#12 SSR: The Truth About Spot Reduction.

Reasons or

Results! 

Fitness Nutrition Training

Sovereign Michael Valentine

SPN, CFT, Eft, Yft, Cft, SSc, GFI, CMCht, CERT, Reiki Master

206.225.9647

email: sovereignmv@gmail.com

web: bnbbs.myshaklee.com

Special Report #12

Part of the

“I see you succeeding"

series

  
The Truth About Spot Reduction.



Spare tires.
Tool-sheds.
Saddle-bags.
Floppy arms.
Double-chins.
Muffin tops.


Junk-in-the-trunk...

The quickie: You can’t spot reduce…you cannot reduce the fat in one area of the body more than another.

Complete answer: The most fast and permanent way to reduce body fat in trouble-areas is by combining proper resistance training, cardio-vascular training (aerobics) and nutritional supplements (BNBBs / Vitalizer).

The body burns fat a little bit, all over the body all at once, in a cumulative fashion. In other words, as the metabolism increases as a result of combining the three components mentioned above. Nutrition being about 80% of the results you achieve [or do not achieve if you skip it], and the other two making up about 20% of the results you get equally. People who are solely focused on one area of the body being fat or doughy generally aren't really in touch with how out of shape they are, because if they were, they would know that the area they are focused on is an average of the bodyfat on their whole body. We can imagine a very huge person looking in a tiny mirror that only shows their face, saying they are only concerned about how fat their face looks.

Each of these three areas have individual components to them, in and of themselves, which have to be adhered to in order to get good results in short order, e.g. with resistance training there is the contraction, the full range of motion, the relaxation phase following the set and the stretch & relax stage between sets.

Those of you who have trained with me in the past remember the differences between “doing” an exercise and “doing an exercise correctly.” The truth is most people cheat themselves out of the results of their hard work even though they show up at the gym and spend an hour or two, simply by nickel-and-diming themselves out of optimal results by skipping and overlooking the details of each exercise…just going through the range of motion.

A lot of people mistakenly believe that the exercise is what makes the body burn fat. Exercise does burn calories in and of itself, but the truth is that exercise, whether it is resistance training or cardio training is the stimulus…it gives the body the message to change the way it is using energy…and the level of results you get or do not get is based on how good your nutritional status is between training sessions.

Without optimal nutrition habits, the body gets the message to build muscle and burn fat but if it isn’t getting what it needs nutritionally, the message goes unanswered. And that’s one of the primary reasons you’ll see people spending time exercising consistently but their body doesn’t seem to be improving much…the tool-shed is still casting a shadow, the double-chin has turned into a triple chin, the saddle-bags seem to be loaded for a long weekend and the triceps are hidden under inches of Jello-like cellulite. Or the people whose body fat level drops one month and increases the next month. Or they lose body fat but they also lose lean mass…a no-no.

It does not matter how much time you spend in the gym if you are not applying the nutrition principles:

Exercise (stimulus) + Nutrition Density (fuel to carry out stimulus) = Results (fitness).

This is part of the reason you hear me talk about people who come to see me for a consultation who have been working out five to six times a week for months and have been gaining a pound of fat per month since they began! They think it’s about the exercise because that’s the part they can see other people doing too. They simply don’t see what the successful people are doing during the 40 or more hours outside the gym between workouts, so they conclude its all in the workout.

Exercise (stimulus) – Nutrition (fuel)  = Frustration (no response to exercise).

 Even if you do lose some pounds or inches off those trouble spots, the effect of training without sound nutrition habits is that once the training is decreased a bit or exceeds the six week mark, the metabolism is has either plateaued or decreased to the point that the fat level is not going to budge!

   

Anyone can experience some change in body composition during the first six weeks of an exercise regime. It’s what happens after the six weeks which demonstrates if you have done your homework or not. Exercising without the nutrition aspect is effectively a different version of yo-yo dieting…the long-term effect is more fat than when you started.

If you aren’t doing the nutrition part, you are effectively trying to "out-run the effects of poor nutrition habits". Like the old cartoons on TV where the guy is running down a snow covered hill trying to outrun a snow ball that is behind him, the further they get down the hill the bigger the snow ball gets and the faster it goes, eventually engulfing the man. You cannot permanently out run poor nutrition with any amount of exercise!

 

In all my years of doing this stuff, I have noticed that the body seems to burn fat from head down and from feet up. The last place to ultimately reduce being the tool-shed and spare tire, both for men and women.

I can’t tell you how many times I have heard, “If I could just get this area to shrink…,” whether it be the back of the arms or the abdominals. You have to think of the body in terms of a whole unit and from a wellness perspective. For whatever reason, and I know there are many reasons we often focus on one area of the body and want it to change before our eyes. Maybe someone made a comment about it or we saw a picture of ourselves. But if you want to reduce fat in any area really fast, heed my suggestions because there is no other way but to learn the habits of people who are consistently lean all over their body. And what they know is that nutrition is the key that unlocks the fat-burning process.

From people who don’t apply the nutrition practices I hear things like, “Its taking too long,” or “I don’t think this is working,” or “I’m working out, why aren’t I losing weight?” From people who do apply the nutrition practices I hear things like, “I feel so good and the fat is just melting away,” or “Wow, Sov, you were right…I wish I had known you twenty years ago.”

