If you ever got to the point of breaking a fat loss plateau or trying to get to the final stage of leanness, things get a little more challenging than they do with traditional fat loss.

You see, when you’ve been very lean or you have hit a plateau, fat loss isn’t just about calories in vs. calories out. It’s about your hormonal makeup and how that affects fat storage and thus fat loss.

When you lose the first twenty or thirty or whatever pounds, you have lost the simple fat. What you will notice is that the remaining fat resides in your problem areas, and those trouble areas are determined by your hormonal genetics.

Fighting to get rid of the trouble fat areas which can be anywhere from the last 10 to 50 lbs. is more of a hormonal battle than a cardio or calorie deficit battle.

Understand Your Stubborn Fat Problem and Learn and How to Overcome It

There are 3 common hormones that cause most regional fat storage:

1. Estrogen – The female sex hormone responsible for the lower body fat patterns. Studies show the estrogen hormone reduces a woman’s ability to burn energy after eating, which results in more fat being stored. Read this to avoid foods that promote estrogen levels, especially important for males and bodybuilders.

2. Insulin or Insulin Resistance – is responsible for the fat storage in the love handles & lower back area. A telltale sign of insulin resistance is the inability to lose weight no matter what you try.

Nearly every time you eat food your body releases insulin. After a long period of time your body becomes less sensitive to your own insulin, and as a result your body has to produce more insulin to maintain proper blood sugar levels.

This extra secretion pushes into an abnormal metabolic state where your muscles become insulin insensitive and many calories are diverted to the fat cells of your abs. Thus your stomach fat begins to accumulate. Remember additional insulin will store as fat.

3. Cortisol – is the stress related fat accumulation hormone and the reason you’ve got more flab than ab. This hormone is thought to directly influence food consumption, and stimulate cravings for sugar and fat. These hormones are working against your fat loss program. How do you overcome the fat building hormones?

Fat Busting Anti Hormones

We know that estrogen puts fat on your butt, thighs and stomach. You combat it with testosterone. Testosterone builds muscle and muscle fights fat. They compete for a lot of the same space.

To put it simply, testosterone promotes muscle and estrogen promotes fat. Testosterone of course can be artificially employed but no reason to go there. Instead, we’ll increase testosterone levels naturally, through fitness. This will increase the net fat-burning effect of all exercises, but more suited to our purposes here, it’ll also help to get rid of lower body fat.

It is not possible to produce a harmful quantity of testosterone through training. So ladies, you need not worry about the masculinizing effects. Training produces a boost in testosterone from a physiological perspective, relative to what your body normally produces. Training increases muscle density and is one of the ways to spur your body to produce and release more testosterone, which will help you lose the estrogen related fat storage.

Training for Maximum Effect

(1) Do more work (sets, reps, or both) at the same time.

OR

(2) Do the same amount of work and reduce the time where you do it. A challenging method of training that’s specific to radical fat loss that not only produces testosterone to mitigate regional fat loss, but also more fat on the whole.

As an example, you select 3 exercises:

Overhead press, dumbbell row, & squats. Use weights appropriate for your level and experience of training. Keep in mind the examples are high rep and better for toning muscles. If you want to grow muscles use heavier weight and do less reps.

Try something like this:

Overhead Press  |25 lb dumbbells  |16 Reps |
DB Row               |40 lb dumbbells  |18 Reps |
Squat                   |150 lb barbell      |18 Reps |

Setting it up in a circuit fashion, you run them one after another with little rest in between.

Sounds like just about every circuit training protocol, right? WRONG! Your training for time not weight or reps. Similar to the training the cast went through in the movie 300, you’re pushing for max reps in each exercise for a given amount of time.

Make it Better

Increase your weight by 10-20% and try to squeeze out more reps. From the about example continue by adding weight and reps.

Your second attempt might look like this.

Overhead Press |35 lb dumbbells  | 20 Reps |
DB Row              |50 lb dumbbells  | 20 Reps |
Squat                  |170 lb barbell      | 20 Reps |

Density Training is fun, challenge-based, burning a heck of a lot of fat, and most importantly, is one of the best training modalities around to increase testosterone production and release. And that’s why training for increased workout density helps you shed stubborn lower body fat and more fat on the whole. This is the main principal of what makes the P90x and Insanity program successful.

