When your goal is to lose weight fast, you know that you must tackle your weight challenge head-on by adjusting your exercise routine, diet, motivation and overall approach to health and fitness.

The question is…how do you turn your good intentions and goals into a daily workout plan that gives you the best progress toward rapid weight loss?

Ideally what you want is to get your body into a mode of optimal health that allows it to automatically burn more fat than it is doing right now…in “Your Body Can Burn Fat On Its Own” the author Debbie Rocker makes some good points…specifically:

1. In situations of either extreme, intense exercise, high intensity weight training, or starving yourself with too much dieting you can actually be causing your body to NOT burn fat, but to STORE fat
2. Varying your exercise in both duration and intensity is the best model for making sure you are both burning fat while exercising, but also that you are building your body mass and metabolism to burn fat when you are at rest
3. Include a combination of cardiovascular training with moderate weight training and thow in some relaxation and coping yoga or meditation to help round out the perfect weight loss program

This concept certainly makes sense to me.

When I first started out training I would do high intensity weight training for 20-30 minutes each day with very little attention paid to diet or cardiovascular training.  What happened?

My chest and arms certainly became more muscular, and it was this progress that kept me following this exercise routine for the first few months.  But…the downsides were:

• I wasn’t losing weight – I was gaining it
• I wasn’t losing size on my waist, I was increasing sizes
• I didn’t feel much better, other than a little more satisfied at mybicept size
• I wasn’t in any better shape when it came to keeping up with my kids
• My stress level actually went up because I had an extra activity to fit in each day which only seemed to add more stress to my life

That’s when I found out about 3 things that have made a major difference in my overall weight loss goals and overall health:

1. By slowly and less intensively working my muscles I could get the same workout with much less pain and more effective metabolism – by performing bicept curls (for example) with 50-lbs making the curl slow (say 10-seconds in total) was actuallly more of a workout on my arms with much less pain and less fat stores
2. By varying my activity – 1 day mainly cardio (fast walk, jogging, swimming or running), 1-day more intense weight workout, 1-day yoga, 1-day half weights – half cardio, and one day a combination of moderate cardio with more intense cardio for 10-minutes I was less bored with my routine and less likely to skip out
3. My weight started to go down quickly – literally 7-lbs within just 2-weeks and I felt better, while the muscle tone still grew

So – next time you think about throwing more weight into your weight lifting routing or running faster or longer or on starving yourself with a diet, don’t forget that you are training your body to process and use fat as efficiently as possible – don’t trick it into storing more than is required for an optimal body.