You’re trying to lose weight and get toned. You want to get into your skinny jeans, or a certain dress or suit in your closet that you’ve been avoiding throwing away, and you want to feel more confident, energetic and happy. And you know there’s a million different ways to lose weight: diet, exercise, pills, surgery, and heck, maybe even photoshop 😉
And if you get your picture taken, you might have figured out just the right pose to look as good as possible. Don’t be shy. You know who you are.
But you want to stop having to contort yourself to look good in a picture. You want to lose weight the sustainable way. The healthy way. Because, yes, there’s a lot of unhealthy ways to lose weight. In this article, we’re going to cover the exercise side of things. How should you exercise if you have 5-50 pounds to lose?
Ready?
Here’s what we’re going to cover in this article:
- Which exercises should you do to lose weight?
- What ratio of strength training to cardio?
- Should you do high reps, or low reps?
- Should you do steady state cardio, or intervals?
- Exceptions to the rules
Which Exercises Should You Do to Lose Weight?
Let me start off by saying that yes, exercise selection is important, but it’s not the most important variable to consider.
In order of importance, the variables to consider are:
- Intensity: at what percentage of your maximal effort are you working? What percentage of your maximal weight are you lifting? Intensity will determine your repetition range. At what percentage of your maximal heart rate are you working?
- Frequency: how many days per week?
- Exercise selection: which exercises should you do?
As you’ll notice, how hard and how often you work at your exercises is much more important than which exercises you do. A person who has sub-optimal exercises, but puts in very good effort, at the right frequency will get far better results than someone doing the exact right exercises, but doesn’t put in a lot of effort.
With that caveat out of the way, let’s discuss which exercises we use with our clients to help them lose fat.
With most fat loss clients, we follow this template of exercise selection:
Lower body, hip-dominant exercise
Upper body vertical push
Upper body vertical pull
Lower body, quad-dominant exercise
Upper body horizontal push
Upper body horizontal pull
Specific work on certain body parts
Cardio
You’ll notice that these aren’t specific exercises, but rather, these are categories of exercises. For instance, in the upper body horizontal push category, you can do a barbell bench press, pushups, standing cable chest press, seated machine chest press, and others. All those would be examples of an upper body horizontal push. As a beginner, it doesn’t matter too much which exercise you select. Pick one that you can do with good technique, and do it. With clients, we’d go into a bit more detail, and base exercise selection on different factors, like exercise history, unique body mechanics, possible injuries, etc. So if you want some more customized help than the advice in this article, fill out this questionnaire to see if you qualify to work with us.
If you’re a first-time exerciser, to guide you through it, here are some exercises that fit those categories:
You might be wondering “but what about the muscles? Which muscles are working?” The reason that we focus on movements, as opposed to muscles is because a movement focus has a better carryover to everyday life. Whereas a muscle-focus is more of a bodybuilder mentality. Not that there’s anything wrong with that… if you’re a bodybuilder. But if you’re just exercising for fat loss, and for a carryover to your life outside the gym, a movement focus will do that for you. A muscle focus won’t do it as well.
But for your own curiosity, let’s say you do want to know which muscles are working in different exercises, here’s a breakdown:
Lower body, hip-dominant exercise: hamstrings (back of the thighs), glutes (butt muscles), and lower back
Upper body vertical push: shoulders and triceps (backs of the arms)
Upper body vertical pull: biceps and back
Lower body, quad-dominant exercise: quadriceps (front of the thighs), hamstrings (backs of the thighs) and glutes (butt muscles).
Upper body horizontal push: chest, front of the shoulder, and triceps (backs of the arms)
Upper body horizontal pull: biceps and back (but a different part of the back than the vertical pull)
Now, I can hear you saying “but Igor, what about my core?” And when people ask me that, they are usually referring to their abs. The truth is that your core is working during all those exercises. Read my article on core strength myths for the full details.
Another thing you’ll notice about this exercise selection is that these are all what’s called “multi-joint exercises.” It’s exactly what it sounds like. Each exercise uses more than one joint. For instance, during pushups, you use both your elbows and your shoulders. During squats, you use both your knees and hips. What’s the advantage of multi-joint exercises? They save you time because you’re working several muscles at the same time. Whereas if you worked each muscle individually, it would take you way longer. And if I’m not mistaken, I think you’d rather spend 1 hour exercising, instead of 3.
However, there are some downsides to multi-joint exercises. One of them is that if you’re exercising several muscles at the same time, one muscle may overpower the others, and contribute more to the movement than possibly your desired muscles. For example, one of the biggest issues I hear is that women who squat want to feel their glutes, but instead, they feel their quads.
That’s why in our programs, at the end of all the multi-joint exercises, we use specific, targeted exercises that isolate one or more specific muscles, and allow a person to work on their individual areas of weakness, or preference.
What Ratio of Strength Training to Cardio?
