For a lot of people, ‘Fatburners’ sound like JUST the thing to assist weight loss, even if their activity level is ‘next to nothing’ and while the majority of ingredients in these types of supplements are legal, they are not entirely safe. Now if you’re a professional athlete, fitness enthusiast or just an average guy, your body’s threshold managing physical exertion will extend over time. Meaning that your body will adapt to pretty much anything you do often enough. If you look at professions that require higher amounts of physical exertion such as a scaffolder or labourer, the strength developed by strenuous activity will adapt in order to function the job at hand. That being said, top athletes apply additional elements to their training and diet in terms of optimising their performance. Imagine that Elevation training masks weren’t just for idiots that want to look like Bane and ARE designed for serious athletes. Well, fatburners are kind of like this too. The thermogenic capacity of these products is down to a few distinctive ingredients that you will find in most ‘fat burning’ or ‘metabolism boosting’ products.

There are plenty of other common ingredients within most popular supplements like ketones, various herbs and capsaicin. Capsaicin is an active component of the chilli pepper, you can see where this is going…

By raising the temperature of the body, we burn more fat. Well that’s the plan anyway. This is why you’ll find ingredients in products that derive or relate to capsaicin such as cayenne pepper in Grenade Thermo Detonator. So technically if I eat a tonne of spicy food I will lose weight? Well no probably not. Nevertheless the role of heat-inducing compounds are essential in fatburners. As I previously mentioned these would be beneficial to individuals that have all of the fundamental controls in place in order to ‘cut’ employing the use of such products to optimise their performance and capacity to burn fat, NOT having the work done FOR THEM. This brings me on to people reasonably new to these types of supplements, unaware of their effects when combined with intense exercise. Bearing in mind supplement brands promoting aforesaid products will sometimes encourage users to take ‘X’ amount of servings in the hope of increasing ‘performance’ but even just ONE of the two- even three capsules recommended in a ‘serving’ could still put someone new to fat burners -even pre-workout- in a bit of a panic. If you’ve not exercised for quite some time and are desperate to lose the weight you’ve accumulated, at least get back into the swing of things before even considering using fat burners. This will only prevent you from passing out at the gym, or worse. If you’re considering the use of fat burners everyday, be sure to think about whether this will impede on your working capability of day to day tasks, will there be the possibility of a fan? am I on edge? is there a puddle in my shoe?

Fatburners and fasted cardio? This is a no-brainer, don’t do it. If you’re familiar with fasted cardio you’ll know that that the big HB- heartburn is bad enough without throwing a ghost chilli and shot of adrenaline in the mix. Don’t forget having these on an empty stomach will drastically increase the effects, you might sweat just as much as you would when doing HIIT , it’s probably not a good idea to pair these together, I once learned.

 Ultimately, fat burners are helpful to implement on top of a good solid diet, they speed up the process of weight-loss to an extent and do provide a somewhat substantial amount of energy when its needed -especially on low-carb days- even if it is all from caffeine. I would however, like to point out that they are not for beginners and certainly not for people with a poor cardiovascular ability, low activity level or bad tolerance of stimulants.

Don’t forget to follow my fitness page on Instagram, new videos coming soon…

JAK3D 👊