What is The LA Fitness Personal Training Journal and Logbook all about? We have created a better Personal Training Journal and Logbook for both trainers and clients of LA Fitness Personal Training Programs. This will not only be a teach tool, and educational aide, but also valuable in recording which exercises a client has performed as they strive to reach their personal fitness goals. It tracks all of your workouts and has weekly and monthly measurements so you can track all your progress! Losing fat and building muscle, plain and simple. One concept that many people seem to have a problem with is the idea that in order to keep fat off of your body you need to put on muscle. While at first glance this may seem counterproductive - gaining weight in order to lose weight - it's all about metabolism. Metabolism can be summed up as all of the chemical reactions that take place within an organism. In terms of weight loss and fitness, metabolism basically means all of those calories that your body burns throughout the day. Your goal is to add lean tissue and in turn elevate our resting metabolic rate. Muscle creates metabolism So how do we do that? As we add lean muscle to our bodies the muscle will require more calories to survive. Imagine adding a bunch of plug-in space heaters into your apartment during the winter. As we keep adding heaters, the energy demands go up and our electric bill rises. More heaters, more heat. Similarly, as we keep adding lean muscle, our body must use more calories to operate that new muscle... Just like the space heaters. More muscle more calories burned. Now let's take it one step further and consider the future. As we are adding lean muscle over the coming weeks and months your body will burn more and more at-rest calories. Let's look at our analogy of adding the heaters inside of our house. There is a certain point where you have enough heaters going to keep you from getting cold, and then you can set all of the heaters to their lowest setting and they will still keep your house warm, no matter how cold it is outside. We want enough lean muscle on our bodies so that the fat we have lost can't come back. There is a tipping point when you are working out, where you have developed enough lean tissue (somewhere between 6 and 15 pounds) that the fat you have lost can't come back because you're burning so many calories throughout the day. Think of pounds of fat in terms of the calories they represent. A single (1) pound of fat is roughly 3500 cal. In general terms, a pound of lean muscle will add an additional 20 to 30 cal. per day to your metabolism. That means if I were to put on 10 pounds of lean muscle I would be burning an extra 200 to 300 cal. each and every day. So if I have 10 pounds of fat to lose (35,000 cal.) that I need to put on enough muscle to compensate for that fat so that once it's gone I don't have to keep stressing about it. A reasonable workout should burn between 500 and 1,000 calories in a given day (weight training plus cardio, CrossFit, extreme cardio, etc.). If you are working out 3 to 4 days a week - which you need to be - you are burning an extra 3000 to 4000 cal. per week. That would burn a pound of fat each week. No one should be afraid of lean muscle; it doesn't take very much space. Ten (10) pounds of lean muscle is not much bigger than a cantaloupe - as far as how much space it takes up in your body (volume). Just 5 pounds of fat is roughly the size of an American football! You're right, that's f'ing gross. But think of it like this: you could put on 10 pounds of muscle and if you lost just 3 pounds of fat you would not be any bigger. We will teach you how to do that in the following workouts. So grab your water bottle, get your towel, and prepare to wage war on fat. Let's get started!