The Biggest Fat Loss Exercise Mistake:

Fat loss is by far the most common goal in the fitness industry.  (Have you ever met anyone who wanted to ADD body fat?  Me neither…)

Which begs the question, why do so many people fail to achieve it?  Of course there are several reasons, but when it comes to exercise methodologies that factor into losing body fat, there is a very common yet quite obvious mistake exercisers make:

Mistake: When starting on a fat loss program, many exercisers exercise with the intention of burning calories instead of raising their metabolism.

Your metabolism, or resting metabolic rate, is how many calories you will burn in a 24 hour period at rest.  

Yes, age and genetics are a factor in what your RMR is but yours can always be improved. 

IF YOU EXERCISE WITH THE INTENTION OF RAISING IT. 

With effective exercise, one can raise their metabolism and be burning more calories 24/7/365.

Even a small increase in your metabolism can reduce your body fat levels significantly.  Do the math – if you can get your body to burn only 100 more calories per day (not much), on its own while you’re resting, that’s over 10 pounds of body fat you will lose in one year.  Not 10 pounds total – ten pounds of FAT.

But because of the short sightedness of many exercise programs, many (most?) people focus on the caloric expenditure of each individual workout. 

To me this is like counting your calories at one meal of the day but ignoring everything else you eat and drink all day – just doesn’t make any sense.

The focus should be on what each workout does to improve your metabolism.

Was it intense enough to force your metabolism to adjust and rise?  Or was it of little consequence and you stopped burning calories as soon as you stopped the workout? (Which is a VERY common mistake…)

The way to know the answers to these questions is far too expansive to get into in a blog post, but some good rules of thumb are:

• Was the intensity high and/or was it difficult to complete?  If yes, it probably raised your RMR.

• Was it long duration?  If so, you probably didn’t do much to your metabolism.  By definition, the longer a workout is, the more the intensity has to drop.

• Has it been done consistently?  If yes, then your metabolism is probably on the way up.  If no, then your workout was just a masochistic ass-kicking.

If your goal is to lose body fat - and again, whose isn't - don't focus on the short term caloric expenditure of a workout, which frankly is irrelevant information.  Make the workouts efficient and metabolism raising and you'll see the changes that you seek.