00:00
Hey guys, it’s Cori from Redefining Strength. Welcome to the Fitness Hacks podcast. This is a show where I share all my free workout and nutrition tips. I’m not going to ever fill this episode with sponsorships or ask you to buy anything. All I ask in return is, if you’re enjoying the podcast, to leave a review or leave a five-star rating or, even better, share it with someone you think it might help. This will only take a few minutes and would mean the world to me and possibly change the life of someone you know. So let’s jump right in.

00:29
The best workouts for fat loss are not necessarily cardio workouts. They might actually be strength workouts, and it’s because, even though your goal may be fat loss, you want to focus on building muscle with your workouts. So often we do think of them just as a chance to burn more calories, and this is ultimately what sabotages our long-term success, because you cannot exercise your diet. You can’t just try and burn more calories, create the deficit through your training alone. You need to adjust your nutrition. So if you want fat loss, you’ve got to adjust your nutrition. But then, when our workouts complement it and all the systems work together, we see better results, faster and lasting results, and part of what helps us see those fat loss results faster from our nutritional changes is the fact that we’re building lean muscle, which helps keep our metabolism healthy. It also means that we don’t have to slash our calories as low, because so often when we cut our calories super low and then we add in more cardio, we end up losing muscle, which means we’re burning fewer calories at rest, which means we need to eat less. Try and keep creating the deficit through our diet. But if we actually focus on building muscle with our training, then we’re going to increase our metabolic rate. We’re going to need to even increase our calories while staying in that deficit, because we’re burning more calories at rest.

01:35
So your focus, if you want to lose weight with your training, should be on building lean muscle, and I wanted to give you six tips to really help you design those workouts that work, because one size doesn’t fit all and we do have to recognize too that it’s not cardio or strength. There’s a whole spectrum and continuum we can really work on or work along as we’re designing our workouts. So just remember that you can get cardiovascular benefits while improving your muscle mass and doing that strength work, and you can also be improving your cardio and also build strength in that aspect too. So there are a lot of different ways you can design to make it really work for your time, your schedule, your goals. Now, I’m not telling you not to do cardio if you are an endurance athlete or you really enjoy it, but if you are solely focused on improving your training regime for fat loss, these tips will help.

02:17
So, number one, see your workouts as a chance to build muscle, which is sort of what I just went over. But I bring this up because I want you thinking about how can I lift heavier, not how can I cut out more rest and feel more slaughtered and see my calorie burn be higher in my watch. The more you are focused on building strength, okay, and then building lean muscle, and that means using a variety of rep ranges. I know often we think I only should go lower rep range or stay in the hypertrophy rep range, but they’ve shown that a diversity is really key, which I’m going to touch on a little bit more shortly. But you want to focus on building strength because as much as yes, maximal strength is that one to five hypertrophy reps, that sort of six to twelve and 15 to 20 is that strength endurance, all those things build together, because if you can lift more weight and move more weight because you’ve worked on maximal strength, you’re gonna move more weight during that hypertrophy of your rep range. You’re just gonna see better results. And if you have that strength endurance, you’re gonna be able to do more reps to failure which is gonna help you recruit more muscle fibers, which is gonna help you see better results as well. Not to mention, you’re gonna recover a lot faster between different rounds of your strength work which will ultimately pay off. So you want to think about how can I build muscles efficiently, which means focusing on loads lifted, okay, and not just making yourself feel completely destroyed. You actually sometimes you want to feel like you’ve recovered so much the next round you can go to true 100% intensity, versus like feeling like the same weights are even heavier than extra on whether to feel light or like you can go up okay and challenge yourself.

03:34
Tip number two is use a diversity of rep ranges and realize pushing to failure is key. They’ve shown that really there’s nothing necessarily magical, but only staying in that six to twelve reps. Well, that can be really good in terms of creating the right training density for you. While moving heavy loads, we do want to use a variety of rep ranges and we can’t say, oh well, I’m trying to get bigger, you know, build muscles, so I’m not gonna do the higher rep ranges. Okay. Often we don’t do that because even myself as a lifter, I like to pick things up and put them down right. I try and avoid higher up ranges on some moves because they’re uncomfortable. But you need those higher rep ranges, especially after heavier lifts, to really work that muscle to failure, failure. But no matter which rep range you use, you want to focus on that failure point. Okay.

