It's all about intensity!

So, I've been having this conversation way too much lately for me to think it's just coincidence.  I'm getting asked more & more about how to effectively burn body fat and lean out (men) or firm/tone up (women).  The answer is the same for both...outside of maintaining a balanced diet, increase the intensity of your workouts.  Right now I'm seeing men in the gym futzing around the weightroom lifting less than optimal poundages (with sometimes horrible form) and women scared to touch weights and focusing endlessly on long duration cardio.  Both of these situations make building muscle and burning body fat a seemingly impossible task.

Webster's defines intensity as the magnitude of a quantity (as force or energy) per unit (as of area, charge, mass, or time).  From our perspective, intensity is the amount of force (weight training) or energy (cardio) expended per unit of time.  Thus, in order to increase the intensity of your weightlifting, one must either lift heavier weights during the same time period or lift the same weights in a shorter time period.  Similarly, for your cardiovascular work, increasing intensity means moving faster (i.e., the same distance in a shorter period of time) or make moving in the same period of time more difficult by adding resistance somehow (carrying weight, adding wind resistance, etc.).  This very simple concept evades most people.  Whether it's ignorance or laziness (or both), I'm not sure...all I know is that it's happening.

Ways to increase your intensity is just like everything else on The Program...it's simple, not easy.  First off, let me address weight training.  Everyone...men and women...should be weight training to get stronger.  Early on in your weight training, getting stronger means increasing the poundages you are capable of lifting by adding weight to your exercises each week of a training cycle.  As you progress (and get older), you will reach a point where getting stronger inevitably becomes maintaining a certain standard of strength.  For instance, one cannot add weight to their squat, deadlift, or press forever until they died.  If this happened, then we'd see 85 year olds setting world records in weightlifting and powerlifting, which we don't.  What we do see is 85 year olds able to maintain a 225 lb squat or a 315 lb deadlift.  Each year they are able to maintain a certain poundage in their lifts, they have in effect gotten stronger.  For you in your quest to get/stay fit, unless you are 85, dinking around the gym lifting the same weight year after year isn't having much effect on your body composition.  In order to build muscle mass and decrease body fat, you must increase your intensity by getting stronger.  If you don't know if you're above or below average strength-wise, here are some tables of strength standards for men and women...

http://www.exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/PressStandards.html

http://www.exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/BenchStandards.html

http://www.exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/SquatStandards.html

http://www.exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/DeadliftStandards.html

http://www.exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/CleanStandards.html

These cover the basic compound lifts.  I also include push-ups, chin-ups, and dips in my recommendations, and I'm not sure of any universal standards.  I usually use the following website for guidelines on the push-up - http://www.topendsports.com/testing/tests/home-pushup.htm.  Dips and chin-ups are typically done body weight until one can do 10 reps and then the intensity can be increased by either strapping weight to your body or adding reps.  Getting stronger in the basic lifts will lead to gains in muscle mass which will increase your basal metabolic rate. 

Regarding cardiovascular exercise, people are under the delusion that adding time to their long duration, low- to moderate-intensity cardio is the key to burning body fat.  If only this were true.  Spending longer than 20-30 minutes per day doing cardio without sufficient weight training and protein in your diet (i.e., if you aren't following a bodybuilding protocol), then all your cardio is resulting in you burning muscle (catabolysis), which in effect makes it more difficult for your body to burn fat.  Long duration cardio only has a place in the training programs of endurance athletes or people wishing to train for an endurance event (marathon, triathlon, etc.).  People looking to get generally fit should limit their cardio, but increase the intensity.  By working your way up from walking to jogging or jogging to sprinting during the same 30 minute time frame will not only increase the total calories burned during the cardio session, but your metabolism will be stoked for hours afterwards making the total calories you burn well into the next day higher.  You can also increase the intensity of your cardio by incorporating things like complexes, shuttle runs, suicides, weighted carries, or farmer's walks a couple of days per week after your weight training sessions.  This will have the same metabolic effect.

If you've hit a plateau in your fitness/fat loss efforts, try increasing the intensity of your workouts and see what happens.  I'd bet you break through your plateau assuming there aren't other things like an imbalanced diet hindering your efforts.