Do you want to know how to triple your results from your resistance training? Why
wouldn’t you?

Properly conducted resistance training can give you startling fat loss results, along with muscle and strength gains. On top of that, when using the techniques I describe in the Fat Burning Furnace eBook, you’ll also receive “top drawer” cardiovascular health benefits. And all from 2-3 workouts each week lasting just 15-20 minutes on average.

But, you’ve got to do them right, not like the average resistance trainer is taught these days. Walk into any fitness center or gym and you’ll see at least half if not more of the exercisers performing their workouts in a less than optimal way…and that’s being kind.

So let’s get right to one of the ways you can triple your resistance training results immediately. It has to do with how you specifically perform the repetitions. To better understand this, let’s examine our 3 different strength levels in any resistance exercise.

Take the dumbbell curl exercise for the biceps for example. In this movement, you begin with the weight down at your sides. You proceed to smoothly and slowly curl the dumbbells up to your shoulders. This movement trains your positive strength level. You should then pause briefly and contract your biceps at the top of the movement. This trains your static strength level.

Finally, you would want to lower the dumbbells slowly back to the starting position. This trains your negative strength level.

Now the problem is that most people don’t even bother with the static or negative strength levels. They put all of the focus on the “lifting” or positive portion of the movement, while not pausing or contracting sufficiently at the top, and not taking nearly enough time on the negative portion.

In effect they are getting only one third of the benefits that this exercise can give them. Actually, it’s less than that because the static and negative portions can actually create deeper inroads into your existing strength levels. This is something you want, as it will lead to greater progress faster assuming you give your body appropriate time to recover.

Why do we care so much about strength? Outside of the obvious reasons, strength leads to muscle growth, which leads to a faster resting metabolism, which leads to faster fat loss and various other improved health factors that could take up another couple of pages at least .

In the Fat Burning Furnace eBook & Deluxe Program, I take these concepts to the next level. Here we are using techniques to maximize your static and negative strength levels in order to push the limits of your lean and healthy genetic potential to the max. That’s when the real fun begins.

So make sure not to neglect the static and negative strength levels when performing your next resistance training workout. Don’t waste the opportunity to triple your results!

If you don’t know how to properly judge your fat loss or fat burning progress from a particular exercise or nutrition regimen, you’re probably not going to be very successful. It’s just like in sports…you have to know the score if you want to know who wins the game. So in our fat loss and fitness efforts, we have to know our body’s score if we want to know if we’re winning, or in this case, losing.

I’ve found that a big mistake a lot of people make in judging their fat loss progress in the pursuit of a fit body is to be a slave to the scale. The scale is a useful tool, no doubt, but I’ve seen far too many people stop doing the right things (like proper weight training) just because they gained a pound on the scale.

But you can’t blame yourself if you’ve been in this mode before…for years most of us were taught to watch the scale carefully when measuring if we did or did not burn fat. But your body can fluctuate a few pounds up or down at different times of the day, every day. This doesn’t mean you’ve burned or gained fat, so following the scale can play games with your mind.

Another big problem with using the scale as your sole judge of progress has become clear with many people adding lean muscle to their bodies recently.

Muscle weighs more than fat, so let’s say you been following a properly conducted resistance training routine for the past few months. You’ve gotten stronger and you’ve also added muscle to your body. If you’re adding pounds of lean muscle to your body, you might see an up-tick in what the scale says. But assuming you’re not gaining fat weight, it’s a good thing. It’s not about weight loss, it’s about fat loss.

More muscle means more calories devoted to building that muscle and keeping it alive. It also means your metabolism will get faster and become more efficient at burning fat. You’ll see that number on the scale drop soon enough, as the new muscle has created a calorie deficit in your daily food intake.

What we really should be looking at here is body fat percentage, or how much your total weight is made up of body fat. Most men will be more than happy with their bodies when they get into the 12-15% range, and most women will be satisfied with a fat percentage of around 16-20. So go out and get a skin caliper, which is fairly inexpensive, or another measurement device so you can keep track of your relative body fat percentage. If it’s going down, keep doing what you’re doing, and don’t even look at that scale!

Another tool I recommend using when judging your fat loss progress is the tried and true mirror in your bathroom. Now, this may sound simple, but use the mirror to judge your fat loss and muscle gain.

Combined with liberal use of your scale and keeping tabs on your body fat percentage, your mirror will provide all you’ll need to judge your progress. The great thing about the mirror is that you’ll get great motivation from seeing your body change right before your eyes, and it will spur you on to even further progress!

The other important aspect of judging your fat loss progress is creating realistic expectations of your new body. As I teach my Fat Burning Furnace students, our friends in the fitness industry often use the genetically superior to advertise their products and programs, and this can easily deceive you subconsciously into thinking all you have to do is follow their advice to look like the cover boy or girl.

