You want to lose weight? Here's the best way...

So it's already October in the time of COVID and the world is still crazy. We might have lost it a little in the initial scare of the quarantine but now that things are opening back up and regulations are loosening, it's time to retake control of the few things you have control over. Your work schedule may be out of your control, your travel plans may be out of your control, your favorite indoor yoga studio may still have its doors shut but how you exercise, how you feel and what you look like is totally, completely and has always been in your full control. Let's take advantage of that.

Low Intensity steady state cardio

LISS is your basic average jogging. It’s aerobic exercise, meaning it requires oxygen to perform and it’s important for things like making your heart muscle more efficient at pumping blood. It is done at a pace that you can keep for an extended period of time (30 minutes to 320 hours). It hinders muscle growth and can lead to decreased fat loss.

Can you feel the excitement shooting off the page? Every the name “low intensity” and “steady state” bore me out of my mind. Those would not be bullet points I’d look for on a dating profile.

There are some real additional benefits to steady state cardio, like getting tan, distressing, passing time in the shutdown, and showing off the body that these next two options got you.

Resistance training

Weightlifting, every meatheads favorite thing of all time, ever, bro, do you even lift? It’s methodical, it’s anaerobic (doesn’t require oxygen) and you can feel it working when your biceps cramp after an arm day and you can’t finish tying your bow tie because you have to keep restarting the YouTube video due to cramps in your biceps.

You won’t burn nearly as many calories as LISS but overtime you WILL increase your resting metabolic rate (the amount of calories you burn while doing absolutely nothing) and that is priceless. I always think of the metaphor, the rich keep getting richer with investments and real estate and the fit keep getting fitter with more muscles always working overtime.

You won’t like what you see on the scale but you’ll like the way your clothes start to fit as muscle weights more than fat as Dr. Oz has pointed out on every daytime talkshow ever.

With proper weightlifting technique, there is also the benefit of improved posture, better sleep, increased bone density, improved mood, easier maintained weight loss, and a new found skyrocketed level of confidence. I’m sure one of these benefits deeply resonated with you and if it didn’t you probably don’t go here and more than likely you don’t lift.

High Intensity interval training

HIIT aka the Zoom workouts we did over quarantine. This is anaerobic so it is unsustainable for any prolonged length of time and it helps build size and strength of muscle in a shorter period of time. Also HIIT workouts ramp up that metabolism for 24-36 hours after the workout so when your Apple Watch tells you you burned 560 kcals in a workout, the real number is much, much higher.

Research has shown a 25-30% increase in calorie burn over other types of exercise. In a six week study it was found that participants showed increased fat oxidation (burning fat for energy) and decreased carbohydrate oxidation (burning sugars for energy) over LISS. Also if not more interesting was fat loss was 9X higher in HIIT than in LISS.

High Intensity Resistance Training

HIRT aka MVMT workouts are a beautiful blend of weightlifting and HIIT. In my opinion, HIRT is the most optimal, most time efficient way to get the body you want.

All the muscle building benefits of weightlifting with the fat-burning, calorie torching benefits of HIIT. We keep a bodybuilding style split of lower body, upper body, core, lower body, upper body, full body conditioning to allow a full 48 hour recovery between workouts and keep you from overtraining any one muscle group and reducing the likelihood of injury.

This split also incentivizes you to come everyday.

We don’t want to be the gym that has 1000 members and only sees 200 everyday. We want to be the gym that has 150 members that show up everyday and get results. We want to be under the “Holy f***, where do they workout?” canopy on the beach. We want to be the reason you throw away the quarantine jeans and pull out the ones from college. We want to be the favorite part of your day and what you look forward to every morning.

That being said, the only real way to lose weight is to exert more calories than you take in. If you want to lose one pound a week, you need to burn 3500 more calories than you eat or drink. Weekends and blackouts included. At the end of the day, you don’t need to workout at all to lose weight at all but working out definitely plays a small role or the hashtag #quarantinefifteen would never have become a thing.

Let’s build some muscle.