04:11
This doesn’t mean you have to feel absolutely destroyed, like you can’t even like lift the weight at all, but it does mean that you can’t just stop because it felt hard and you hit the top of the rep range. That’s actually something I wanted to touch on. Is that double progression? Because I see so often we just think about lifting a heavier weight or using a harder variation and we don’t really understand the nuance and the rep range we’re given. Usually you are given a rep range of three to five if it’s maximal strength, or six to twelve, that if it is in hypertrophy, even eight to twelve to keep you in that higher rep range or 15 to 20, right. And so we’ll say, okay, I can do the top end of the rep range. Great, I felt. Challenge, that’s good.

04:43
But if you can do that top end of that rep range at any point with any weight, you need to go up in weight the next round until you hit even a weight, especially the more experience you are. You can barely do that bottom end of that rep range and maybe even on that final round of that week you can’t do the bottom end of the rep range like I love when a client hits eight reps consistently and on that final round they can’t do eight without a rest pause where they do six and then pause and do eight or two to get that eight, because that means that they really maxed out with that load and took it to failure. And so the next week I might have them stay at that and they might get nine, nine, nine and then finally hit that eight on the last one, right. And then once they work up in that rep range, that we might add loads from there as well, depending on how advanced you are, how much you really want to work on that maximal strength and you feel comfortable with your form or recruitment patterns. You might stay lower in that rep range, consistently, making sure that you’re always sort of adding weight to max out only a rep or two above the bottom. But if you’re hitting that top end of the rep range, I can tell you right now, no matter how hard it feels, you need to go up, okay, and if you can still hit it, go up again. But don’t fear. Also with this, when you’re doing the two different rep ranges or multiple different rep ranges, doing the back-to-back, you want to think about, yes, potentially lifting heavier, doing more compound movements with the lower reps because you can move more loads, and then, as you go over your workout, potentially doing more isolated movements for the higher reps or for the stubborn areas. But you can also think about using things like compound burners where you’re doing that, you know, hypertrophy rep range of even 8 to 12 reps for a compound them. Or you’re going heavier followed by a higher rep move where it’s more isolated, because then you’re really working a muscle group to failure and that work to failure is going to create that muscle growth which will ultimately help you look leaner, be stronger, functionally more fit, have a higher, healthier metabolic rate.

06:18
Okay, and it becomes harder, guys, to build and retain muscle as we get older, because the hormonal stimulus is not as optimal as it was when we were younger. Often we have to make adjustments to our fueling. But we also want to do more in our training. We need almost more of that stressor in our workouts to create the same stimulus for growth and that same muscle building response. Okay, so you got to use those rep ranges. Sometimes you got to do the higher reps. Even if you only like to lift for lower reps, okay, you can’t fear them. But that doesn’t mean going light for those higher rep ranges because you don’t want to turn it just cardio. No weight should ever be light. Okay, even with higher rep ranges. That should challenge you for those reps. So it should always feel heavy for whatever reps you’re doing.

06:54
Tip number three is focus most on compound moves, and I bring this up because isolation exercises are super key for stubborn areas. We need to include them. But so often when we’re short on time, we do those things and then we don’t burn the maximum amount of calories we can. We don’t build the maximal amount of muscle we can. In that time, if you can move a heavier weight, you are going to see more muscle growth from it. Okay, with compound moves, we are using more big, large muscles all at once to move the weight. We’re gonna see better benefits. Okay, that’s why we want to focus on those. However, yes, if you do really want to build more muscle in your arms or build your glutes or build your quads or build a specific aspect, that’s where you’re going to use those isolation moves to help take that muscle group to failure. But if you are especially short on time, focus on those compound movements. They’re bigger bang for your buck. You’re going to move heavier loads and that quality movement of heavier loads is what is going to stimulate muscle growth, stimulate the best metabolic response.

07:44
Then, tip number four don’t do body parts splits. I have no problem if you really can train for hours in the gym because you have the ability to have the rest periods. If you really like that workout design, doing body parts splits where you’re doing chest one day, back another day, arms another day, but this is the least efficient schedule possible. When you’re working some of the smaller muscle groups, you’re really not going to end up burning as many calories in the day. We don’t want our workouts just to be about calories burned. This isn’t optimal if we are looking for efficient workouts to lose fat and gain muscle and create a better hormonal environment, especially as we’re getting older. Think about how you can work more large muscle groups in each and every session. Again, going through menopause, we need to create the stimulus for muscle growth through a bigger stressor. We want to work larger muscles in each session if we can. That might mean we do upper lower to give our body a break. It might mean we do full body splits. Focus more anterior, posterior over the week. We want to think about how can we work at least one or two large muscle groups before we even isolate if we do have stubborn areas. Can’t just do body parts splits if you really want the most efficient thing, especially as you’re getting older.

