Many fitness specialists believe that body fat percentage is a far
more important health factor than your
weight. it certainly affects the
way you look. the one thing body fat percentage affects more than
anything is how your stomach looks. to put it simply, if you don’t
sufficiently reduce your body fat percentage, you will never have the
kind of abs most people desire. another thing you need to know is that
it’s possible for almost everyone to get to that low level of body fat
percentage.
how can you lower your body fat percentage?
in order to lower your body fat percentage, you need to create a
calorie deficit. this means that you need to burn more calories than you
take in. to do this in the most efficient yet easier way is to combine
the right kind of exercise with the right diet to burn off maximum fat
in as little time as possible.
exercise
as far as exercise goes, you need to get your entire body into shape. to
do so, you need to do cardiovascular routines 3 times a week. when you
do cardio, make sure not to waste your time on low intensity activities
like running at the same pace for 30-40 minutes. even though you’ll burn
a lot of calories, your body soon becomes accustomed to that monotonous
pace. a better thing to do would be to engage in interval training in
which you change the intensity level of your cardio every few minutes.
for example, you start by 5 minutes power walking, then change to 2
minutes of sprinting at a difficult pace, than go to light running,
sprinting again, power walking and so on. when you do that, you work
your body along a wide range of intensity levels. this develops your
heart and metabolism much better than monotonous cardio (which is also
boring and time consuming) and helps you to reduce your body fat
percentage much faster.
another thing you need to do to reduce your body fat percentage is to
do weight trainings for every part of your body. some people try to
target certain areas of their bodies which they find more fatty than
others. this can have some results in terms of muscle development, but
little to do with your overall body fat. to better reduce your body fat
percentage, work every muscle group in your body 2-3 times a week (it’s
alright to do cardio and strength on the same session).
diet
the second thing you need to do in order to lower your body fat
percentage is to go on a regular and effective diet. this doesn’t mean
starving yourself. actually, starving yourself can seriously undermine
your efforts to lower body fat. a good diet is one which is made up of a
great deal of vegetables, fresh fruit, lean protein like eggs, turkey,
and chicken breasts, and complex carbohydrates like whole wheat bread,
brown rice, whole flour pasta, yams, and potatoes. this is a diet in
which you eat 4-6 small meals each day instead of 3 large ones and also
drink a large amount of water each day.
the secret to getting super lean – i’m talking about being ripped,
not just “average body fat” – is all about mastering the art of
“peaking.” most people do not have a clue about what it takes to reach
the type of low body fat levels that reveal to see ripped six-pack abs,
muscle striations, vascularity and extreme muscular definition, so they
go about it completely the wrong way.
here’s a case in point: one of my newsletter subscribers recently sent me this question:
“tom, on your burn the fat website, you wrote:
‘who better to model than bodybuilders and fitness competitors? no
athletes in the world get as lean as quickly as bodybuilders and fitness
competitors. the transformations they undergo in 12 weeks prior to
competition would boggle your mind! only ultra-endurance athletes come
close in terms of low body fat levels, but endurance athletes like
triathaletes and marathoners often get lean at the expense of chewing up
all their muscle. some of them are nothing but skin and bone.’
“tom, there seems to be a contradiction unless i’m missing something.
why do bodybuilders and fitness competitors have to go through a 12
week ‘transformation’ prior to every event instead of staying ‘lean and
mean’ all the time? if they practice the secrets exposed in your book,
they should be staying in shape all the time instead of having to work
at losing fat prior to every competitive event, correct??”
there is a logical explanation for why bodybuilders and other
physique athletes (fitness and figure competitors), don’t remain
completely ripped all year round, and it’s the very reason they are able
to get so ripped on the day of a contest…
you can’t hold a peak forever or it’s not a “peak”, right? what is
the definition of a peak? it’s a high point surrounded by two lower
points isn’t it?
therefore, any shape you can stay in all year round is not your “peak” condition.
the intelligent approach to nutrition and training (which almost all
bodybuilders and fitness/figure competitors use), is to train and diet
in a seasonal or cyclical fashion and build up to a peak, then ease off
to a maintenance or growth phase
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