If you’re looking for get lean and lose fat, it’s going to be imperative that you’re paying close attention to what you’re doing with your workout program. While regular exercise and a good diet will obviously help you move closer to total fat loss, it’s going to be smaller tweaks that you make with your workouts that will really push results up to the next level.

Many people just go about their workout program without ever really thinking about these tiny changes that must be made and hence they don’t progress nearly as fast as they could. Fortunately, by getting acquainted with the following tips and then making sure that you put them into action with your training you can get right on track to seeing proper results again.

Let’s get started and show you four quick yet highly effective things to start doing with your workout training.

Pair upper and lower body exercises together

The first thing that you can do to help get lean and lose fat is to start pairing together some upper body and lower body exercises. Rather than doing all your sets of upper body exercises and then moving on and doing all your sets of lower body exercises, do one set of upper body work and then immediately after that do one set of lower body work.

Alternating in this fashion will speed up the rate at which you progress throughout your workout and will also help you burn fat faster.

Utilize an exercise ball

Second, the next method of boosting your rate of fat loss is to start incorporating an exercise ball into your workout routine. Since the exercise ball is going to reduce your base of support and make all those muscle fibers within your core contract that much harder, this is going to up your calorie burn of the entire workout session.

The more muscle fibers you’re able to stimulate within a given workout the better the rate of fat loss you’ll see so do try and include this whenever you can. Chest presses, shoulder presses, lateral raises, and bicep curls can all be done while sitting on an exercise ball.

Add interval training

Third, interval training is the next thing that’s a ‘must do’ if you want to get lean in a hurry. Since interval training has you working at such a high intensity as you go about your cardio session you’ll not only burn off more calories while you’re doing the workout but you’re also going to maintain a higher calorie burn in the hours following the workout session.

Interval training is extremely stressful on the body however so try and keep it to just two sessions per week. Anything more than this, especially while you’re on a calorie reduced diet is just going to set you up for overtraining.

Alternate heavy weight and higher rep workout sessions

Finally, the last thing that you can do to enhance fat loss is to alternate between low rep, heavy weight workout sessions and then higher rep/lighter weight workout sessions.

Note that ‘lighter weight’ doesn’t necessarily mean taking the weight so incredibly light that you’re no longer challenging yourself but it does mean using a weight that is going to allow you to move into the 10-12 rep range. This is where you want to be with these sessions to increase your post-workout calorie burn and improve the amount of muscle definition you see.

Then on the other workouts aim to keep your rep range around 5-8 reps and you’ll be right on track with where you should be.

So keep these simple tips in mind. If you can start including each one within the overall context of your workout program, you will definitely notice a difference in how lean you look.

Cabel McElderry is the director of One-to-1 Fitness in Red Deer. He can be reached at 403-341-4041. Also check out www.personaltrainingreddeer.com for more information.