Another way to lose fat

My New Cardio Trick
by Dr. John Berardi

I've been playing around with a new cardio trick lately and have been seeing very good results for fat loss. Basically the program goes as follows:

Stage 1 — The 4 Week, Pre-Diet Preparation

Your diet should come on the heels of a Massive Eating program where you have a very high calorie intake and thus, a high metabolic rate. During the 4 weeks before your diet actually begins, you'll gradually increase your cardiovascular exercise in terms of frequency, duration, and intensity while maintaining the intensity, duration and frequency of your weight training.

By the week prior to dieting, you'll be doing daily cardiovascular exercise of at least 30-45 minutes in duration at about 80% of your HR (heart rate) max {0.80 x (220-age)}. Remember, this is just for one week. Be sure to slowly increase your cardio throughout the four weeks of preparation. A good plan (depending on how you respond to cardio) may be as follows:

Week 1 — 30 min cardio every other day at 70% HR max
Week 2 — 45 min cardio every other day at 80% HR max
Week 3 — 45 min cardio every day at 70% of HR max
Week 4 — 45 min cardio every day at 80% HR max

Remember, the goal of this phase is to actually promote some muscular adaptation to the cardio so you must train regularly and intensely. Most importantly, though, during this period you must not lose body weight. This may be very hard for some but it's very important. To maintain weight, weigh yourself every few days and increase your calories (that's right) above Massive Eating levels.
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Stage 2 — Diet Phase

Now that your metabolic rate and the rate of tissue turnover is very high, it's time to drop out both the cardio and the calories and watch the fat disappear. Starting with your first diet week, cut your cardio back down to 15 minutes every day or 15 minutes on training days and 30 minutes on non-training days. Also, lower your intensity back down to 65-70% of HRmax.

This reduction in cardio training should accompany a reduction in calories so that you're eating about 25% less than you would at maintenance. Maintain a heavy weight-training regimen during this time. As the diet progresses, lower your calories to maintain your fat loss and keep your cardiovascular activity relatively low. Only increase your cardio activity if necessary to continue your fat loss.

Using this little fat loss scheme, you'll be able to lose a maximum amount of fat while avoiding over training during your calorie restriction. It's a good strategy to take advantage of the muscle's ability to adapt to imposed demands. By doing some hard-core cardio for just a few short weeks, your body will learn to become efficient at utilizing oxygen and in maintaining weight. As a result, you won't lose muscle mass. Then, when you back off on the cardio, the cardio adaptations will persist, and you'll be a better fat burner during your diet.