Lift For A Lean Body
People often say things like ‘It’s 80% diet, 20% training” or “abs are made in the kitchen,” but in reality, it’s 100% of both if you want to see the best results.
I want to run you through a primer on the type of training you’ll be doing as well as how you’ll eat, before we get into the nuts and bolts of each.
As far as training goes, you’ll be employing two forms. The first being
Weight training.
Now, weight training doesn’t mean that we’re going to have you gunning for World’s Strongest Woman, or trying desperately to increase your bench press 1-rep max.
Nope. What we’ll be doing is using different forms of resistance training, be it free-weights (barbells and dumbbells,) machines or your own bodyweight to create a workout.
Plenty of women are discouraged from weight training as they think they’re going to bulk up and look manly.
This isn’t the case at all. One of the main factors in building muscle is a hormone called testosterone. It’s the main male sex hormone, and women only have around 10% of the amount that men do, so adding muscle is much harder.
That’s not to say you won’t add any muscle whatsoever, but you certainly won’t look too big.
The type of training we’ll do has the main emphasis of burning calories and shaping your physique to make it look more feminine and to increase tone and definition.
Lifting weights and having more muscle also increases your metabolism, which means you burn more calories every minute of every day, and so can eat more food while still dropping fat. I’d say that’s a win in anyone’s book.
The second type of training you’ll be doing is HIIT (High intensity Interval Training.)
This is cardio, but it’s not cardio like you’re used to.
The beauty of HIIT is that it’s very short, but extremely effective. You can get a great cardio workout in as little as 10 minutes.
In combines quick periods of very high-intensity effort, with longer periods of low-intensity work.
In the research, HIIT has been show to be superior for body composition, and also increases your metabolic rate for up to 48 hours after you’ve finished a workout. Combine that with the fact you don’t need to do it for very long at all to see results, and that’s the kind of cardio we like.