8 Tips to Reduce Fat While Building Muscle

Most people see opportunity to be in better shape. What they do is attack one thing at a time. The typical story is losing fat first, and then builds muscle. What if you could do them both at the same time? Well, the truth is that you can. There are several tips and tricks that allow you to build muscle and lose fat simultaneously. The key knows how your body works.

Start with Protein

Protein is a godsend for anyone trying to get in shape. This is because protein, such as egg whites, chicken, turkey, and other lean meats have minimal fat, and therefore don’t add to the fat concentration in your body. Do you know what else? They are a prime contributor to building muscle. Start by having protein every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Stay Full on Non-Fattening Foods

Many people think that in order to lose weight you need to feel some hunger pain. Recent science has found that this couldn’t be further from the truth. If you have a diet of lean protein and high fibre vegetables you’ll feel full all day long, which helps to keep your metabolism working. Ironically, it also means that none of that food will stick to you in an unhealthy way. You’ll be able to easily convert the protein into muscle with the proper workout routine. If you’d like to build even more muscle, add some carbohydrates into the mix, but don’t overdo it as carbohydrates easily convert to fat.

Daily Cardio

You’ll need to do some workouts as well. In order to properly tone and get the unwanted fat off you want to start with 30-45 minutes of cardio 6 days per week. Cardio workouts are the workouts that get your heart rate up, such as running, power walking, jogging, cycling, and swimming. Choose whichever one you think will work best for you and make a routine out of it. It’s best to actually switch up your workouts from day to day. This helps your body to not get accustomed to the type of workout your doing. It builds up something comparable to an immune system if it finds you doing the exact same workouts every day.

Weight Training for Muscle

After your daily cardio you want to then weight train. You use the cardio to tone your body and shed fat in unwanted places, and weight training will help you convert fat into muscle in your prized places. The most common routine is to work on abs/core every day, and rotate between legs and arms every other day to have even toning. Remember that in order to gain muscle you want to do few repetitions and higher weight. If you’re able to do 60 reps, you’re likely not using enough weight and you are risking not having the outcome you prefer. If you’re only able to do 10 reps with much more weight, you’re building muscle.

Resistance Training for Fat Loss

People doing cardio Resistance training is a more localized form of cardio. This is really useful for someone who wants to have more control over toning. General Cardio workouts are great for the heart and will cause weight loss all over the body. Resistance training is the opposite of weight training, where you’re using as little weight as possible and doing several reps. this allows someone to localize the area where they want to lose weight if they’re trying to convert fat to muscle in other places. For instance, if someone only wants to lose weight in their thighs, and gain muscle in their abs, they will want to weight train the abs and resistance train the thighs to have better control of their results.

Water

When it comes to replenishment and hydration there are a lot of drinks out there, like Gatorade. Gatorade is great because of the electrolytes that balance out the water intake, but the primary ingredient in the drink is water. You should be careful to consume a ton of water while you’re working out. If you don’t, your body will become dehydrated during your workout. When you’re dehydrated, your body doesn’t function properly and in turn won’t properly burn fat.

The Lean Meats You Should Focus On

There are certain lean meats you should focus on when you’re getting fit. Lean meats contain less fat. They still contain a lot of protein so your body can use them to build muscle. Loin meats are a great choice of lean beef, while chicken and turkey (regular or lean) and great choices of lean protein as well. If you like ground, choose ground round instead of ground chuck. Whenever you can, opt for grass fed meat, especially beef, to ensure that nothing harmful is entering your body. Lamb is a great choice of lean meat as well. You can choose the arm, leg, loin, or lean ground lamb. The really great thing about lean meat is that it doesn’t taste low fat. It tastes equally as good, and is much healthier.

Know Your Target Heart Rate for Full Potential Workouts

Knowing your target heart rate will take you a long way. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to run the fastest on the treadmill in order to be burning the most calories. Everyone has their own individual target heart rate. This is the heart rate you should focus on staying consistent with when you’re working out, especially when you’re trying to burn fat. If you over clock your body you’re simply wasting energy, not burning more calories. When you under clock your body you’re not reaching your maximum potential for how many calories you can burn. When you’re trying to gain muscle, you don’t have to worry about having too low of a heart rate, but you still don’t want to waste energy by senselessly over working your body.

When you’re trying to figure out how to get healthy, lose weight and tone all at once it can seem like a lot of information. But it’s really quite simple in summation. Drink lots of water, Gatorade, or another high water drink. Know your target heart rate and focus on that when you’re doing your cardio. Use weight training and resistance training to tone the right areas properly, and be mindful of a diet that will be conducive of your new lifestyle and body.