Fat Burning Tips with Chad Waterbury

What are your top three fat burning tips? Actually, let’s start with three for training and then we’ll go into three for nutrition.

CW: The first step is to make your cardio training short and intense. Tabata’s research taught us that high intensity cardio is the way to go because you’ll boost your anaerobic and aerobic power at the same time, and you’ll stimulate your metabolism to burn calories long after you leave the gym. Low-intensity cardio only burns calories while you’re doing it. High intensity cardio stimulates your metabolism to keep burning calories long after you stop.

Next, for every other workout it’s important to lift weights that are heavy enough to recruit your biggest, strongest muscle fibers. A 6-10 rep maximum is enough to get the job done when you accelerate the lift. There are two reasons why this is important. First, you’ll keep the muscle you have because you’re recruiting all of your muscle fibers. As I’ve mentioned in my books and articles, when you recruit the largest muscle fibers you’re also recruiting all of the other muscle fibers because of the size principle. As the saying goes: if you don’t use it, you lose it. Second, when heavy weights are performed in a full-body circuit with short rest periods, it drastically increases the metabolic cost of a workout. That’s essential for burning fat. But you can’t do much heavy training while cutting fat, so that’s why the next step is so important.

Third, you must perform cardio and cardio strength exercises at top speed.  There are no typical cardio exercises in my world. Instead of jogging on a treadmill I have my clients perform a circuit of, say, split jacks, jumping jacks, and burpees for multiple rounds as fast as possible. Then I have them do exercise pairings that don’t require a lot of weight, but still recruit all your muscle fibers when performed at top speed. I call this “cardio strength” training. A good example is the kettlebell swing and push-up pairing. Start with 13 swings, then immediately drop to the floor and do 13 push-ups. Jump back to your feet and do 12 swings followed by 12 push-ups. Then do 11 swings and 11 push-ups. Continue with this sequence until you reach one rep of each exercise.

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