Week five: Let the metabolic circuits commence!

So, we’re four weeks down with two to go in our challenge to help six women get into ‘that’ pair of jeans…… and this week the training ratchets up a couple of notches.

The training shifts from more strength based training with some metabolic work to all out cardio-strength training.  In a nutshell, it’s now cardio with weights.  We don’t really go in for traditional cardiovascular training, particularly for fat loss, because it’s not the most effective way of going about things.  We of course still do ‘cardio’, we just do it in a much more time efficient and more affective manner – which is also much kinder on the joints.  (Think Crossfit with brains!).

We still have to respect the fact that we have chronic structural problems in three of our six women and that four of them have gone from zero exercise (we purposely made it challenging for ourselves!) to where they are now in just four weeks – and we need to program accordingly.  ’Results’ certainly does not include causing injury or inducing absolute exhaustion in people who need to be effective at work and maintain a happy family life!

In fact, last week we took the decision to reduce the number of sessions that some of the guys did as fatigue was starting to take its toll and the quality of workouts was diminishing.  It’s always better to do less with intensity than it is to be mediocre more often.  It helped, and this weeks workouts have been better as a result.

We retested everyone at the end of last week to track their fat loss progress.  The results were good.  In fact in some cases they were very impressive indeed, with one the guys (girls) having now lost a total of 5kg, but more importantly a whopping 86mm of fat – which equates to in excess of 10% body fat dropped, in just four weeks!  It’s the first time we’ve run a shortened female challenge over six weeks (we’ve previously done eight or nine weeks – in which we can pretty much guarantee two dress sizes) and so far the results are looking very promising indeed.

We’ve now got two weeks of serious metabolic training and we’re expecting some serious fat loss…..