Just 4 Weeks To Go

The Next Gym Workout Is Almost Here

4 weeks from today gyms will finally, happily and thankfully reopen. I personally can’t wait to get back to working with my personal training clients after such a long time out. Summer would be almost upon us too if not for the rain on what seems like every day now. Generally this means a lot of you will be getting back to your gym training. You could be taking up training for the first time or just thinking about getting in better shape for summer weather. I wanted to say holidays but who knows what the hell that situation will look like! With that in mind I want to help you with quick, actionable information over the coming weeks. In doing so, hopefully pointing you in the right direction to better health and fitness. This week I’ll look at calories.

For the majority of people, getting in better shape means burning fat. Note that I said burning fat and not losing weight. Without going too far off topic right now, weight loss is pointless if it’s through water loss or worse, muscle loss. That tends to happen when average folks without any training or nutrition knowledge blindly cut out every carb they can think of (probably without also resistance training or consuming enough protein) because they heard that’s what their friend did before their wedding. Or they remember all the times they did that before to lose weight. They fail to realise that they regained the weight they lost as soon as they reintroduced carbs to their nutrition. This means they repeat the process over and over. You know what they say about madness…

To Burn Fat, You Need A Calorie Deficit

If you take away anything from these few short minutes of reading please let it be this. Don’t go zero carbs, zero fat or zero anything. Just don’t. If you want to know why you shouldn’t, I’d be happy to explain in another post but for now just take my word for it.

At the end of the day fat loss boils down to being in a calorie deficit. That is, burning more calories than you consume. Using the following quick and easy calculator will give you your maintenance calories per day or the calories you need to consume to stay the same weight.

https://www.thecalculatorsite.com/health/bmr-calculator.php

From there you just consume a few hundred calories less than that maintenance number and theoretically you should burn fat. I say theoretically because there’s more to it than just that. Calorie consumption, absorption, digestion etc. are all different in each individual as well as calorie numbers on food labels being an average and well, you get the picture that this isn’t so simple. Hence the reason people hire a trainer like me to navigate the muddy waters and steer the ship in the right direction. Use the formula as a good starting point and track your progress for a couple weeks.