Dear Member,
Here’s a great way to lose fat fast. Today, you’ll see how to use a specialized exercise technique to accelerate fat loss for your New Year’s resolution for 2007. I promised this tip for my recent teleconference on our Fat Loss Challenge. Unfortunately, we ran out of time answering the many questions but I didn’t mean to leave you hanging.
This secret, I call “delayed recovery”. It’s not for the faint of heart, but if you want to step up your fat loss – this technique will throw even your most stubborn fat onto your “metabolic grill”.
Remember: PACE® employs brief sets of exertion followed by focused recovery back to near your resting state. Now, instead of going straight from your exertion to your recovery, you insert an “intermediate exertion period” between the two. This has the effect of putting off your body’s recovery from the exertion.
Here’s an example to see how it goes: Let’s say you’re on a stationary bike and you’re pumping hard during a 60-second exertion period. Instead of going straight into your recovery after the 60 seconds is up, you drop into an intermediate exertion level for another minute.
You’ll do this delayed recovery period at about half to three fourths the intensity of your preceding exertion period. After this delayed recovery period, THEN stop exerting yourself or slow to a pace that feels like a comfortable walk and focus on complete recovery. Don’t go into rest mode during your delayed recovery period. You’ll notice yourself longing for the recovery. Let yourself continue to huff and puff a bit –knowing your rest is coming soon. Why would you want to do this?
By delaying your full recovery, you’re forcing your body to fully deplete its high-energy output system. That means you’ll use up
ALL of your stored glycogen and you’ll burn calories – carbs from your muscle tissue – at your body’s maximal rate.But your body must replace the glycogen burned to prepare you for your next exercise session. The more glycogen and muscle carbs you burn during your workout, the more fat your body will burn to replace that used up energy. This strategy burns your fat while you rest!
But it’s not so easy. If you’re pushing yourself – like in the above example – you’ll naturally want to go into full recovery right after you finish a high-intensity exertion period. In other words, you’ll be dying to stop and pant. (As you remember, panting after an exertion period is a sign you’ve hit your supra-aerobic zone.)
By forcing yourself to do an intermediate period right after, your lungs will be screaming for more oxygen – for you to “repay” the oxygen debt you just created.
But by delaying the recovery of oxygen, you’re pushing your body to literally use every last high output fuel store it has. And when you forcibly empty your tanks, the resulting fat loss will be more intense and more noticeable – and it will happen at double the rate.
Here’s a chart to help you better visualize what I mean:
Warm-Up Set 1 2 minutes
Full Exertion 60 sec
Intermediate Recovery 60 sec
Full Recovery 3 to 5 minutes
Instead of each set having just two components – the exertion period and the recovery period – each set now has three components.
The chart illustrates the example we used above: A high-intensity exertion period of 60 seconds, followed by an intermediate exertion / delayed recovery period of 60 seconds, which you do at half to 3/4ths the intensity. Finally, you allow yourself to hit full recovery for however long it takes for you to feel recovered. You can use your heart rate to gage recovery. I look for my heart rate to return to below 100. Then I repeat this 3 part set of exertion, delayed recovery and recovery.
But here’s another secret I touched on during the teleconference that I had previously only used with my own family and friends. You only need a minimum of one set of PACE® for it to be effective. That can cut down your workout time even further.
You can still get the fat burning benefits of PACE® by simply doing one set using the delayed recovery technique we’ve talked about today.
To Your Good Health,
Al Sears, MD
PS. Over the long run, remember the first principal of PACE® is Progressivity or “incremental change through time”. So, to keep the momentum of your fat-burning program going for months, you can use sets as your progressive change and gradually work up to 5 sets.