The average woman gains 2 to 5 pounds during the holidays. Most lose some of the weight during the spring. However, leftover holiday weight gain leads to "fat creep," which increases your weight 5 percent every 10 years.

Stop the madness! Don't let holiday revelry interfere with your quest for a fit, trim, sexy body. You have worked hard all year to improve your fitness and are finally making significant progress after months of exercising and following a healthy diet. Don't ruin it by blowing off your diet and exercise program during the holidays. Help is on the way! We will show you a way to have your cake and eat it, too.

Holiday weight gain is surrounded by urban legend. Articles in the popular press claim that most women gain 5 to 10 pounds between Thanksgiving and the New Year. A well-control led study from the National Institutes of Health showed most people gain less than 2 pounds, but some people gain more than 8 to 10 pounds. Holiday weight gain is not inevitable. People who did less exercise than normal during the holidays gained weight, while those who increased activity levels lost weight.

Scientific breakthroughs in exercise physiology show how you can burn more calories during exercise and mobilize fat-burning chemicals that will change you from a fat maker to a fat burner. Combining high-velocity weight training, short rest intervals between exercises and high-speed interval training will increase metabolism and turn you into a calorie-burning machine.

Burn More Calories During the Holidays

How many times have you seen a beautiful woman who exercises regularly, yet still has a muffin top and a fat butt? Pretty common, huh? Developing a fitness model body is very difficult, because biology is working against you.

Most women are pears– they store fat in the lower body. The fat you deposit on your legs and hips is there for survival. Women need fat to reproduce; the genes are programmed to release this fat only as a last resort. Stress hormones such as epinephrine (noradrenalin and adrenaline) and growth hormone stimulate fat breakdown. They work by triggering hormone-sensitive lipase (HSL), an enzyme that causes the release of fat from fat cells and determines your capacity to lose weight and fat. Losing lower body fat is not impossible if you understand how the body regulates it.

HSL doesn't work well when you're overweight, but is activated as you lose weight. Women have a difficult time getting rid of thigh and butt fat. Scientists discovered that women lose fat in the upper body and face first and reduce lower body fat slowly. Studies from Penn State University – using a technique called MRI that allows scientists to take internal pictures of muscle, fat and bone– found that women who trained with weights lost substantial fat from the arms and abdomen, but very little from the legs.

One reason for this is the way the nervous system controls fat use in women. You must turn on your nervous system (sympathetic nervous system) and increase growth hormone release if you want to lose fat from your thighs and butt.

Resting metabolic rate determines daily caloric expenditure and is critical for fat gains and losses. The nervous system sends a steady stream of impulses to the tissues that helps control metabolism and the rate you burn calories. This process works very much like the idle setting on a car– the higher the idle, the more gas the car uses. In your body, the higher the setting of your nervous system, the more calories you metabolize every day.

Researchers from the University of Colorado– led by Dr. Christopher Bell– found that these nervous signals are lower in women than men, particularly older women who don't exercise. Hormone-triggered fat release in the lower body is lower in women than in men, whereas fat release from the upper body depots is comparable.

This means that women can lose fat from the upper body easily, but have trouble losing it in the lower body. Increasing growth hormone and adrenaline release are the keys to reducing stubborn fat stores. The best way to do this is with a "shock and awe" exercise program that activates fat-burning hormones through high-velocity training with minimal rest between exercises and sets.

Increase fat use by training more intensely. A Ball State University study, led by Scott Mezzetti, showed that high-velocity weight training burned 12 percent more calories than training more slowly. They concluded that explosive muscle contractions increase the intensity and caloric cost of a workout. Using the same weight, attempting to do an exercise explosively activates larger muscle-nerve units than doing it more slowly.

Explosive weight training "turns on the nervous system," which increases growth hormone and adrenaline release and burns more fat. Combining explosive weight training with high-and moderate-intensity aerobics increases calorie use and promotes weight loss.

High-velocity training means doing the exercises as fast and explosively as you can. Don't use less weight, but lift explosively. Attempting to activate the weights quickly recruits fast-twitch muscles that are metabolically less efficient, so they use more calories when activated.

The structure of your weight training and aerobics program is vital to burning more calories and losing fat. Take little or no rest between exercises and sets– zero to 30 seconds works best. High-velocity training using minimal rest intervals increases growth hormone and adrenaline levels into the stratosphere and increases the caloric cost of exercise.

Muscle is one of the most metabolically active tissues in the body. The more muscle you have, the more calories you use during the day and night. Muscle is also important for using calories during and after exercise. Building muscle mass is an important way to increase metabolism, burn more calories and lose fat. Intense weight training builds muscle and cuts fat. Since muscle is denser than fat, your body looks toned and shapely– not bigger and broader.

Lifting weights will increase muscle mass and burn more calories. Don't be a wimp. Train intensely and explosively during each set and repetition and minimize rest periods between sets and exercises. This will build metabolically active muscles that will help you burn more calories and fat. Hard work will bring you closer to your goal.

The Explosive Holiday Fat-Busting Workout

"The Explosive Holiday Fat-Busting Workout" incorporates scientifically proven features to burn more calories and promote fat loss:

• Exercises are arranged in supersets, so that you rest one muscle group while working another. Supersets allow you to do more exercise in less time.

• The program provides minimal rest periods. Don't rest between exercises within each superset, but rest 1 minute between supersets. Minimal rest increases the release of adrenaline and growth hormone that promotes fat loss.

• Choose a weight with which you can barely complete 15 repetitions. Each set requires 12 reps, so you are training at slightly less than maximum (i.e., 12-repetitions maximum; 12 RM). Do each repetition as fast and explosively as you can. However, do not cheat; do each exercise with good form.

• The exercises are arranged in a precise order to maximize growth hormone and adrenaline release. Large muscle, lower body exercises (i.e., step-ups and leg curls) are scheduled last to maximize the release of fat-burning hormones. This sets the stage for increased fat use during the aerobics portion of the workout that follows.

• Lift weights first and do aerobics second to maximize growth hormone and adrenaline release.

• Do 30 to 60 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobics (e.g., treadmill walking, jogging, elliptical trainer or stationary bike) on weight-training days (three days per week).

• Do high-intensity interval training workouts– a series of intense, short-burst exercises followed by rest– two days per week when you aren't weight training.

• Rest one to two days per week. High-intensity training increases the risk of overtraining and overuse injuries. Listen to your body and back off if you develop aches and pains (beyond the usual). It is OK to take short rest intervals between sets and exercises when you begin the program. Work toward minimizing rest periods as your fitness improves.

• Get plenty of sleep. Sleep promotes growth hormone release and weight loss.

• Be more active during the day. Some studies found that people who exercise intensely compensate by doing less exercise later. Go out of your way to increase your activity levels: park in the back lot at the grocery store, take the stairs instead of the elevator at work, put the television remote in a drawer or go dancing. The holidays are times that you spend with your family. Involve them in your activity program and improve their health and fitness, too.
  
  Include interval training in your fat-loss exercise program. Intervals involve doing high-intensity exercise with rest intervals between repetitions. For example, on a running track, sprint the straightaway’s and walk the turns for two miles. In the gym, do 10-20 repetitions of 1-minute sprints on the tread mill or elliptical trainer followed by 1 minute of rest between repetitions. This program includes a treadmill-running interval program that you can do indoors at a health club.
  
  Don't be a holiday statistic. This year, make November through January the time when you stopped the slide toward "fatdom" and became more lean, shapely and sexy.

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