Last time, we looked at some of the basic needs to lose weight and keep muscle.

The first thing you'd have to do was to make sure you didn't eat as much. Reducing your daily caloric intake by 500-600 (depending on how big

you are) is a good start. Next, since muscle is essentially made up of protein, you need to make sure that your diet still has a high ratio of protein.

Keeping your protein intake high will put you in a much better position to maintain muscle.

The third - and possibly most important - thing is to get on a good exercise program that involves heavy weight training and some form of cardio.

However, traditional cardio can cause muscle to break down pretty easily and quickly, so to get a cardio effect, one should do circuit training with

heavy weights.

In case you're unfamiliar, circuit training is simply just performing sets of many different exercises back to back without rest. So, you might do a set

of presses, then a set of rows, then a set of chins, then a set of squats, etc.

There are many benefits to this style of training. Mainly, you can get the effect of a good cardio workout (increased breathing and heartbeat).

However, because you're using heavy weight training to stimulate this effect, muscle loss is minimized.

Although this kind of training is intense, you can get a lot done in a short period of time, so you don't have to spend that long working out. This is

good not only because will the workouts not take that long, but the intensity your body has to endure is minimized. Intense exercise is good, but

when on a reduced calorie diet, it can be hard on the body. In fact, too much intense exercise on too strict of a diet (without other specific recovery

methods in place) can result in your metabolism being thrown all out of whack. Worst case scenario, your metabolism slows to a crawl, meaning

that its virtually impossible to lose any weight. You keep your muscle this way...but also the fat. Not good.

Though this style of training is simple, it's not easy. It can be very hard work, but it's also very rewarding. You'll find that you not only lose

weight and keep muscle, but you build a work capacity that you didn't have before...meaning that you can do more work (and work harder) than

you likely could before. It will take a lot more to tire you out.

That is good because when you go back to your heavy lifting, you'll be able to train even heavier and harder.

Good luck.