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If you want to lose fat and gain muscle, you need to not only have the right workout routine. You also need the right caloric balance in your diet. Furthermore, you need to ensure you schedule rest days and take active measures to reduce your stress levels.
Get started with the following seven great tips.
1. Progressively Use Heavier Weights
To gain muscle and strength, you should challenge yourself by progressively increasing the weights that you lift. For each exercise you do, begin by using weights that enable you to do around three to five reps, which is typically perfect for women, or six to eight reps, which is typically ideal for men.
When you’re able to easily hit the last few reps of your last set, it’s time to increase the weight.
2. Take Supplements
If you’re serious about gaining muscle, you should consider taking supplements as part of your workout and diet routine.
Two of the best supplements available for building muscle are creatine and whey protein.
The former can help to increase high-intensity exercise and lean body mass while the latter is an ideal form of protein that helps to increase muscle protein synthesis and improve body composition.
Check out this informative article about creatine vs whey to find out which one is best for you.
3. Try Interval Training
When it comes to both building muscle and losing fat, interval training is the best way to go. By sprinting once or twice a week, you can spike your metabolism and soon see great results.
Try sprinting as fast as you can for thirty seconds. Then rest for sixty seconds before running at a very slow pace for sixty seconds. Then repeat for up to twenty minutes.
4. Incorporate Compound Exercises into Your Workout Routine
Another great way of losing fat but keeping muscle is to focus on compound exercises, which target several joints at the same time.
Compound exercises include squats, lunges, pull-ups and pushups, and deadlifts.
In addition to helping you to gain muscle but lose body fat, compound exercises are great for building your core strength.
5. Get the Right Caloric Balance
Diet is just as important as the type and amount of exercise you do if you want to lose fat but keep muscle.
It’s best to avoid undereating but you should get the right balance of carbohydrates, protein, and fats. You should aim to get 20% to 30% of your calories from protein and split the rest of your calories between carbs and fats.
When combined with the right exercise routine, you’ll be able to stay lean and build muscle.
6. Take Scheduled Rest Days
Just as important as the right type of regular exercise is remembering to take scheduled days to rest and recover.
It’s important that you take rest days to help your muscles repair and strengthen, so make sure you have scheduled rest days and take additional rest days as you need them.
But keep your diet and caloric input the same as any other day.
7. Adopt Stress Management Strategies
While this tip is one of the least common, adopting active stress management strategies can indeed help you to maintain muscle and stay slim.
The reason is stress can slow down your metabolism, prevent fat loss, and inhibit muscle gain.
When you’re often stressed, your hormones that involve chronically high levels of stress can cause you to put on additional fat and can even cause you to lose some of your muscle mass.
So, try incorporating stress management strategies into your weekly routine, such as yoga, meditation, or journaling.