Well, I’m here to tell you that even if you have the most efficient plan or program, you still may never look like your favorite physique superstar or model.

Research tells us that we are a product of our genetic inheritance. We all have our own inherited physical characteristics. For instance, some of us carry more fat in our bellies than others. Some of us have more muscle fibers in our legs and arms. Some of us carry more fat cells in our hips and thighs. Some of us are short, some are tall, some have dark hair, some have blue eyes, etc.

Some of us lose fat and gain muscle easily, some don’t. While this may come as no surprise, it is important to remember so we don’t sabotage our efforts in the gym or at the dinner table trying to burn fat. What I mean by that is, just because you don’t lose fat in your belly at the same rate as your best friend doesn’t mean you’re doing the wrong things to lose it.

You can only compare yourself to you. Lying in you right now is your very own best body – your own strong, lean, and healthy physique. Everyone’s is different. Yours might be highlighted by broad shoulders and powerful arms. Or maybe it’s your slender and muscular waist that frames your body.

So don’t feel chained by your genetic makeup, feel liberated, knowing that you have the power to reshape and transform what you were given.

With the combination of the right knowledge and developed habits, you can burn fat fast and make such improvements in your body that you’ll impress almost everyone you know. I’ve seen it happen with my friends, family, and students…I’m talking about people seeing them and saying wow!

And more importantly, you’ll feel great knowing you’ve done all you can to live the rest of your life with the body you’re truly capable of…and that is just an awesome and empowering feeling.

In order to reap the benefits from the intense exercise I recommend to my Fat Burning Furnace students, you must get adequate rest. I can’t stress this fact enough. In fact, rest is just as important, if not more important that the actual exercise.

During the high intensity resistance exercise that my students perform, the muscles experience tiny injuries or tears. The body’s response is to adapt and repair, getting stronger and larger muscles, which of course leads to burning more fat and a leaner body.

But this growth and repair process won’t take place if the body is not allowed the time to do its job. Too often, people rush back into the gym, as many have been inundated with the “more is better” axiom when it comes to exercise. But if we don’t get out of the body’s way and let it do its magic, we will experience poor results. We won’t burn fat like we want to, and we will just end up demotivated or possibly give up our efforts altogether.

If you don’t get enough rest or sleep, you’ll have a very difficult time building the fat-burning muscle that will transform your body. And you’ll also have a tough time burning fat off too! That’s why we can’t work out too long or too often when using a sufficient intensity level. When giving the body an intense stimulus, such as proper weight training, you can’t keep hammering it into the ground.

If you did this, you’d quickly over train your muscles and negate your body’s ability to recover from exercise. Your immune system could become so worn down in fact, that you might even get sick…this happened to me a few times in the past when I wasn’t paying attention to getting adequate rest and sleep.

And this repair and recover process doesn’t happen overnight, it usually takes 2 days or more, So make sure to keep between 1-3 days of rest between your properly conducted resistance training workouts, or you will be short-circuiting your chances of success to burn fat and build lean, strong, muscle.

Now that we know how important rest is to burning fat and building muscle, we also must understand the most important component of rest…otherwise know as sleep. Sleep is the ultimate recovery tool, and not only for recovery from exercise. It’s a recovery tool from any stress you take in throughout the day.

Whether it’s from family pressures, work issues, or finances, etc., increased stress can be dissolved by adequate sleep. And don’t think you can burn fat maximally when you’re over-stressed by other things in your life. A high stress level can shut down the effectiveness of your ability to burn fat, among other things.

So make sure to get adequate sleep. What’s ideal? I would recommend no less than seven or more than nine hours. In fact, seven and half hours per night might be the perfect amount!

Research has shown that we sleep in cycles of 90 minutes or so. It has been suggested that if we wake up too far before or after one of these 90 minute cycles, you will probably feel groggy for a good part of the day. So try the 5 90 minutes sleep cycles, or 7 and a half hours…you’ll most likely wake up feeling well-rested and energized, and your fat burning furnace will show it’s appreciation, allowing you to burn more fat faster.

The majority of exercisers today still rely on long duration moderate paced aerobic exercise as their primary routine to burn fat fast.  But recent studies have shown that this is a big, I mean big mistake.  In fact, you could say that the whole aerobics explosion of a few decades past was one of the biggest mistakes in the health and fitness industry.  Why?

There are several reasons, but I’ll focus on the two main issues here.  When you exercise at a moderate pace for extended periods of time (as in the typically recommended percent of your target heart rate), your body is burning fat during the exercise.  While this may sound good, it’s actually bad news. 

This sends a signal to your body to keep a certain amount of stored fat available for your next workout.  You’re essentially telling it that it needs fat available to burn, ‘because you’ll be doing this exercise again.  So while we may be burning some calories during this exercise, after the exercise is over, our body begins storing up some fat for the next workout.  Obviously not what we’re looking for in terms of maximum ability to burn fat fast.