Remember this: when it comes to losing body fat, 60-70% of the results are going to come from your nutrition anyway. Knowing that, what should be the role of exercise when it comes to fat loss?
- To preserve muscle mass, so that as you lose fat you don’t lose strength, and also, so that you don’t slow down your metabolism. Muscle is what contributes to the speed of your metabolism.
- To burn extra calories.
Knowing those goals, we know that to preserve muscle mass, the only way to do it is with strength training. Not cardio. Cardio burns muscle (have you ever seen a muscular marathon runner?), and strength training builds it. So to preserve muscle mass, strength training becomes particularly important.
Cardio is less important, but still plays a role.
So what ratio of strength training to cardio should you be doing?
That depends on a couple of factors. The biggest one is whether you’re a man or a woman, as well as on your frame size.
If you’re a small-framed woman, without much of a propensity to gain muscle, you should have approximately a 1:1 ratio of strength training to cardio. In other words, if you do strength training twice per week, you should also be doing cardio twice per week. If you do strength training three times per week, you should also be doing cardio three times per week.
If you’re a woman with a propensity to gain muscle, then you should be strength training 1-2 times per week, and doing cardio 3-5 times per week.
If you believe the whole fitness industry myth of “women can’t bulk because they don’t have the same testosterone levels as men”, think again. It’s true that most women don’t have the same testosterone levels as men, but women with excess body fat do have more testosterone than they should, because excess body fat is masculinizing to women. In addition to that, about 10-15% of the female clients that I see who want to lose fat have PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome). What’s one of the hormonal signatures of this condition? High testosterone levels (yes, in females). So some females can most definitely bulk too easily. It’s not the majority, but it is a fairly large minority.
If you think “oh my God, I am that woman who bulks up too easily”, read my article Women: How to Avoid Getting Too Bulky, and if you have PCOS, read my articles about how to lose weight with PCOS and workouts for PCOS.
If you’re a man with a small frame, you should be doing slightly more strength training than cardio. You might do 3-4 days of strength training, and 2 days of cardio. If you’re a man with a large frame, you should have a fairly equal ratio of strength training to cardio, or maybe slightly more in favour of cardio.
Should You Do High Reps or Low Reps?
This section will be fairly short, because I wrote a full article on that, called What’s Better: High Reps or Low Reps?
In a nutshell, if you’re doing strength training for the first time, go with high reps. Also go with high reps if you’ve taken an extended break from strength training (longer than 3 months).
If you’re more advanced, it would depend on the kind of diet you’re following, and how advanced you are.
If you’re following a low carb diet, go with low reps. Low reps don’t deplete your body of sugar (glycogen) as much as high reps. Your sugar is already depleted by your diet. No need to do it with exercise as well. In this case, more isn’t better.
If you’ve built up a substantial amount of muscle mass before you needed to lose fat, and you want to preserve it, also stick with low reps. If you’re OK with losing a bit of muscle in the process, go with high reps.
Again, I elaborate about this in much greater detail in this article.
Should You Do Steady State Cardio, or Intervals?
The real truth when it comes to long-term fat loss: it doesn’t matter. The difference between the two for fat loss is waaaayyy too overblown. When most studies measure the difference between the two, they measure a “soft” end point. That end point is “calories lost.” But nobody really burns calories for the sake of burning calories. The real bottom line is fat loss. That would be a hard end point.
So sure, there are differences in calories burned between intervals and steady state cardio, but unfortunately they don’t translate to “intervals cause greater fat loss than steady state.” Yes, they both cause fat loss, but one isn’t superior to the other.
Why? Because in the grand scheme of things, cardio (regardless of whether it’s intervals or steady state) doesn’t contribute all that much to fat loss. Nutrition does.
So just pick one, whichever one you like, and stick with it.
Exceptions to the Rules
Above, you got a detailed explanation of how we basically help our clients lose weight, but as with anything, there’s an exception to every rule.
Exceptions are made based on:
- Injuries. If you have certain issues with your back, knees, shoulders, etc., certain exercises will have to be modified or eliminated.
- Slow thyroid. If one of our clients has a slow thyroid (and we see that pretty often), yes, there will be additional modifications to our basic program.
- Muscular imbalances. The above program is a general, well-balanced program. A person with good mechanics and no muscular imbalances will do well on this program. Unfortunately giving a balanced program to an imbalanced person will either maintain the imbalances, or exaggerate them. So we have to give an imbalanced program to an imbalanced person, until those imbalances are corrected.
- Personal responsiveness. Some people have body parts that are hyper-responsive to different exercises. For instance, some women have shoulder muscles that grow at a disproportionate rate compared to other parts of the body. In which case, we would have to reduce the number of sets done for the shoulders.
…and more.
As you can see, although they’re called “exceptions”, there’s a lot of people who would qualify to be an “exception.” The key in exercise, as in other areas of fitness is individualization, and if you’d like a program specifically customized to your body, fill out this questionnaire to see if you qualify for your program.
