Weight Training and HIIT for Weight Loss

I’ve decided to make my own weight loss workout program and follow it for a month and see how it goes. If it goes well, I will keep going much longer. I plan on updating my progress every week, similar to what I did with Insanity, and challenge myself to see if I can lose more fat on my own program than I did on Insanity.

I have been doing some research, and it seems like the thing I have not taken very much advantage of yet is strength training. I have lost a lot of weight, but my body fat percentage is still too high because I have been focusing on mostly cardio. The result of that, of course, is that I’m now kind of “skinny fat,” or, normal-sized but still flabby instead of toned and firm. I intend to change that with my program.

I don’t want to throw out cardio altogether, however, because I like being able to do things without being out of breath and I really don’t want to go back to that. After doing Insanity, though, I think it would drive me nuts to going back to steady, long cardio sessions where the pain of boredom outweighs any muscle fatigue by far. I have been reading about the supposedly supreme fat burning power of high intensity interval training, or HIIT, for a long time now, and I think the time has come for me to put it to the test.

I also want to put some interval plyometrics in there somewhere, because I have recently started taking martial arts classes and I want to train to have more explosive power, rather then my usual slow brute force approach.

Today, I am actually on the first day of my second week, having started my program last Monday. Here are the results of my first week:

Start weight: 180
Start body fat % (according to my handheld monitor): 28.6%
Guidelines: I have two weights workouts that target different muscle groups. I alternate these on my upper body weight training days. I do three sets of six exercises per workout, aiming for 7-10 reps to exhaustion. I ate at about 2000 calories per day the first week. I lost weight, but I have been so conditioned over the years to be deathly afraid of eating calories that I am honestly considering lowering them to around 1750 per day, just in case. I really don’t want to, though, because it would be amazing to be able to eat 2000 calories per day and still lose weight. I may keep my calories high this week and see if I lose again, and then adjust from there.

Monday workout: Upper body weights workout A
Tuesday workout: HIIT Sprints
Wednesday workout: Upper body weights workout B
Thursday workout: HIIT Plyo
Friday workout: Upper body weights workout A

My weight this morning was 178.6, which is a loss of 1.4 pounds from last week.
I will take my body fat percentage at the end of the month and see if there is an improvement.

Yay, I’m excited! I have my own workout program! You may have noticed I left out abs workouts altogether. This is mostly because I haven’t decided yet whether to do the abdominal workout that I planned, or to do a second experiment alongside this first one and test out how well the Flex Belt for abs works…

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