Let me ask you something about the approach you take to burn fat. What, exactly, do you go to the gym for? Oh, and the answer is not ‘to workout’, by the way.

At least I hope it’s not.

I’ve spent the past 12 years coming as close as you can to living in a gym, and I can tell you categorically that the people who go to the gym simply to ‘go to the gym’ or ‘to workout’, well, that’s pretty much all they achieve.

you don’t burn fat just by ‘working out’

The ‘workout’ gang rarely change their body fat or seem to build any lean muscle, their belly often expands over time rather than shrinks, and to be brutally honest I’m not even sure that what they’re doing could be classified as a workout most of the time.

We’ll come back to that in a moment, but first – another question. What do you do in the gym? How do you spend your time?

Typically when I ask a new client this question I hear something like ‘a couple of group fitness classes a week, 2-3 cardio sessions, and some weight training’. Well, duh, right – I mean that kinda covers everything you can do in most commercial gyms, so what am I expecting to hear?

We’ll come back to that as well:)

if you want to burn fat, you have to PLAN to burn fat!

This might not be as glamorous as the post title implied, but the one simple way you can burn fat faster in the gym is to plan to do so.

And you know I’m not just talking about the power of positive thinking 🙂

So let’s come back to the question of what you do in the gym. I know that the person in front of me is educated on training if I hear something like this:

“I do weight training 3-4 times a week, usually for 45-60 minutes, and at the moment I’m doing a 3-day split program. I usually do some cardio 2-3 times a week either after training or at night, and on the weekend I either go to a yoga class or do something active outdoors”

Do you see the difference? This person has a fat burning plan (I’m using fat burning as the hypothetical goal for the sake of this post, but it could be anything of course :)). They’re talking about what they are doing ‘at the moment’, implying there is some kind of structure. No doubt if I were to ask this person what kind of rep and set range they use, they’d have an answer outside of ‘3 sets of 10’. They might even be using tempo training.

5 steps to ensure your burn fat faster

Okay, okay, I know I said one simple way, but it really has a few parts to it 🙂

1. Decide what you want to achieve
2. Devise a plan to get there, or hire someone to do so (as an indication, some kind of variation of what I wrote earlier would be a great start for fat burning. Perhaps most importantly, be sure that you understand the rules on cardio)
3. Follow the plan for the designated time
4. Guarantee your success by assessing yourself (or having someone else do it) before you begin the plan, at designated periods throughout (every 2 weeks is what I’d recommend), and at the designated end of the plan
5. Repeat steps 1-4

You don’t go into a new business or even a new project without a plan, so why do you go into the gym without one?

Feel free to share your current plan in the comments and I’ll happily give you some feedback!

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