5 Fundamentals To Getting Lean Fast

Need to strip off the fat to reveal your lean and muscular body as fast as possible? Don’t be a victim of the common misconceptions surrounding fat loss that will tell you to eat salad and spend hours on the treadmill at the gym. Losing weight takes time and is accomplished through hard work, the right diet plan, and effective body workouts. Whether you are a beginner or a professional athlete, you know how important it is to stick to a regime and see desired progress in a short time.

Here are 5 simple, yet effective tips that will help you speed up your fat-burning goals. Incorporate them into your daily routine, and you will soon notice the improvement it makes on the body. Keep reading to see yourself lean and toned with nothing but lean body mass.

Benefits of Being Lean

Lean body mass is the weight of your bones, muscles, organs, and water. Most of the lean body mass cannot be changed (e.g., internal organs), but the loss or gain of muscles contributes to the total lean body mass. Here are a few reasons to start doing your exercise and get tones:

Burn More Calories

Your muscles burn a lot of calories even at rest to generate energy, compared to the fat that requires none of them. Therefore, the more lean muscle tissue you have, the easier it is to lose calories and prevent fat accumulation. Consequently, your health will be improved and you will not suffer from obesity-related illnesses.

Faster Illness Recovery

When you are sick, your body requires protein in order to recover. However, many people suffer from protein deficiency. Therefore, it is hard to meet daily intake requirements and heal fast. However, your muscles are just like a reservoir of protein that is used to combat illnesses.

Healthy Bones

If you exercise regularly and maintain a healthy amount of macros intake, your bone density will be improved, and the risks of osteoporosis will be reduced. This is especially important for the elderly, who naturally lose lean body mass with time.

Tips to Get Leaner and Fitter

1. Strength Training

The more muscles you have, the higher your resting metabolic rate. This is because the more muscle you have, the higher your caloric needs will be to maintain your mass, even at rest. Incorporating regular strength training will promote muscle growth and anabolic hormone production that actually reduce fat storage. This means you will need more energy to fuel muscle building which will help you burn fat much faster.

Therefore, it is advised to plan your body workout routine that you will not deviate from. As time goes by and you get used to the training, you can add new exercises and continually increase the weight and number of sets you do per exercise.

What is vital to remember is to stay on schedule and gradually increase the workout difficulty so that in a couple of weeks’ time, you’ll feel stronger and more toned.

2. Stay Calm

Attempting to make a mad dash to getting lean can have some counter effects that will actually halt your progress. Panicking to get fit in a hurry can lead to overdoing cardio, extreme calorie deficits, muscle catabolism, and hormonal fluctuations that can lead to fat storage.

Cortisol is an anti-inflammatory hormone associated with stress that is catabolic and can lead to increased fat stores and decreases in muscle mass. Premeditate your diet and exercise program and focus on staying relaxed throughout this fat loss period to optimize muscle mass and reduce the effects of stress.

Note that everybody loses extra weight at their own pace and follows their own routines. You need to get your mind ready for a weight loss journey and train your body until you see satisfying results.

3. HIIT Training

When trying to get lean, people tend to think they need to spend hours on the treadmill doing low-intensity steady-state cardio. Butin fact, the secret lies in the intensity of your workout.

High-intensity interval training (HIIT) burns more calories during and after a workout and results in higher rates of fat loss in a shorter amount of time. It is an ideal workout routine for people who lack the time in a day and have only an hour to hit the gym. The training consists of a couple of exercises that are done in a row without any break in between.

To maximize the outcomes of this intensive training, you should choose exercises that will get the most out of your body. Since HIIT is interval training, you should do around three sets. Prepare 5-6 exercises per set and do each of them for 30 seconds without rest. The break between each set should be around 2 minutes.

An intensive workout requires more oxygen to restore muscle glycogen, which may help you build more muscle. This is what is known as EPOC, which helps you burn more calories after the workout.

Excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC) is the body’s natural ability to return to homeostasis after exercise, which takes longer with HIIT training; therefore, more calories are burned hours after finishing a high-intensity interval workout.

Note to beginners: High-intensity interval training can be strenuous for first-timers; therefore, it is best to keep your program simple and at a lower intensity. You can start with cardio and add other bodyweight exercises later. The frequency of your workouts shouldn’t exceed two-three days per week. Give yourself enough time to recover in between sessions.

4. Calculate Your Macros

Not all calories are created equal, and you can’t manage what you don’t measure, so tracking your overall calories and macronutrients is a must for anyone who is looking to shed fat fast.

Counting the consumption of macronutrients means measuring what amount of protein (e.g., meat, fish), fats (e.g., seeds, oil), and carbohydrates (e.g., pasta, rice) you eat per day.

You’ll want to make sure you consume adequate amounts of these three nutrients for your specific goals and body type on a daily basis. Use a food log or one of the various applications for tracking macros and calories to allow yourself to monitor your calories much more accurately so that you can assess your progress over time and make adjustments accordingly.

Counting your macronutrient intake is much more efficient than just going on a weight loss diet.

Difference Between Calories and Macros

If your goal is to look ripped and you have a great workout routine, maybe your diet plan is keeping you off track.

It is no surprise that cutting down calories will help you lose weight. However, many people omit the fact that what you eat really makes a difference. You can reach an adequate amount of calories by only eating junk food. Consequently, you will lack essential nutrients like protein and end up only consuming fats.

Therefore, to know that your body receives all the benefits of healthy food, you should count macros. This, in turn, will also help you track the intake amount that your body needs.

In addition, macros can give freedom to have a cheat day once in a while, as long as it is within your daily limits.

5. Drink More Water

Many fruit drinks, sodas, and alcoholic beverages have a ton of calories and sugar, which will dramatically increase your calories on a daily basis and put a stop to your fat-burning efforts. By drinking more water, you will increase your ability to perform during your workouts, leading to improvements in muscle mass and caloric expenditure.

Staying hydrated will also help your body avoid storing water due to deficiencies. People often don’t make the connection that high water retention often means there’s a lack of it in your diet. Water balance is very tightly regulated by ADH and aldosterone, which can make you retain water and appear bloated when dehydrated. The recommended amount of water consumption by the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) is:

• For men: 2,700 mL/day
• For women: 3,700 mL/day

Although it is still unclear whether water consumption helps you lose weight, being hydrated is important and even helps to lose calories. What we do know is that keeping the fluid balance makes you feel full and suppresses appetite.

In Conclusion

Getting toned fast can be simple if you know how to do it.

Cutting down the calories, you eat per day is not ideal for losing body fat and getting lean. If done wrong, it can also be bad for your health. Instead, you should calculate your macros and opt for quality food. And remember, every meal should have a portion of protein with the addition of whole grains and veggies.

The exercise you do should be chosen according to what you can handle and then gradually increased to gain muscles and lose weight. Your workout should consist of strength and high-intensity interval training.

Staying hydrated is keeps you healthy and helps with weight loss. However, you shouldn’t drink liters of water per day; simply consume as much as you need and according to NAM recommendations.

And, finally, keep your calm and don’t strive to lose weight as soon as possible, because getting lean gradually will help you stay in shape longer. Treat the process as a lifestyle that helps you get toned but also healthy.

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