8 FAT SHREDDING Tips You Wish You Knew Last Summer!

What’s going on Nation! With summer approaching fast, I know many of you are looking to shred fat, bring those abs to the surface and show off your gains at the beach!

At the end of the day, there’s really no reason why you would want to kill yourselves in the winter trying to make some gains if you can’t enjoy the physique you’ve built.  And that doesn’t have to be for just showing off guys, it can be for overall health reasons, maybe there is some clothing you really like and want to fit into, or maybe a special occasion you just want to look your best for.  There are many reasons why we train hard and when it comes time to trim down, in my opinion, most of us take WAY TOO MANY drastic measures to cut the fat off.

So, I thought I would share with you guys my top 8 tips to help you trim that layer of body fat as fast and as safe as possible.

Tip #1 – Don’t Wait Until The Last Minute To Start Cutting

Now, you might think this is a bit TOO obvious to be a helpful tip, but it’s actually very important. Most people forget or neglect to start their cutting phase until it’s too late.  Then they realize they don’t have enough time, start panicking and employ drastic measures in a futile attempt to drop weight fast. This never works guys and in most cases you will lose a lot of that precious muscle you have been building during your bulking season. In fact, you might even end up being less lean and less defined because you are depriving yourself of food and water to “lose weight” and your body just isn’t getting the hydration, vitamins, minerals and macros it needs for your muscles to look healthy and full.

In fact, RIGHT NOW is the time to start cutting.  March is over and you’re left with 2 - 3 months to get it done.  If you have been LEAN BULKING, you should have only gained about 10 – 15 pounds max of fat during your bulk and setting a goal to trim 2 – 4 pounds of fat a month is VERY realistic, especially if you apply the following tips I’m about to share!

Tip #2 – Don’t Fall Victim To Crash (Fad) Diets

I’ve read the articles in the so called “fitness magazines” too guys! I know what they’re spreading around, and it’s nothing more than misinformation which can even be dangerous and unhealthy at times.  The worst was about 2 years ago when every damn Instagram account with over 100k followers was promoting that detox tea bullshit.  Do you guys remember that?  Made me CRINGE every time I saw it because I knew for a fact that 99% of the fitness “influencers” posting about it didn’t even touch that junk.  At the end of the day if you eat healthy, you don’t need a detox and a few weeks of drinking  FLUIDS ONLY will of course make you lose weight because you are going to shit and piss your brains out.

You also see articles about how low carb diets and ketogenic diets can be excellent for dropping weight fast too. Listen guys, these are just drastic and desperate measures to sell subscriptions or gain views and they are bound to fail. First of all, a low carb or ketogenic diet isn’t any better for losing weight than any other calorie deficit diet and secondly, in many cases they can even be bad for your health.

You have to understand that losing weight comes down to calories in versus calories out. As long as you’re in a caloric deficit (which means you eat less calories than your body needs), you WILL lose weight, regardless of the macronutrient ratios.

However, notice I said macronutrients and not micronutrients. Of course, a calorie deficit diet WILL help you lose weight.  But that doesn’t mean you can eat whatever junk you want and still hope to drop weight like all these people eating McDonald’s and claiming IIFYM would like you to believe.  In fact, if someone is telling you to eat McDonald’s in moderation, just unsubscribe from them.  It’s low quality food and should never be on your mind as an option.  Now there might be times you HAVE to get it because you had a crazy day and it’s a matter of eating something or nothing… but you’ll never look ripped eating McDonald’s in moderation unless you’re on drugs.  Period.  It’s LOW QUALITY shitty food guys.

Also, micronutrients such as vitamins and minerals are extremely vital when it comes to losing weight.  So make sure that whatever calorie deficit diet you’re following is nutritious and healthy and packed with quality foods.

Now, returning to my previous argument, since you ARE going to lose weight while in a calorie deficit the only thing that’s gonna happen if you follow a low-carb diet is MAYBE you’ll not have enough energy to complete your workouts or even get through your day at first but then your body will adjust. Furthermore, and I don’t want to get too much into this now, carbs are essential for our overall health, and severely limiting them for a long period of time can bring about serious health consequences. Our brain’s and muscles’ primary fuel is glucose (carbs), so we can’t really survive without carbs and I am not going to try to sit here and convince you all to go ketogenic diet either because it’s definitely not for everyone and that includes me.

All you have to do is stick to a simple calorie deficit diet with a deficit of about 250-500 calories per day and that should be more than enough to get you to lose about 2 - 4 lbs per month without restricting your performance in the gym and in your day-to-day life.

