In order to reap the benefits from the intense exercise I recommend to my Fat Burning Furnace students, you must get adequate rest. I can’t stress this fact enough. In fact, rest is just as important, if not more important that the actual exercise.
During the high intensity resistance exercise that my students perform, the muscles experience tiny injuries or tears. The body’s response is to adapt and repair, getting stronger and larger muscles, which of course leads to burning more fat and a leaner body.
But this growth and repair process won’t take place if the body is not allowed the time to do its job. Too often, people rush back into the gym, as many have been inundated with the “more is better” axiom when it comes to exercise. But if we don’t get out of the body’s way and let it do its magic, we will experience poor results. We won't burn fat like we want to, and we will just end up demotivated or possibly give up our efforts altogether.
If you don’t get enough rest or sleep, you’ll have a very difficult time building the fat-burning muscle that will transform your body. And you’ll also have a tough time burning fat off too! That’s why we can’t work out too long or too often when using a sufficient intensity level. When giving the body an intense stimulus, such as proper weight training, you can’t keep hammering it into the ground.
If you did this, you’d quickly over train your muscles and negate your body’s ability to recover from exercise. Your immune system could become so worn down in fact, that you might even get sick…this happened to me a few times in the past when I was not paying attention to getting adequate rest and sleep.
And this repair and recover process does not happen overnight, it usually takes 2 days or more, So make sure to keep between 1-3 days of rest between your properly conducted resistance training workouts, or you will be short-circuiting your chances of success to burn fat and build lean, strong, muscle.
Now that we know how important rest is to burning fat and building muscle, we also must understand the most important component of rest…otherwise know as sleep. Sleep is the ultimate recovery tool, and not only for recovery from exercise. It’s a recovery tool from any stress you take in throughout the day.
Whether it’s from family pressures, work issues, or finances, etc., increased stress can be dissolved by adequate sleep. And don’t think you can burn fat maximally when you’re over-stressed by other things in your life. A high stress level can shut down the effectiveness of your ability to burn fat, among other things.
So make sure to get adequate sleep. What’s ideal? I would recommend no less than seven or more than nine hours. In fact, seven and half hours per night might be the perfect amount!
Research has shown that we sleep in cycles of 90 minutes or so. It has been suggested that if we wake up too far before or after one of these 90 minute cycles, you will probably feel groggy for a good part of the day. So try the 5 90 minutes sleep cycles, or 7 and a half hours…you’ll most likely wake up feeling well-rested and energized, and your fat burning furnace will show it’s appreciation, allowing you to burn more fat faster.
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