Brining Enough Intensity To Your Workout For Fat Loss

Kate Vidulich, creator of Fat Loss Accelerators shared with us her approach to metabolic training in part 1 of this expert interview series.

If you missed it you can always jump back or  Click here to hear the call.

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Craig: That’s great. Now next question I want to ask you, Kate, was what are the common mistakes people make with their interval training? Everybody’s using interval training, traditional interval training generally right now. What are the common mistakes people are making and how does Fat Loss Accelerators fix that?

Kate:One of the big issues I see with people going interval is that I think they’re doing an interval but they’re not bringing enough intensity. So they’re not really pushing to that 9 out of 10 level where you really need to stop and take a break. When people don’t bring this intensity, they feel that they don’t need to take a rest and they just continue to go with that same steady pace and work through rest periods. I feel like if you don’t need to take a rest then you didn’t bring enough intensity in that interval to actually create a fat loss effect. So I think that is one of the biggest mistakes I see people making.

The people who wanted to go out and try to do a running interval workout, they don’t sprint fast enough or bring enough intensity to that sprint to feel they need to take a rest. It’s really important that you work hard enough in that interval to then need to take a rest so it doesn’t change to a steady state, boring cardio workout that’s proven to be ineffective for fat loss.

The other thing I’ve seen with people doing interval training is that they don’t plan it. They just do random workouts through the day that they chop and change. These random workouts, they never have an progression so first of all you’re not tracking how you’re doing or what you’re doing so how do you know where you’re going if you have no plan?

So it’s just as important to plan your intervals and to plan those workouts even if it is traditional interval training. It’s really good to plan and track it so you can see that you’re making progress and getting better. Otherwise, it’s not effective for fat loss or for your training and a total waste of time, if you ask me.

Craig: Yeah. Do you see a lot of people when they’re doing interval training they’re not going hard enough, is this because—and I think I see this a lot—because people go too hard during the recovery?

Kate: Sure. I feel like recovery should either be standing still or gasping for air for one to two minutes or however long you need to catch your breath or just walking and they’re continuing to  walk to catch their breath. I feel like some people are not even out of breath. The other thing is when other people do spinning and they do these intervals in spinning, that people keep spinning through the rest period and just end up reducing the amount of resistance on the block and not actually being able to then bring their intensity enough for the next interval and they all just blend into one long intense workout.

Craig: Yeah, basically they’re doing a cardio session and they wonder why they’re not getting results, right?

Kate: Sure, and then they go out and eat extravagant amounts of food because they’re starving and this is where people then just fall into the slippery slope of not getting results and falling off the wagon.

Craig:  So what are your nutrition recommendations generally, especially with these really busy people?

Kate: I think being prepared is like number one for anyone, whether you’re busy or not. If you’re not prepared, you’re going to end up eating the worse food. I think being prepared for busy people is just having or knowing what you’re going to eat each day over the week so you’re sort of facing it one day at a time and planning the meals around your schedule because sometimes your whole day can be totally booked up and I found with people, some of my clients particularly, that they just don’t eat all day. Then they’re losing a lot of their muscle and it doesn’t look attractive.

So it’s just about being prepared basically for whatever each day will bring and finding out just what works best for you. There are so many diets and there are so many ways you can approach nutrition that it’s just important to find something that works for you. If it’s not working, you need to find something else and be willing to change and try different avenues if something isn’t working out the way you planned for it. But it’s really important just experiment and figure out something that works for you that will help you to become strong and athletic, and improve your training.

Craig: That’s really awesome. Now tell us about some of the results that people get. You probably have some of these people that are just so Type A that they’re training with you, then working 14 hours a day, trying to do triathlons or something, trying to get six-pack abs at the same time. So tell us about the amazing results that some of your clients have gotten with the Fat Loss Accelerators.

Kate: One of my favourites actually is a 63-year old woman. She comes and trains hard and does her best every single workout, increasing intensity and to be honest with you, she’s in better shape than a lot of 30-year olds going around. She’s one of my number one users for all of my workouts, well after me of course. Initially she lost 20 pounds in training with me and since then, we’ve been training together for it’s been over three years now, the focus has definitely shifted more towards performance goals and improving her running and just little performance goals that we set up along the way.

I think one of the greatest things is that she maintains her weight yet can definitely get away with cheat meals, strategically timed cheat meals, and I think at that age, being able to athletically perform at such a great level without being injured and without being in pain, and being able to have cheat meals here and there when she likes is definitely one of the most fantastic results that I’ve had with one of my clients here.

Also, I’ve had a 52-year old female client who basically refused to do any cardio so that kind of cut out half of my worries, trying to stop people from doing cardio, but she also didn’t really like going to the gym and hadn’t been to the gym a lot before she started to train to me. Over the last three years, when we first started working out together, within the first three months she totally transformed her body. She lost maybe five pounds. She was a small woman but she dropped two dress sizes in that three months over the summer.

