The Truth about Exercise, Fat Loss, and Fitness

This is fitness model Jennifer Nicole Lee. Check out some of her workout videos on youtube. (there's one below) The videos feature strength training and other high intensity exercises. She does high quality metabolic training, and the results are incredible. She has an exercise program available to help anyone achieve similar results.
HOW TO LOOK LIKE A FITNESS MODEL WITHOUT BEING ONE
My name is Jennifer Nicole Lee. My weight loss success story has been featured on Oprah Winfrey, Inside Edition, The Big Idea with Donny Deutch and "E" Entertainment among many others.
I hold titles such as Ms. Bikini America and have been named the first ever Ms. Muscle and Fitness. I am a world renowned fitness expert, author and lifestyle consultant and have all the credentials to coach and train you to the cover worthy body that you deserve. I am an Ace Certified Fitness Instructor, Personal Trainer and Group Fitness Instructor. I am also a specialist in sports supplementation and certified through ISSA (International Sports Science Association).

For men I recommend looking at what Mike Geary has to offer. You will find he preaches the same principles as this article.
THE TRUTH ABOUT ABS

There are three primary reasons to exercise. People want to improve health, appearance, and physical performance. Some people are more worried about appearance, others health, others performance, but everyone is motivated by some combination of these three things.

If you are training for performance, you will do things that apply to the desired activity. If you need strength, you will have to do strength training; if you need endurance, you will have to do endurance training. I do believe that high intensity exercise can be useful even for endurance activities, but that is not a discussion worth getting into right now. Most people exercise for health and appearance benefits, so I'll focus on those.

Let's talk about health. Most people do not pick their exercise based on its health benefits. It is generally assumed that any exercise works to keep you healthy. This may be true for cardiovascular health, energy levels, and stress relief. However, there are functional abilities that you will want as you grow older that are far better trained by high intensity exercise.
-First, strong bones and joints. How do you get strong bones and joints? By putting stress on them. The body responds to stress by strengthening things. You also want to put your joints through a wide range of motion to promote flexibility and smooth movement. Compare using an elliptical to strength training. An elliptical uses a small range of motion and involves small amounts of force. Proper strength training does the opposite. Think about the range of motion in your hip during a lunge as compared to on an elliptical, and think about the additional force that a lunge places on your joints and bones.
-Second, flexibility. You gain and maintain flexibility by regularly putting your joints through a complete range of motion. You may say, "Yeah, I stretch when I'm done jogging." Stretching is ok, but something more challenging like yoga is better. It forces you to actually support yourself and balance in a stretched position, so you actually become stronger. Or strength training is again superior, because now you are bearing weight as you move into a stretched position. Which do you think is more beneficial? Stretching your gluteus muscles while sitting on the floor, or stretching them while in a deep squat position with 50 pounds on your back? The answer is obvious.
-Third, posture. You may not have any posture problems, but if you do, are they going to be solved by jogging? Absolutely not. Posture is controlled by your musculature, so to change it you have to change (strengthen) the right muscles. This is done with appropriate strength training. One exercise for all three of these functional health abilities is overhead squats. (shown above)

So high intensity exercise can be better for your health. Now let's look at improving your appearance. Those of you who want to get rid of fat (most of us) pay special attention. The only thing that matters is how your calorie consumption compares to your expenditure.
Most people will focus more on reducing their caloric intake, AKA dieting. As many people can attest to, dieting is often completely ineffective. Why? The human body is an amazing efficiency machine. If you feed your body too few calories, it responds by burning less. It will shut down nonvital processes like building muscle or strengthening joints. The more you limit your intake, the more your body will shut down. So in dieting, the focus should not be on eating less but on eating better. Your body needs food, so you might as well give it higher quality food. (more on nutrition below)
The more effective approach to weight management is to burn more calories instead of consuming less. We all know to burn calories by exercising, but think about this... How much time do you spend exercising compared to not exercising? Personally, I exercise 5-6 hours out of 168 each week. A vast majority of our time is spent not exercising, but people still focus so much on what workout will burn the most calories. We should be asking, "What workout will make my body burn more calories all day long?" This brings me to the most important aspect of weight management, the Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). This is how many calories your body burns at rest. A high BMR is the reason adolescent males can eat and eat and eat and get lean at the same time. Their bodies are growing and developing so much they just go through energy like crazy. So how do you raise your BMR? High intensity exercise. You need to put high stress on your body that requires a significant recovery process, a process that will be burning calories long after your workout. The best thing you can do is add some muscle. Did you know a pound of muscle burns about 50 calories a day at rest? 3500 calories equals a pound. Add 5 pounds of muscle, and over the course of a year that muscle will burn over 25 pounds worth of calories, not counting the time when you exercise it. This gives you a two-pronged attack on fat burning, because you burn calories while you exercise and you drastically increase calorie burning at all other times. Ladies before you freak out about adding muscle, muscle is dense; 5 pounds added to your thighs and core will add shape and definition; you don't have to get big.
Low intensity (aerobic) exercise requires far less recovery; it provokes far less calorie burning and no muscle growth. It may even cause decrease in muscle. Thus, low intensity exercise is far less effective for weight management. It gained popularity because your body shifts to burning fat as opposed to carbs during an aerobic workout. But your body also stores fat to adapt to the long, low-intenisty workouts. Plus, any unused calories get stored as fat anyway, so it doesn't matter what you burn when. Again, all you need to pay attention to is burning more calories than you consume. The best way to do that is with high intensity exercise.

