Fat Loss Training

Hey, 👋 it's coach Josh here, former army master fitness trainer and current strength shaman, helping people build fat, burn muscle, feel good in Portland, Oregon. And today I am coming to you to talk about the concept of training for fat loss, why hard training doesn't help you lose fat, in some cases may even make your fitness journey a little bit harder depending on what you're doing and I want to save you some time, energy and money along the way. And this is a particularly important video for me because I've struggled with my own health journey in the past and even currently, where I have to learn the same lesson over and over and over again.

So I'm gonna help you not have to learn that lesson. And I want you to get to your goal in the quickest way possible. And to start off, I want to address why training and fat burning programs don't help you burn fat.

And this (the internet) is populated with them; fitness books, fitness programs, you know, claim to have the afterburn effect or, or assistant fat loss in some kind of way. And it's really not true. I guess, you know, abs are made in the kitchen and fat loss is a is a dietary exercise, not a fit, you know, not a training exercise.

But I want to go a little bit deeper on how training can help in your fat loss journey and how it can hurt depending on how you use it. And I want to tell you a little story about when I was a younger man in the army and basic training, in fact, and having to learn the lesson of trying hard myself, and I enlisted in the army when I was 17… so excited to get out of my small town and got to basic training was having a lot of fun, getting beaten up and not getting very much sleep.

And one of the things you have to do in basic training is you have to actually shine boots quite a bit. I was enthusiastic, and I really went for it with gusto - but my boots never really looked that good.

And I continued to spend more and more time or more energy polishing my boots over and over again. And sometimes it would actually even get worse. And I was really frustrated and really committed.

And I just kept doubling down more and more time, more and more polish, more and more effort. And finally, one of my teammates was watching me shine boots. And while we were all trying to my boots look like dragged ass, and everyone else's look pretty good.

So he would watch me shine for a minute or two, and then he walked over, and he put his hand on my hand, and felt what I was doing. And he looked at me in my eyes and said, “Why are you pushing so hard? You're pushing the shoe polish right off the boot.” And I learned for the first time, a lesson that I'm still learning, that I'm really trying to let this one sink in is, is we have to try softer.

Sometimes, you have to let the polish do the work, you have to let the system do the work, you have to let your resources do the work, and you have to give time, it's due course, so that you don't try to make up for in effort what you lack in strategy. And all I had to do was relax a little bit, and let the rag and the shoe polish set and shine. And pretty soon with less time, energy and effort, I was able to get nice, glossy, mirrored finish to those boots, and I felt really good about myself. 💪

And I learned a valuable lesson that I would forget many, many times in my life. And that is that harder effort doesn't always yield a better result. So, what do we do with this information when it comes to our journey in training and fat loss?

The purpose of training, and strength training and exercise is to keep your muscle, keep your cardiovascular health up, keep your muscle tone up as you drop weight. So your body will not hold on to muscle that you do not need. So it's going to be up to you to use your muscles and specifically perform strength training activities so that your body doesn't shed your muscle when it starts to shed other tissue, specifically fat.

So your strength training program is really about preservation of muscle first. And if you have a really great diet and you have a really great recovery process, you can build muscle and burn fat at the same time. But that's a secondary goal.

The primary goal is to not lose muscle. So your strength training, 30 minutes, two to three times a week, total body is enough to keep the muscle on your body as you begin to cut weight. So your strength training program should be about maintaining the performance, meaning if you're bench pressing 25s, you can at least do, you know, 25s for a set of eight at the end of your fat loss program, if that's where you started.

Now, if you can add a couple of extra reps, amazing. If you can add a couple extra pounds, awesome. That's a bonus. 🏆

But it really, it's about continually keeping your performance up as your calories drop, as you lose body weight over the course of six, eight weeks of your specifically designed fat loss phase. So that's what training is for in the fat loss program. And your diet is really the most important thing that contributes to the speed of your journey and the efficacy of your journey and the, whether or not your journey is difficult, painful, or stressful.

That is the cold hard truth about fat loss — it’s an energy balance thing, it's a food thing. It's not monumental effort. It does take work to be organized, but it's not hard training effort. And it's focused effort of being consistent with your plan over the long haul. So hopefully this gives you a felt sense of what your exercise program is for and how to go about your fat loss goals.

And if you have questions or you're worried about your particular/current program and how to go about it on your own, I've got free programs on my YouTube channel.

So, poke around and download something that'll help you. And if you've got some value out of this video, please like, share, subscribe and spread the word. I want to help people build muscle, burn fat, bring out the warrior within and have fun doing it.

Coach Josh out. 🤘