Getting fit via weight training is unique in that one man’s idea of fitness is another man’s version of a couch potato — the standards for fitness aren’t concrete.

Rather, sculpting your body is much akin to art because the final determination is based on a subjective visual impression based on the gym rat’s idea of the perfect man.

When people scoff at your gallon jug of water or sink full of protein-caked shakers, they will be dumbfounded, much like the effect of Samuel L. Jackson’s hit man character Jules paraphrasing Ezekiel 25:17 in the motion picture cult classic “Pulp Fiction.”

Designed to Consume Every Calorie

Successfully getting into shape is dependent on maximizing muscle and minimizing subcutaneous body fat, though these two goals are paired together so often that public opinion assumes they naturally occur together.

Experienced fitness buffs know that emphasizing muscle growth typically forces one to accept fat gain, while focusing on fat loss usually involves sacrificing muscle size and strength.

This is particularly evident in guys who don’t use chemical “enhancements,” as these protocols have been developed to allow enhanced individuals to “manually override” the metabolic fail-safes normally protecting against the marginal energy stores present in conditions of extremely low body fat, or limit muscle growth to reduce the amount of caloric energy necessary to maintain great masses of metabolically active tissue.

Our bodies don’t realize we live in the 21st century. Physiologically, we’re designed to consume every calorie in our reach and store it as fat in preparation for long, cold winters.

Thanks to efficient building insulation and heating-cooling systems, we’re not exposed to seasonal variations in weather, but consider that our genes still remember the last ice age, which ended in 1850.

So guys who want to get fit are forced to train and diet in a manner that continues to build and maintain muscle, but also drops body fat in a subtle, sneaky way.

It’s not a simple matter of combining intense cardio and weight training, as the body’s response to muscle-building weight training often sabotages its response to fat-burning endurance exercise and vice versa.

This is called the concurrent training effect and it’s been observed down to the genetic level. Certainly, there are numerous health benefits to aerobic exercise, but those are outside the scope of this article.

Yet, unless one is willing to follow a very strict diet, some form of cardio is necessary to increase fat loss.

The question is: how does one maximize fat burning without resorting to muscle-wasting aerobic exercise? [source: FitnessRx for men] Note: To be continued…