I think the most exciting thing about this was that her whole mind shift was the way she viewed herself and her confidence in her own ability but in her whole life completely changed and shifted. I think was just really impressive.

Craig:  That’s really fantastic. Now what about some of the guys, did they listen from the girl from down under with the funny accent and do exactly what you do?

Kate: They’re a little more challenging, Craig, to listen to what I say but I do. I have a couple of clients who are in their fifties as well. To be honest with you, I’ve just started training more guys because more of them have decided to listen to me now.

Just when we start training together, bringing more intensity to these workouts, I’ve definitely noticed a change, even just from doing bodyweight training because until you bodyweight train and you’re down, you can’t bear any weights through some of these complex movement patterns.

So even just doing bodyweight training, within eight weeks, maybe even six weeks, I’ve definitely noticed a change in their core, thighs or their legs and to be honest, their goals in between. That’s what it’s all about here.

Craig:  Tell me more about the New York City training scene. I know you train in real small spots so it’s tough to say what exactly goes on in most of the bigger gyms but are a lot of people still using terrible workouts and wasting their time?

Kate: Yeah, absolutely. I mean I go to boxed gyms just to keep an eye on what’s going on and see if anything’s happening. Most of the time, the ellipticals are all full and the weights area is clear except for a few muscleheads. So in terms of people training on their own, it’s probably just like the old times but there’s been a lot of boutique gyms popping up and studios and also spinning has really taken off but—

Craig: Still?

Kate: Huge, SoulCycle and FlyWheel. It’s a really, really huge, huge craze right and it doesn’t really seem to be going away.

Craig: Yeah, spinning was really popular when I was in college, back in mid-early ‘90s, so it’s amazing that it’s still kind of stuck around but that’s good. At the end of the day, people are training. So what last bit of advice would you give to people who are looking to get a little bit more results or cut off their workout time? What are one, two or maybe three rules that you’d give to people that just need to get it going?

Kate: The first thing you need to do is bring the intensity. If you’re not finding your workouts to be stimulating and you feel like you’re in a rut and you’re bored, you definitely need to change up your program and you need someone else to write a program for you. I mean I find that sometimes I’m in a rut and the best thing to do is to get someone else to write your program. Even as trainers, we need someone else who can advice us or write a program specifically tailored to what we want.

Do things that you don’t want to do because most of the time the stuff that you go and do on your own is stuff that you like so you tend to not get as much out of it after a period of time. So the next thing is make sure you’re always changing up your program. At least give it a month before you change but you need to really change it up each month.

It’s kind of a double-edged sword. Sometimes people do two weeks and then they hop to something else but as long as you’re doing a program for a good solid four weeks at a time and changing it up, that’s how you’re going to continue to see ongoing results and not get bored and tied down to that same kind of workout.

Another thing that’s really important, tip number three, is to choose loads that’s challenging without compromising your form. I think women make the mistake of lifting too light most of the time on strength training exercises and then the guys try and overdo it, go too heavy, then compromise their form, and get hurt so it’s kind of different advice for males and females but particularly with metabolic training and lifting the weight, you want to lift something a little lighter than what you’d do in a strength training exercise

Three-pound dumbbells are not acceptable for any women, no matter what you say. You need to make sure that you’re lifting some kind of weight that’s going to create a metabolic effect, otherwise you’re not going to see the results that you’re looking for. I think the most important thing is that you just don’t compromise your form based on how heavy you lift because that’s when people get hurt and injured and that is definitely not what you want to do.

Craig: That’s a great point about lifting the right amount of weight. It takes a little bit of trial and error but it really shouldn’t get more than a couple of minutes to get the weight right. So Kate, first of all spell your last name, and then tell people where they can find more about your program, your YouTube channel, and all sorts of stuff online because you have some really, really great videos and your YouTube channel is set up almost perfectly.

Kate: Cool. Thanks, Craig. So my last name is spelled V-I-D-U-L-I-C-H. Hopefully, you can understand my accent when I said that. So you can find me at FatLossAccelerators.com and that’s also the name of the YouTube channel. You can pop over there and subscribe. It’s got some great stuff, great workout videos, really fun, exciting. And there’s also Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and all that kind of stuff as well but most of the action is happening on my website and on YouTube right now.

Craig: Okay. That’s really great, Kate. Thanks so much. Thanks for helping people get better results and thanks for being a certified Turbulence trainer and teaching at the Summit this year. You’ll be back next year for the Summit. So thanks everyone for listening to the Turbulence Training podcast. You can sign up on to our podcast for alerts. Just go and search “Turbulence Training” in the iTunes store. Make sure you visit the Turbulence Training fan page at TurbulenceTrainingFanpage.com to sign up for more information. Thanks again, Kate!

Kate: Thanks, Craig.

Craig: All right. Awesome. Good luck with everything down in New York City. Keep on rocking and make sure the guys are listening. So thanks everybody for being on the call and we’ll talk to you soon. Goodbye everyone.

Looking forward to your success,

Craig Ballantyne, CTT
Certified Turbulence Trainer