The Truth About Fat Burners and Thermogenics
What to Take Before Your Workout for Optimum Fat and Weight Loss
UPDATE!!!
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Now, back to the blog...
One of the reasons I became a personal trainer (and now travel the world helping people pull off the most amazing body change possible!) is this: I got tired of hearing stories about personal trainers giving horrible nutrition and supplementation advice. Many personal trainers can name 80% of the muscles in the body, but don't know how to engage the various types of muscle fibers during workouts, cannot lock in fat loss without the help of a heart rate monitor, and cannot skillfully guide their clients around a nutrition store or grocery store. No wonder so many people who hire trainers struggle to see results!
What Fat Burners and Thermogenics Are Designed to Do
People spend billions of dollars a year on weight-loss supplements. Most of this money goes to fat burners and thermogenics. First of all, fat burners and thermogenics usually belong in the same category. If a supplement raises heart rate (therefore increasing body temperature), it is a thermogenic. A lot of products try to sell a technology as fat burning (and some products, the NxCare's Methyl Ripped seem to be onto something) when, in reality, they are primarily focused on raising a person's heart rate.
When a thermogenic raises your heart rate, your body is working harder, which means it is burning more calories. When taking a thermogenic, any exercise feels like an extra effort as far as your heart and metabolism are concerned. Therefore, walking feels like jogging, jogging feels like running, etc. When you burn more calories, you lose more weight.
Unfortunately, most people who use a thermogenic lose muscle! In fact, if a pre-workout thermogenic was the only supplement a person took, they would most certainly lose lots of muscle. Losing muscle would slow down the metabolism over time, paving the way for weight gain...which paves the way for the purchase of more thermogenics. In truth, most thermogenic products create a muscle loss/weight loss/slowed metabolism/weight gain/thermogenic-product-purchase cycle.
What Fat Burners and Thermogenics Need to Succeed
Every client I work with uses one of two fat-burning supplements to coincide with a thermogenic (if indeed it makes sense for them to use one...and it is a per-case basis). Idea #1 is conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), a natural nutrient of grass that used to be prevalent in our dairy products when cows were grass fed. When we take a thermogenic (which helps burn more calories) and CLA (which helps burn fat, the RIGHT calories), we end up burning more of the right calories. Idea #2 is to take a very specific pre-workout shake or bar (email me at adam@rapidresultsfitnessmn.com to find out which shake/bar), which will help yield the optimum fat and weight loss in the gym when taken with a thermogenic/fat burner.
The bottom line is that a thermogenic/fat burner is not a stand alone product. When taken in conjunction with a nutritional piece (CLA or secret idea #2) that locks in fat burning, we can really get somewhere with our bodies in a very short amount of time.
Why I Recommend Thermogenics in Conjunction with Nutrition-Based Fat Loss Supplements
The reason I recommend thermogenics is simple: when taken in conjunction with CLA or secret fat loss shake/bar (send email adam@rapidresultsfitnessmn.com to learn what it is), the body burns more fat and keeps more muscle, which increases the metabolism and turns a person into a calorie-burning machine over time!
When I work with a client, my end goal for them is for their body to be a natural calorie-burning machine. Whenever fat is subtracted and muscle is added, this is guaranteed to be the case. And this is where most people go wrong: they only take a thermogenic (which typically locks in muscle loss) instead of taking it with a fat-burning-focused nutritional supplement that biochemically forces the body to lock in fat loss and muscle gain.
Supplements are helpful only when they are used correctly. Unfortunately for most of the people who are emptying their pocketbook and schedules to lose weight, they are one or two supplement strategies short of hitting the mark.
Adam Erwin is a personal trainer who travels the world to deliver one-on-one intensive boot camps for those looking to change their body now! His work is documented at www.rapidresultsfitnessmn.com. Currently, he resides in Minnepaolis, MN and trains athletes and serious weight-loss clients.