Exercises, Reps, and How 3% Isn't Going to Help You Lose Fat

Exercises, Reps, and How 3% Isn't Going to Help You Lose Fat
By Dan Grant
dangrantfitness.com

When choosing exercises for your program you need to consider what exercises are going to be most beneficial for your goals.

What you want to do during your workouts is use as much muscle as possible. That means multi-joint exercises (squats, bench, pullups, deadlifts, rows, presses) are best because they will work more muscle then a single joint exercise (bicep curl, tricep kickback).

Take into consideration the size of your muscles as well. For example, doing squats are far more beneficial then bicep curls. Why?

Well your biceps are roughly only 3% of your entire muscle on your body. Doing the squat works over 50% of your total muscle.

So when you're thinking from a fat loss perspective, working out your bigger muscles will build you an overall greater lean muscle growth. The result of that is a higher metabolism, which is of course, what you want because you'll burn a higher amount of fat throughout the day. (My note: You will also burn more calories performing compound exercises than isolation movements because of the size and number of muscles you'll be using.)

Do I have my clients perform bicep curls? A little bit. Most of time we'll stick to 3-6 sets a week and actually push it kind of heavy for 6-10 reps.

Same thing applies with tricep specific exercises, EXCEPT we'll do 10-15 reps because I've found that the stress put on the elbow joints doing a heavier weight under 10 reps increases the risk of injury by a fair bit.

Generally we'll stick between 6-12 reps for most exercises but I'm going to mention that in the next email.

hope that helps,

Cheers,

Dan Grant
dangrantfitness.com

PS - Remember, look at the pros and cons of what you're doing. If it's increasing the risk of injury then re-evaluate. That's why i rarely do long cardio with my clients and it's also the reason we stick with over 10 reps for lying tricep extensions.

Exercises, Reps, and how 3% isn't going to help you lose fat