If you’ve just put yourself on a protocol to lose weight, one thing that you definitely want to take steps to avoid is losing that hard earned muscle mass. It’s a very common mistake that’s so often made.

People work for months to build up more lean muscle mass and then when they go to diet down so they can reveal all that new muscle, they lose it in the process. Then, they’re back to square one and more frustrated than ever.

So how can you side-step this? How can you be sure that you lose fat not muscle?

It definitely can be done. You just need to know precisely how to go about doing it.

Here are some workout tips to remember.

Lift Heavy

First, you must make sure that you are lifting as heavy as you always were in the gym. The minute you start downgrading how much you lift is the minute you are telling your body it doesn’t need to be as strong as it was before.

Bad move.

Keep the weight on the bar constant and that will help to protect you against lean muscle mass loss.

Keep Volume Reasonable

Next, you also must make sure that you keep your volume reasonable. Many people make the grave error of doubling their workout length as soon as fat loss is the goal.

Now you have twice as much exercise as half as much food.

This is a recipe for disaster. Your body will fight hard when put in this sort of situation and start dropping muscle quickly because it’s so metabolically active.

If anything, your volume should decrease while dieting.

Avoid Excess Cardio

Finally, it’s also a must to avoid excess cardio training. This is another big mistake that too many people make. They figure they’ll do six hours of cardio training a week to boost their weekly calorie burn.

Here again, it goes along with the volume factor. Too much exercise on too few calories sends your body into shock and will have it losing strength and muscle. Especially when it comes to cardio training because you’re giving the body no reason to retain that lean muscle mass as there’s no resistance.

If your diet is set up properly, you can easily do three full body workouts per week and that’s all you need for optimal fat loss.

So keep these quick tips in mind and you can avoid losing excess muscle mass next time you go to lose body fat.