People will often ask how to get rid of belly fat or thigh fat. I want to set the record straight... There is no such thing as targeted or localized fat loss. You cannot control where your body stores fat or where it burns fat from. That is genetic. Men tend to store more fat on the torso, women on the hips and thighs.
So doing ab crunches will not necessarily remove your belly fat, and jogging may or may not burn fat from your thighs. You cannot pick the places to burn fat from. Adding muscle tone to those areas can help you look better though, if there isn't much fat covering it.
The goal has to be to get a lean body, meaning you get rid of fat in general. You aren't going to have a fat back and a ripped stomach. If you are consistently burning a lot of calories and eating healthy, you should be able to cut fat from all areas of your body.

So let's lay off the ellipticals and stationary bikes and get in the weight room. Look at what Jessica Simpson did using mostly weight room work.

Let's give up light jogging, and start sprinting instead. Look at track athletes. They do high intensity training for high intensity activity, and it just happens to give them very sexy bodies.

If you like yoga, try to push yourself and progress to new challenging poses. Have you ever seen an out of shape yoga expert?

If you like dancing, dance as hard as you can, whether it's in a dance class or at the club. Look at professional dancers. These girls are strong, balanced, and flexible, because they dance at a high level of difficulty and intensity.

I show pictures of women, because if these recommendations work for women they work even more for men, since men can build muscle more easily.

A lot of these recommendations may not apply to you. For example, most guys don't need to be told to get off the elliptical and into the weight room, but even within the strength training niche there are problems.
Most guys would rather look like an NFL receiver than a bodybuilder, but they still lift like a bodybuilder, except worse because the lower body is neglected.
BODYBUILDING
Bodybuilders use high reps with multiple lifts for one muscle group to achieve muscle exhaustion. This is lower intensity than just doing 3x5 as hard as you can. Bodybuilders also do a lot of nonfunctional lifting. Bicep curls, wrist curls, tricep extensions, chest flys, these things all focus on one muscle. Again, it's lower intensity than a lift like squats that uses a lot of large muscle groups and uses movement at multiple joints. Bodybuilders may look like the strongest people in the world, but they are not. You never see bodybuilders at the World's Strongest Man competition. What they do is manipulate muscles to be larger, not necessarily stronger. Doing this successfully requires very strict intake and lifestyle that most people want nothing to do with. Not to mention the fact that most people do not have the recovery ability to actually make gains from these incredibly high volume routines. Instead guys will go to the gym, do half the workout that a professional bodybuilder does, eat whatever they want, carry on with their busy lives, and see very little improvement in strength or appearance. It's no wonder why.

The more sensible approach to strength training is to always be functional and metabolic. You do that with exercises that coordinate multiple joint movement and use a lot of different muscles. Train like an athlete at high intensity. It's also good to focus on the legs and core, where your biggest muscles are. Not only do those muscles burn the most calories and have the most potential for growth, but it is better to be strong from the ground up than in your upper body, unless you spend more time walking on your hands than on your feet. Also make sure to use a wide range of motion and perfect form to promote flexibility and healthy joints. The clean and jerk, squats, and deadlift are three examples of highly metabolic, functional exercises. For the upper body, pull-ups and dips are the best.

1. Along with calories, your body needs vitamins, minerals, and protein to stay healthy. If you just eat junk, you give your body energy, but not the materials it needs.
2. Many healthy foods contain fewer calories per volume than unhealthy foods. A fast food french fry and a baby carrot will take up the same amount of space in your stomach, but the french fry contains more calories. Eating healthy lets you fill up on less calories.
3. Many healthy foods will cause more calorie burning during the digestion process. Cottage cheese is harder to break down than a piece of candy.

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