Tip #3 – Carb Cycle On Rest Days

While low-carb diets for an extended period of time can be detrimental to your health, it might be smart to limit your carb intake on days that you don’t work out and your body doesn’t require too much energy. So if you are following a 250 calorie deficit diet on your workout days, you can bump that deficit up to 400 calories per day and adjust your macros so that your total carbs do not exceed 100 - 150 grams. Obviously, you will have to increase protein and fats, since your carbs will be considerably lower.

This is a very smart and common way to manipulate your macros when trying to shred fat and it has no negative impact to your health and performance since you are only dropping calories on your rest days.  This is also how you accomplish LEAN GAINS and is the technique I use as well.  For example, on workout days I eat around 250+ grams of carbs and on rest days I drop it down to about 130 grams.  It’s simple.  If I’m not working out, I am not burning as many calories so I don’t need as many carbs as workout days.

Tip #4 - Curb Late Night Cravings With Leafy Greens

This is a tip that I found to work particularly well when it’s late at night and I have no more room for calories on my meal plan but I’m still hungry. This situation is a prime time for most people to start binge eating and blow up their whole meal plan for the day. My trick is combining leafy greens like spinach with a zero calorie drink like BSN AMINO-X and I find that this tricks my body into feeling full without actually increasing my calories. Well, I mean the greens might be like 10 calories or so but that’s really nothing to worry about and at the same time, I satisfy my sweet tooth craving with the taste of the AMINO-X and for those of you who have tried GRAPE, you know what I mean. SO GOOD! Plus, if you consider the micronutrients gain from the leafy greens and the 10 grams of BCAAs from the amino-drink, it looks like this has turned out to be an amazing late night strategy to combat cravings!

Tip #5 - Change Your Weight-Training Protocols

When you’re cutting, there’s really no point in dropping fat if you’re wasting muscle mass at the same time. The best way to hold on to as much muscle mass as possible while cutting is by losing fat gradually and trying to maintain your strength. Remember guys, strength loss while cutting is common and it’s highly associated with muscle loss as well.

At the same time though, you want to maximize the calorie-burning process, especially during your workouts. Therefore, while 8 sets of 3 repetitions may be a great way to keep your strength, it doesn’t really help you burn as many calories as you possibly could.

So if you want to shred fat, but not sacrifice your strength gains entirely you should focus primarily on compound movements and employ some techniques to make your workouts more effective at building strength and burning more calories.

• Technique 1: Utilize drop sets. For example, as soon as you’re done with a heavy 8 - rep set of squats, immediately drop the weight by about 40% and grind out 8 more reps. Then drop the weight one more time by another 50% and rep it out until failure. This method of training will burn an immense amount of calories, and bring in the benefits of high volume training to your workout.
  
  
• Technique 2: Utilize super sets. Instead of training biceps first and triceps later, why not combine the two by using supersets? Choose 3 exercises for your biceps and 3 for your triceps and pair them together as supersets instead of taking long rest periods in between your sets like you would if you were doing just one muscle group at a time. Not only is this going to save you a lot of time but it’s also very energy-demanding. You can also pair up different muscles groups such as chest and back, quads and hamstrings, OR you can even superset exercises for the same muscle group, for example, Pull-Ups and T-Bar Rows or Chest Presses and Chest Flies.
  
  
• Technique 3: Utilize CHEAT & RECOVER. To implement my new style of training all you have to do is increase the weight and utilize cheat reps to overload on the eccentric portion of your reps for 8 repetitions. Then, immediately drop the weight, and perform 8 more clean reps with proper form on the concentric and eccentric portions of the movement.. This way you can the best of both worlds. High volume and heavy negative overloading.

Tip #6 – Include HIIT In Your Program

For those of you who don’t already know, HIIT stands for High Intensity Interval Training and it’s the answer to the age-old question “How to burn MORE FAT and make the treadmill or bicycle less long and boring.”

Believe it or not, jumping on the treadmill and jogging for 40 or 60 minutes is not the most effective way to burn fat and it takes up a lot of precious time you could be allocating toward your weight training.  In fact, you can burn the same number of calories or more with HIIT and not have to worry about muscle breakdown.

Now there are many ways to include HIIT into your workouts and the simplest one is probably the treadmill. For example, all you have to do is jog for 60 seconds, then sprint as fast as you can for 30 seconds and repeat that cycle for 15 to 20 minutes max.

Another way to implement HIIT into your workouts is by using different exercises in a circuit, and in my opinion this is far less boring than running on the treadmill. All you have to do is pick 4 or 5 exercises, preferably multi-joint movements like squats, presses, pull-ups, dips, push-ups, burpees and sit-throughs, and perform each exercise for 30 seconds without taking any break in between. Then, as soon as you complete one round, rest for 60 seconds and repeat the circuit for 3 to 4 more rounds.

