Body Building Workouts for Muscle Building and Fat Burning

September 9, 2018 Matt

Muscle building, fat burning, body building workouts are the most important factor in maintaining lifelong good health and a powerful immune system. For burning fat, raising your resting metabolic rate (RMR) is the key.

Roughly 10% of your daily energy is used to convert food to fuel, 20% is used for everyday physical activity, and 70% is consumed by your RMR. So raising your RMR with your workouts will make a big difference to any fat burning program.

Early Bird Muscle Building Workouts

Numerous studies show that resistance exercise (lifting weights) raises your RMR after muscle building workouts for up to 18 hours or until you go to bed (with aerobic exercise RMR returns to normal in about an hour). For maximum benefit, do your fat burning workouts as early in the day as possible.

Most of us get up in the morning and go straight to work. But here’s best health insurance in the world – get up an hour earlier and do your body building workout first thing. Sounds tough I know, but try it! You’ll be amazed how much energy you generate for the rest of the day.

Going to a gym at this hour is impractical for most of us. So the best option may be to invest in some basic home weight lifting equipment. There’s no need to spend a fortune; some basic free weights such as dumbbells for beginners or kettlebells for more advanced muscle building workouts will be all you’ll need.

Little And Often for Fat Burning Workouts

It’s been shown that those who do their body building workouts five times weekly lose three times as much fat as those who workout just two or three times weekly (even if they worked out for longer). If you work out just once a week you may even lose no fat at all! So try for five small 30 minute morning sessions a week focusing on one bodypart per day; legs and abdominals, back, shoulders, arms and chest.

Work each bodypart only once per week. Exercised muscle breaks down its worn cells over 48 hours, then takes another 48-72 hours to build new, stronger replacements – that’s 5 days. For 3 days after that strength remains maximum then slowly declines. So exercise a muscle group every 5-8 days for the best results from your body building workouts.

Sensible Precautions for Body Building Workouts

Before you pick up the weights, do a gentle aerobic warm up followed by muscle stretches. Do a wide variety of resistance exercises. Machines stress only certain fibres of a muscle in certain positions. So use free-weights as well (barbells and dumbells) to reach multiple fibres in many positions.

When lifting free weights, because of the wider range of movements, you should think about wearing a weight lifting belt to protect your lower back from injury during your body building workouts.

Sip water or a light carbohydrate drink throughout your body building workout to spare your muscle glycogen, maintain your energy level and prevent dehydration (3% dehydration = 10% strength reduction). Your temperature will then stay low, which means less blood to the skin for cooling leaving more supplying the muscles with oxygen and nutrients.

How Many Repetitions for Body Building Workouts?

For a good balance of muscle building and fat burning, during each of your body building workouts do one warm up set of 12-15 easy reps followed by one medium/heavy set of 6-10 reps to exhaustion. Emphasize the return phase of each repetition. The stress for a muscle lengthening under load causes the most lean mass and strength gain.

Here’s a rule of thumb for your body building workouts:

Using heavy resistance (3-6 reps, 5-6 times) builds maximum muscle but doesn’t burn much fat.
Using medium resistance (8-12 reps, 3-4 times) builds some muscle and burns some fat.
But use low resistance (20-25 reps, one set) builds a little muscle and burns a lot of fat.

So for ultimate fat burning workouts do one set of each exercise with a weight that exhausts you in 20-25 repetitions.