08:49
Tip number five use cardio strategically. As much as I say, don’t turn your workouts into cardio. As much as I say cardio is not the best thing for fat loss. Even though we tend to turn to it, this doesn’t mean you want to avoid it. Cardio has great health benefits and it can even be used to create the stimulus for growth. We can make it again on that continuum. It doesn’t have to be cardio or strength.

09:08
We can make our conditioning more strength-oriented or we can make our strength work more metabolically oriented by how we include cardio. This might mean doing more circuits where you rest in areas in another area of work so that your blood does get pumping as you’re alternating areas, especially if you’re short on time. That can be great. It can be using intervals over just set reps and sets. Sometimes when we do an interval of work we do more reps than we would have done had we just had eight to 12 reps. We force ourselves to use rest pause technique and eat things out. It does work on that. Strength endurance takes us potentially more to failure. Then we also want to think how can we use sprints even after our strength work, especially when we’re short on time. If we add in that little five-minute burner at the end, that might be more metabolically focused, more conditioning-focused. That’s going to help us recover faster so we can get more out of our strength training routines. It’s going to help us bring that heart rate down faster if we do that conditioning.

09:57
Thank you for the little short intervals. This can be more like sprint training or it can be more like speed training. I’m going to separate those two out because with sprint training, you might have 10 seconds of work with 15, 20 seconds of rest or even only 10 seconds of rest. It might not be a longer rest to work, but you’re keeping those intervals very short so you can go to high intensity even though you’re not fully recovering, which is a great stressor for your body and can really be helpful during menopause. If you want to work on that speed and that true recovery, you’re going to think, how can I do 10 to 30 seconds interval work with two to three times the rest? Because you actually want to be training speed so you don’t fully recover, you’re going to be training slowness because you’re not going to be able to go as fast as you did before. You need that longer rest interval between. Consider even just five to 10 minutes of that sprint work, sometimes after a strength routine. Or consider how you’re designing your strength workouts to be a little bit more metabolically focused with that circuit training, the density sets, or the intervals.

10:48
Then tip number six, do more mobility. This is the least sexy part of it, I know, but the more mobility work you do, the more you’re going to recruit the correct muscles at the correct times as efficiently as possible, which is not only going to help you avoid falls and fractures in everyday life and be more powerful and more explosive, but this really does improve your strength because of the improvements in my body connection, because being stronger is about how quickly and efficiently you can recruit muscles to the right extents, in the right orders, even to the right amount of muscle fibers being called to do the movement. All of that is efficiency in movement, and that’s what strength truly is. It’s not just brute force. The more we do that mobility work, the more we’re able to work through a full range of motion, the more we’re able then to maintain that full range of motion, but the more we’re able to recruit the correct muscles to the correct extents because the joints are fully mobile. It also includes in the mobility work that activation which establishes that my body connection, and activation alone drives muscle growth. It’s been shown to really improve muscle hypertrophy. So not only are we helping ourselves potentially recover, we’re getting more out of our training sessions, and we’re helping ourselves avoid injury, which means we can train more consistently without being sidelined by different things popping up, which helps us see better results faster. So mobility work has a lot of different benefits, from injury prevention to recovery, to being able to actually go harder, even in our sessions, to see better muscle hypertrophy or gains from those sessions.

12:04
Okay, so, using these six tips, start to make small tweaks, to work on design and then make sure you’re designing a weekly progression that you repeat over and over again, because that’s going to show you the best results, because you’re able to build and know what isn’t isn’t working and even track those numbers over time, because that’s the way to track progress. If you’re randomly stringing things together, there might be one week where, because you did it in a different order, you don’t feel as strong or you can’t go up in weight. Okay. And then, even as you’re adjusting your nutrition, you’ll see how your nutrition impacts things, to even know hey, I have gone on more of a mini-cut, my energy is lower, so then I need to still maintain my numbers from the week before. But here’s how I’m going to do it with rest-pause technique or longer rest intervals or whatever else, so that I’m not going backward on my training. But having that clear progression really allows you to drive yourself forward faster, okay. So don’t randomly string things together. Use these six tips to really design workouts that work for you.

12:52
Thanks for listening to the Fitness Hacks Podcast. Again, this is the place where I share all my free workout and nutrition tips. I’m never going to run sponsorships or ask you to buy anything. All I ask in return is, if you’re enjoying the podcast, leave a rating review or share it with someone you think it might help. This will only take a few minutes, and it would mean the world to me and possibly change the life of someone you know.