Insulin Growth Factor 1 (IGF1) – Anti Insulin Resistance

Producing IGF-1 via extra training will help you improve insulin sensitivity and begin to burn the fat on love handles and lower back. We know that insulin resistance is very common, especially among people who previously were overweight.

If you’ve lost some fat and you’re now struggling to lose a bit more (and it happens to be fat in your love handles), I’m willing to bet your suffering from some degree of insulin resistance.

To get rid of the fat, we need to do fat burning workouts and increases insulin sensitivity in the greatest degree we can. As a result, we’ve to employ Dynamic Training.

Dynamic training uses rapid movements to teach the body to move efficiently. Since this type of training is very expensive in terms of energy (calories), dynamic training is excellent as a general fat loss modality. Dynamic Training is an incredible way to produce IGF-1. In doing so is one of the most efficient methods to mitigate insulin sensitivity.

Cortisol vs Growth Hormone

The higher the cortisol level, the more stomach fat you’re going to accumulate. Given that fact, it’s understandable that if you store fat primarily on your abs, you’re a victim of high cortisol. Also known as the Fountain of Youth, growth hormone is the most effective compound the body can manufacture to influence both fat loss and muscle gain.

The more of it you produce, the faster you’ll lose fat and build muscle. It is just as simple as that. Now, in addition to that awesome little fact, the growth hormone is going to counter cortisol and help you lose stomach fat.

Also, you have probably heard that one of the ways to reduce cortisol levels is to get more sleep. That is something you hear on almost all of the medical TV shows.

What you don’t hear is why. Sleep is one of the main ways your body produces growth hormone. In other words, while you’re sleeping your body will naturally produce growth hormone. And, as I mentioned earlier, growth hormone is one of the key hormones that reduce the effects of cortisol.

So sleep more and you will produce more GH! Produce more GH and you’ll have less cortisol! Sleep more, results in lower cortisol levels. Got it? Of course, I’m not suggesting you to sleep your way through a fat loss plateau (although more sleep helps). I’m just illustrating the relationship between cortisol and growth hormone.

That brings us to the production of growth hormone, as it relates to your training regimen. While almost all forms of exercise both growth hormone and cortisol production, some types are better than others. Surprisingly, cortisol is heavily produced during long cardio sessions. Instead we’ll gear our training to a style that produces more growth hormone.

To do so you must first produce latic acid. If you done any type of repetitive resistance training you find your muscles will tire eventually and you’ll feel a burning sensation. That’s latic acid being produced in your muscles.

By definition, lactic acid is a by-product of the chemical reactions that occur during exercise. This matter is wildly irritating to the nerves, and your body reacts. The human growth hormone will counter act the latic burn.

In any event, it is important to structure training to produce the most lactic possible. And because lactic acid is produced mainly in the concentric (positive) phase of anaerobic exercise, we’ll extend this period.

What it means is that we’re lifting the weight very, very slowly. And then we lower it very, very quickly, so we’ve have a quick turnaround. As an example, if you are doing a squat, you will descend to the bottom of the squat very quickly (drop-down fast, but still checking the weight slightly) and then sloooowly lift the weight, oh so sloooowly over a period of 4-6 seconds.

This will create enormous amounts of lactic acid, which in turn will send the GH production in overdrive. Now I’ve to mention that training in this way necessitates the use of lighter weights than you’d normally spend on a given exercise.

So if you are interested in lactic training, I suggest you reduce weight you would use on any exercise by about 30% to be both safe and effective. With traditional teaching methods, lifting weights normally would be quick and lower it slowly. Here we’re doing the opposite, to produce the most lactic acid possible, which will cause a corresponding increase in the production of growth hormone.

This will result in reducing not only decreasing cortisol, but also a reduction of cortisol related fat belly storage. And on top of everything, it’s great for fat loss in general!

Tags: Abs Diet, fat loss, flatten tummy, Tummy Fat