Adapt Your Body to Lose Fat Faster
The human body is so adaptable that it’s figured out a way to keep fat on your body, even though it’s increased strain on your heart, your lungs, and many of your other systems. Over time, it gradually adapted to increased demand with decreased physical activity. It responded by padding you and preparing for a period of starvation.
You see, when you feed your body and lack movement, your body assumes that the winter is coming, and it puts weight on. This is an adaptation response from our ancestors, and we’re lucky to have it; this way, our bodies can feed off of fat and muscle when we’re starving.
When you want to create a “fat loss adaptation response” in your body, you’re talking about tricking your nervous system into thinking its summer time again. When it’s time to be slow and sleepy, your nervous system prioritizes digestive functions. When it’s time to sprint and be alive, your nervous system prioritizes energy consumption and hormone release.
It’s time that we start approaching fitness from the two most instinctive systems in your body – your cardiovascular and neurological. Today, let’s talk about your nervous system and how that relates to fitness. Neuro Fitness is an interesting approach to fat loss for 3 main reasons:
- It leads to faster fat loss.
- More muscle contracts with each exercise.
- Improved coordination with decreased risk of injury.
How Neuro Fitness Helps You Lose Fat More Quickly
By teaching your nervous system how to properly contract muscle, your body will start building muscle more easily. Remember:
Muscle = your metabolism.
So, building muscle is important even when you don’t want to get bigger.
You see, nerve signals tell muscle to shorten, which leads to a muscle contraction. Here’s how this works:
- Nerve signal travels from brain down to your spinal cord…
- Then from your trunk to your arms and legs…
- Brain ====> Spinal Cord & Trunk Muscles ===> Arms/Legs
It’s pretty simple, actually. Your brain controls the initiation of nerve signals, your muscles react according to the instructions your brain provides, and then your joints have little nerve receptors that provide feedback to your brain and let it know how everything ended up. The feedback receptors are called Proprioceptors, and they deal with position sense (where your body is in space.)
The faster (& more accurate) your nerve speed, the more muscle you get to use in any given exercise. The more muscle you use, the higher the metabolic demand of exercise.
With increased metabolic demand, your body starts to burn calories in overdrive mode hours after you leave the gym.
(This is referred to as EPOC.)
How Neuro Fitness Helps More Muscle Contract With Each Exercise
Ok, so enough about where the motor signal comes from. There’s actually another signal that’s really important if you want to activate as much muscle as possible. That’s known as your “Premotor Signal.”
You must be wondering how all of this applies to your fat loss program. Well, let me break it down for you.
With enhanced signaling strength & motor pathways, your body is going to be able to perform movement with less effort, thereby allowing the “Premotor Area” of your brain to start working harder. The “Premotor Area” is your movement planning center. By properly learning to activate your movement planning center, you can increase contractile strength by up to 30%. Pretty crazy, huh?
By learning how to plan a movement in a language that makes sense for your brain, you can lift 30% more.
That means you are leaving 30% of your strength on the table every time you work out. It’s no wonder you’re not getting results fast enough.
How Neuro Fitness Leads To Improved Coordination With Decreased Risk Of Injury
Remember talking about proprioceptors (position sensors) up there? Well, once your body learns a movement over a period of about 6 weeks, something called “Plasticity” takes place. This is a chemical change in your brain where grooves & bumps (sulci & gyri) develop to represent movement. Your brain actually becomes more
organized and a permanent (or “plastic”) change takes place.
That’s why people say the famous quote, “It’s just like riding a bike,” when they say it’s easy to pick back up on something. That’s where “Muscle Memory” comes from – Plasticity.
Well, with plasticity taking place, your body no longer has to tense every muscle up and hold on for dear life every time you do a pull up, and it knows exactly where to go. Your brain is no longer telling you that the weights may come crashing down on your head when you do bench press or skull crushers.
Now, your body can work on fluidity of movement, or coordination. With improved coordination, it’s less likely to pull a muscle or move a joint out of place. With increased coordination, you’re more likely to last longer with each set, because only the intended muscles are being targeted.
If you last longer on each set, you get more work done. If you get more work done, you lose fat faster. And around and around we go…
I’ve put together a Neuro Fat Loss & Fitness website that will teach you everything we discussed above and provide you with insanely effective neuro fat loss workouts that you can start doing today.
Want to know how to increase your metabolism even further? Check out this link we made for you:
==> Exactly what to do for rapid fat loss
by Dr. Kareem F. Samhouri, CSCS, HFS, Neuro Metabolic Fat Loss Expert
