TO get in great shape we all know that we need to exercise, and what’s more, we need to exercise well.

Exercise gives you many great benefits, but you may need to decide what benefits or results you want to gain from your exercise or training programme so that you can structure a programme that can enable you achieve those results.

If you want to reduce the amount of fat your body carries then you need to train in a way that your body will build muscle and burn off fat and calories.

A programme that focuses on this will give you the greatest results for fat loss. Incorporating weight training for increased strength into your programme will enable you to build muscle.

This additional muscle will increase your resting metabolism. Your resting metabolism is the amount of energy (calories) your body burns off every day without exercise, while you carry out your daily routines.

You can obviously burn off more calories through exercise but, generally this will only be a small amount in comparison to your normal daily amount (aka your Resting Metabolic Rate).

So, with that in mind, increasing your muscle mass and resting metabolism (RMR) will be a huge bonus of you want to lose fat.

Your diet plays a key factor in gaining results. Achieving any results is near impossible without a good diet. If you do gain any results with a poor diet they will be short term and your health will also suffer.

To build muscle and shift fat you should train with moderately heavy weights, around 70-85 per cent of your maximum, use rep ranges between 8-12, do 3-4 sets and only take short rest periods (60 seconds).

Training this way will help turn your body into a fat burning machine.

Use exercises that use more than one joint, such as squats, lunges, pull ups, dead lifts, etc. It will be of a higher intensity and volume of training, so you get the most from your session.

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