This way you’re essentially performing a full body workout while building up your muscle endurance and burning an insane amount of calories at the same time and all in just under 15 minutes.

Obviously you can adjust the time of the intensity depending on your current fitness level.  But try to start with at least 2 or 3 rounds if you’re trying this method of training for the first time.  For the more advanced athlete watching this video, go for 5 - 6 rounds or maybe even try one of my REAL TIME 20 minute workouts and see if you can keep up!

Tip #7 – Minimize Stress & Alcohol

Believe it or not, being stressed out all the time and drinking too much alcohol can seriously impede your fat burning potential.  Now, I don’t want to dive TOO much into the actual science, but here’s why:

First let’s talk about STRESS:

Every time you get stressed out, a specific hormone called cortisol is being released into your bloodstream and when cortisol is chronically released from an over-abundance of emotional and physical stress your body reacts in three main ways that negatively affects fat loss:

1. Cortisol Makes Cells Less Responsive To Insulin & Leptin. This means that if your body can’t read the signals for insulin, fat stays trapped in your cells and if your body can’t read the signals for leptin, you’ll feel hungry all the time. So you can see how both of these things place you in an uphill battle when it comes to losing weight.
   
   
2. Cortisol Increases Inflammation. Stress signals increase your likelihood of storing more visceral fat (or unhealthy fat), and having more visceral fat increases the release of inflammatory signals. This causes a bad cycle of inflammation and increased visceral fat storage leading to more inflammation and so on.
   
   
3. Cortisol Dysregulates Hunger Hormones. This means that cortisol can make you more prone to reach for more sugary foods causing a rollercoaster of insulin spikes and dips which is definitely something you want to avoid when you’re trying to lose weight.

Now let’s talk about Alcohol..

Guys, I understand that having a social life is linked with the consumption of alcohol but at the end of the day if you have goals you need to ask yourself, “How bad is alcohol REALLY for fat loss?”

Well, alcohol can actually limit your fat loss in several different ways:

1. Alcohol contains 7 calories per gram which is almost double than carbs and protein. This simply means that a few shots of alcohol or a couple of beers can contain a lot of calories which must be counted towards your total calorie intake for the day. The problem with that is the IIFYM argument again. While you’re still on a deficit if you watch your alcohol calories, you need to understand that calories coming from alcohol are nutritionally void so they are essentially empty calories.
   
   
2. Alcohol Can Damage The Stomach, Kidneys, And Liver. and Consistently damaging any of those organs will lessen their fat processing ability and this can have a detrimental effect for fat loss.
   
   
3. Alcohol Lowers Testosterone. And this is something that should really get you guys worried because Testosterone has a powerful fat loss effect and is reduced whenever alcohol is consumed, thus halting its full potential as a fat burner. Also, remember that testosterone is an anabolic hormone and contributes to gains in lean muscle mass. So, lower testosterone levels means fewer muscle gains, and less muscle means a lower metabolic rate.

Basically what you should learn from all this is that you should limit your stress as much as possible and while sometimes this isn’t easy, you should at least be aware that it is a contributing factor to your weight gain.

As far as alcohol is concerned, just try to keep it in moderation. It’s better if you have a few drinks once a week, rather than drinking every night. Your body won't metabolize sugars and fats as efficiently while trying to metabolize the alcohol in your system which basically means that your metabolism will SLOW DOWN.  If anything, the number one reason why people gain loads of weight from drinking is not necessarily from the alcohol itself, but from all the food they eat and their bodies can’t metabolize WHILE drinking alcohol.  So lowering your testosterone and poisoning your body on a daily basis is by no means a smart plan to shred fat.

Tip #8 – Stay Motivated

Just about everything in life has its ups and downs, its breakthroughs and its setbacks. Always measure your progress but don’t lose motivation if you don’t make progress for a few weeks. It’s natural to plateau sometimes.  If this happens, maybe you just need to change your macros or workouts or maybe you just need to push yourselves harder, but you definitely shouldn’t give up.

Getting shredded is not difficult, it just requires persistence and patience. Having the right support can also help when it comes to staying motivated. Find someone who has the same or similar goals as you, someone who can support and motivate you and vice versa.  You can even post in my forums and join our community on MuscularStrength.com.  We are 100,000 strong now and everyone is there for the same reasons.. to see GAINs!

Just make a profile, create a thread in the forum section and I will take a look and help you out because nothing makes me happier than seeing you all reach your goals.

I hope you guys enjoyed this rather long article and if you learned something useful, be sure to share the article with your friends and leave a comment down in the comment section below! And remember…more good stuff coming soon!