triggered by the negative or eccentric stroke of an exercise (like when you lower a bench press, squat or curl rep).

Once your body repairs those microtears, it follows that the muscle should grow stronger; however, that trauma is in the myofibrils, the force-generating actin and myosin strands in the fiber. Those strands grab onto and pull across one another to cause muscular contraction. When you control the negative stroke of a rep, there is friction as those strands drag across each other in an attempt to slow movement speed to prevent injury—and that dragging, it’s believed, is what inflicts the microtrauma.

That’s a simple way to explain it, but you get the idea. So it looks that some growth can happen after muscle soreness is repaired, but it’s in the myofibrils. More and more research is beginning to reveal that those force-generating strands do not help the majority of muscle size; serious mass comes via sarcoplasmic expansion. That’s the “energy fluid” in the fibers that’s filled with glycogen (from carbs), ATP, calcium, noncontractile proteins, etc.

So, if soreness is a signal of only small amounts of muscle growth, why look for it? Well, even small amounts of growth contribute to overall mass. Most of us want every fraction we can rasp up. But the real goal to seek some soreness is to burn more fat.

When the myofibrils are damaged by focusing the eccentric, the body tries to repair them as quickly as possible. That repair process takes energy, a lot of which comes from body fat. The process generally takes many days, so your metabolism is stoked to a higher level for 48 hours or more, helping you get leaner faster (Note: High-intensity interval training, like sprints alternated with slow jogs, damages muscle fibers during the intense intervals, the sprints, which is why HIIT burns more fat in the long run than steady-state cardio where no muscle damage take place).

Do you need heavy negative-only sets to obtain that extra bit of size and metabolic momentum? That’s one way, but negative-accentuated, or X-centric, sets may be a better, safer way.

For an X-centric set, you take somewhat lighter poundage than your 10RM (repetition maximum) and raise the weight in one second and lower it in six. That one-second-positive/six-second-negative cadence does some great things, starting with myofibrillar trauma for some soreness. While you’re dealing with that extra post-workout muscle pain, remember that it can build the myofibrils and that it’s stoking your metabolism for the time of the repair process for more fat burning.

The second big advantage is sarcoplasmic expansion. At seven seconds per rep and eight reps per set, you obtain almost an entire minute of tension time (seven times eight is 56 seconds). A TUT (time under tension) of 50 to 60 seconds is something most bodybuilders never attain, which is a shame because that’s optimal stress for an anabolic cascade and this is the ideal way to train as you age.

If you’re into moderate-poundage, high-fatigue mass building, then the F4X method featured in the Old School New Body method is for you. You can use X-centric as the last set of the sequence. Reduce the weight and do a one-up-six-down cadence. You’ll get sore, build some extra size and—bonus—burn for fat. How great is that?

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And I’m not talking about interval cardio, although the weight-training method I mention here (at the end) has an HIIT feel to it. That’s the F4X method, (featured in Old School New Body) which is moderate-weight, high-fatigue training with short rests between sets. It burns more fat and pumps up your muscles a lot too. Here’s the workout:

You take a weight with which you can get 15 reps, but only do 10; rest 30 seconds, then do it again—and so on for four sets. On the fourth set, you go to failure, and if you get 10 reps, you increase the weight on the exercise at your next workout. Observe how those sets are like intervals with short breaks between—you can even step between sets to burn extra calories, but there’s more.

1. While that training style does great things for muscle growth, via myofibrillar and sarcoplasmic expansion, you also get loads of muscle burn. That lactic acid pooling has a spiking effect on your growth hormone output—and GH is a potent fat burner. Fire up muscle burning to get your GH churning (GH also amplifies other anabolic hormones, so it affects both muscle and rippedness).

2. If you do the reps correctly on each set, you’ll also get myofibrillar trauma. The myofibrils are the force-generating strands in muscle fibers. By “damaging” them with slower, controlled negative hits, you force the need for extra energy during recovery. That is, your body runs hotter while you’re out of the gym as it revs to repair the microtears.

To achieve that additional fat-burning trauma, utilize one-second to lift and three-second to lower on all 10 reps of all four sets. On a bench press that’s one second up and three seconds down. It’s the slow lowering that will generate the metabolic momentum after your training (That rep speed will also offer you 40 seconds of tension time on every set, an ideal hypertrophic TUT.)

3. Now if you really desire to get some blubber-busting microtrauma, try your last set of a F4X sequence in X-centric style. That’s one-second to lift and six-second to lower. You may have to decrease the weight, but it will be worth it. Try for eight of those, 56 seconds of tension time, and you should feel the effects the next day. Your muscles will be soring, but it’s a good indication that fat is baking.

F4X for a GH surge, slower negatives for fat-burning micro trauma and X-centric for even more time under tension and fat reduction. It all adds up to faster leanness with less stinginess—because you’ll need less cardio.

Not familiarized with the F4X method? Click Here to get more information about it.

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