120413 WOD

 

Losing That Pesky Body Fat part 2

Yesterday I shared about the importance of hormone balance in losing body fat. We do that through eating a proper diet of meat, veggies, fruit, and healthy fats. This is the most important aspect of losing body fat. But we can supercharge the results by increasing our basal metabolism.

Metabolism is basically our bodies process of converting food to energy and then using it to keep us alive. Think of it like an engine burning fuel to stay running. If you can get your engine to run a little faster and require a bit more energy to run then you'll use more energy throughout the day.

Often when people think about burning body fat they think they need to workout more.  We can't workout all day, and as I mentioned yesterday our body uses the carbohydrate stored in our muscles and liver for fueling exercise anyway. So how do we supercharge our engine to burn more fat for energy throughout the day. A couple things.

1. Make sure our engine is running as efficiently as possible. 

We have 4 metabolic pathways in our body. In simple terms it is like having 4 speeds on our human engine. These are the different ways our body accesses our stored fuel and uses it for energy. This is why our CrossFit workouts are constantly varied. We do short sprint workouts, we do intervals, we lift weights, and we workout for different lengths of time. Our body accesses fuel for energy differently based on the type of activity we're engaged in. So working all the metabolic pathways is important to keeping our engine running as efficiently as possible.

2. Build Muscle

Muscle is active tissue. It needs to fuel itself constantly. The more muscle you have the more energy you need to go about your day. You'll burn more energy just sitting at your desk, or sleeping. This is why we have heavy strength days. This is why they are important.

When you pair up the effects of diet that keeps our bodies fueled by fat and not carbohydrate and the increased burning of dietary and body fat due to increased muscle you can see rapid loss of body fat.

For any ladies that are concerned about getting "too big" or "mannish," don't worry. It's not going to happen. If you are eating the proper diet you'll be getting enough calories to support your life but not so much that you gain size. Remember you can gain muscle without gaining size, because muscle is more dense than fat. The women that are "mannish" work really hard to get that big. It's hard work to eat that much. 

I'm assuming we'll be doing some sort of challenge at the beginning of the year, and thought that a little refresher on this info might be helpful.  Remember this as you gear up to lose body fat, increase your fitness, or whatever your goal for the new year will be.

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BUY IN
Row 200m
10 Ring Rows
Row 200m
10 Pull-ups

WOD
Death by Pull-ups
1 Pull-up the first min
2 Pull-ups the second min
3 Pull-ups the third min
etc.

Continue until you can't complete the given reps for that minute. Score by the number of rounds completed.

CASH OUT
5 Min Squat Test
Accumulate 5 min in the bottom of an air squat.

YOGA!!!!THURSDAY @ 6:30