There just is no tricking the body to burn fat while the nutrition part is being neglected. Even if you don’t care enough about long term health and preventing the common de-generative dis-eases of our day, if you want fast as well as long-term, fat loss with any kind of sustainability think of nutrition as your best friend whom you may have not met properly introduced to yet.

If you do the nutrition part correctly from the beginning, you’ll likely burn off the body fat you want to rid yourself of at a rate of about 12 - 20 lbs / month...up to 45 pounds in 8 weeks. And then you just move into maintenance mode once you hit your goal.

And that leaves one wondering, “Why have I been spending months working out but not doing the nutrition thing yet.” Does it not?

But if you don’t do the nutrition part, you’ll likely spend months upon months exercising, lucky to see a 2 lb monthly decrease in overall body fat, followed by an increase the following month. Fat loss simply is not sustainable or maintainable without the nutrition connection.

If you are hit and miss with your nutrition you’ll likely see swings in your body composition of  about 1 ½  lbs each week. Up one week and down the next.

Some of the latest research data out now shows that when we exercise / train a particular body part the metabolism of body fat stored in that particular muscle group and being reduced does increase a bit, but not to the extent that training just the trouble-spot would completely eliminate the fat in that area, without training and reducing it and improving overall wellness of the rest of the body as a whole. 

For example, by training / exercising the whole body with progressive resistance training three times a week and cardio-training three times a week along with some special emphasis on the body part of choice will make for enhanced results…as long as the foundation of the training is a whole-body approach. (The extra emphasis won't burn fat faster, but it will leave you with extraordinary definition in that area once the fat has melted away.)

Its common nowadays for beginner and intermediate level trainees to do exercise routines where they do one or two body parts per workout (e.g. chest and back on Tuesday, biceps and triceps on Thursday, etc.), trying to make the body get faster results than training the whole body each workout.

The truth of the matter is that for the majority of people in their first year of training, doing more than three sets per body part per workout is too much…it leads to over-training.  Each set of weight lifting is stimulus for the muscle to improve the way it uses energy (done according to the guidelines herein, the body gets stimulated to burn fat and increase the energy storage capacity of the muscles themselves).

When I first started weight training back in ’89 & ’90 my main goal was to get really amazing abs…a six pack.  And sure enough my personal trainer got me on a whole body training program the first two or three months, where I worked through my whole each work out three days a week. Not only did I get killer abs (my body fat was 4%), I gained 13 lbs of muscle!

She really knew what she was doing!

  

It only takes a bit of exercise (3 sets for each body part), to achieve these outcomes. But, when we read publications like Muscle & Fitness Magazine we see professional athletes doing multiple sets per body part and we think that is what we are supposed to be doing…I mean they look good, right? More is better, right?

Wrong. I learned this the hard way myself. After those initial months of gaining muscle and burning fat, I caught the fitness bug and thought, “More must be better!”

Sure enough, in a short time I was doing longer training sessions, more sets per body part…more weight training in general…and I began experiencing the effects of over-training (e.g. sick often, decrease in lean mass, motivation dropped, aches and pains increased and I started having to miss workouts because I didn’t feel as good).

At that time I was working 40-60 hours a week in a horse emergency hospital in Redmond, Washington and attending massage school in Seattle 30 hours a week so my workouts decreased accordingly…sure enough, as my training decreased my muscle mass began to increase, seemingly all by itself, my energy increased and motivation to train came back!

The clincher of it all is that there are a lot of “personal-trainers" out there who attempt to impress their clients with long, specialized training sessions for each body part, make their clients sore as if soreness accurately indicates progress (which it does not), and finally to increase the number of sessions it takes to get measurable body composition results (if you train each body part harder and longer but less often it will take longer to get results), in hopes that the client will spend the money to continue in hopes of getting the results that were discussed during the initial consultation (bait- and-switch of the fitness industry).

And most of all, your trainer should check your body composition every 30 days. In my opinion, if they don’t they either don’t know what the numbers mean or at a fundamental level they do not know how to take your goals and design a personalized program which will elicit the physiological responses to manifest the specific body improvements you want to have (having a trainer and going through the motions does not mean you will get the results you want unless the exercise program, nutrition program and recovery program are all tailored to where you are starting from and where you intend to go) + a way for the trainer to know if you are actually doing what you are supposed to be doing (monthly body composition testing).

I have inherited clients who had been training with other trainers who in their first month following these guidelines make a 10 lb improvement in body composition. I have also inherited clients along with their files from other trainers who have (hopefully mistakenly), fudged the body composition numbers from the beginning so that it looks like their body fat is higher than it is, so when the clients numbers are re-checked and done accurately a month late it appears they have lost body fat.

Just having a trainer does not mean you will be successful! But if you have a good trainer and do the correct actions during the 163 hours of the week when you aren’t training, your success is likely.

Later, we’ll talk a little more about the measurable results and what clients experience when they do the nutrition part and when they do not, along with examples from the last year.

If you're truly interested in great nutrition products that will not only help you reach your goals and maintain them, but have a 100% guarantee, check out my website below and look into the 180 Turn Around Program.

https://bnbbs.myshaklee.com/us/en/shop/healthyweight/shaklee180kits/product-_p_shaklee-180_sup-supturnaround-kitp

By visiting my website, you can get a membership that gives you 15%-25% off all your orders. 

  

You'll be glad you did!