The other big concern with moderately paced aerobic exercise performed several times per week is that it trains your body (heart, lungs, muscles, etc.) to become efficient.  Again, this may sound good, but what is actually happening is bad for long term health.  You are working only within your existing aerobic limits, without improving your aerobic capacity. 

This is important because your aerobic capacity is what determines how your body responds in times of physical, emotional, and mental stress.  If you reduce your capacity for work, as you do in this type of exercise, you’re reducing your long term health, no to mention a poor chance of burning fat.

The good news is, you can reverse these effects by instead focusing your workouts on high intensity resistance training, with workouts that last 15-20 minutes on average, and can only be performed 2-3 times per week. 

These workouts will burn carbohydrates instead of fat during the workout, and will cause your body to use its fat stores to replenish the burned carbs over the next 24 hours, after the workout is done!  This type of work will also increase your reserve capacity and thus your ability to handle all types of stress, leading to lasting health and fitness…and 24/7 fat burning.  Nice!

But the exercise must be performed correctly to be effective, and that means using sufficient intensity, and keeping your rest periods between exercises and sets down to 60 seconds or less.  

The students of my Fat Burning Furnace method know this, and are reaping the benefits.  When you think about how little time you have to spend compared to the typically recommended methods to get these fat burning and health creating results, it’s almost magical.

By now, most people realize that adding lean muscle mass to your body does wonders for your metabolism and fat loss, as well as a host of other benefits that allow you to live out your life as healthy as possible.

Unfortunately, most people I see performing weight training or resistance training at the gym are spending too much time with the exercise and not working hard enough.  They’re not going to burn very much fat this way.

The secret I’ve found is that training for lean muscle and strength requires the proper application of three vital elements that are often ignored by those who attempt it.  Those three elements are:

-Intensity

-Volume & Frequency

-Progression

The intensity is how hard it is to perform for you, given your current condition.  The volume and frequency are how much and how often you perform the exercise.  The progression is related to how much the demands increase from workout to workout.

Most times, weight training, is carried on for too long and performed too many times per week.  It is unfortunately treated much the same way as so-called fat burning aerobic exercise.  But they are vastly different forms of exercise.  In fact, they’re complete opposites.

Aerobic exercise typically is characterized by low to moderate intensity, high volume and frequency, and little progression.  Anaerobic exercise, or weight training, must be performed at a high intensity, lower volume and frequency, and with progression to be as effective as possible.

No amount of weight training performed at a low or moderate intensity will provide significant muscle or strength building benefit beyond the first few weeks.  On a high level view, it is simply the combination of sufficient intensity, coupled with attempting to increase either the number of repetitions of a weight training exercise or the amount of weight used each and every workout that will keep your body evolving into the ultimate fat burning machine!

You also have to pay attention to other details when creating an effective and efficient routine to maximize your workout and minimize your time spent in the gym.  Why?  Because perhaps even more important that the workout itself is the rest period that follows.  You’re not going to get stronger or more muscular if you don’t rest.

You see, when you strength train properly, you are creating tiny injuries to your muscles.  You then have to let the body repair itself, and then overcompensate and build upon the already existing amount of muscle mass you have.  If you workout again before that process in completed, you’ll experience lackluster, if any, muscle building or fat burning results.

So make sure to get proper rest between workouts, which typically means a minimum of 1 to 3 full days of rest between properly executed resistance workouts.

Now upon hearing the idea that you’ve got add muscle to your body to ensure the maximum fat burning environment, a lot of people, women especially, start thinking, “But I don’t want to get bigger, I want to lose weight!”  But this is such a shame, because it’s very unlikely to happen, and countless women are losing out on these fat burning benefits because of it.

You see, most men and almost all women simply lack the necessary genetic traits required to produce such muscle gains that would cause them to look bulky or overly-developed to most people.  These traits include testosterone levels, muscle fiber makeup, muscle belly length, and others.

Those competitive bodybuilders you’ve seen on TV and in the magazines are the genetic cream of the crop for muscle development and they are typically on heavy doses of anabolic steroids, growth hormone, and other bodybuilding drugs.  Don’t be fooled by these images, or those that scare you into thinking this way.  Also, lean muscle is more compact that fat, as it takes up less space in your body, so you will actually be getting smaller when replacing the fat on your body with lean muscle.

Please understand that you’re putting yourself in the best position to succeed with your fat loss and fitness goals when you perform properly conducted intense resistance training, no matter who you are.

But make sure you understand and apply the three critical principles I discussed above.  If you don’t, you’ll ultimately be unhappy with your results, both in your ability to burn fat and realize the lean, strong, and healthy body you deserve.