Archive for the 'Cardio' Category
There is some debate among weight loss pros about the best way to burn body fat and get a flat tummy. Some say just do cardio. Get on the treadmill and do 45 minutes to an hour of running or the Stairmaster and you will get a flat stomach in no time. Some hardcore experts argue that the best way to lose the belly fat is to get into an intense weight-training program. They will go “Diet is the key. Just pump the iron and get on a strict diet!”
Well, I think that this debate is still going on in some of the forums. I am not surprised because people want a quick and specific solution to their problem. A lot of people are fed up about their tummy and flabby arms that they want to lose weight now! Not only that, a lot of us do not have time. In many cases, when we step into a gym, we are faced with 2 options, cardio or weight training. Let me solve this dilemma for you.
I have preached this over and over again in my Fast Fat Loss E-Mag, that in order to lose stubborn fat effectively, you need to do both. You have no choice. You will not enjoy optimal weight loss and maintain muscle mass if you do cardio alone. In fact, you will lose muscle mass, your metabolism get crashed down and you will hit a weight loss plateau. Weight loss plateau is what all of us dread of. And because you are only doing cardio, you avoid training your postural muscles and this will lead to very bad posture and then injuries.
Now, lets discuss if you do only weight training. Yes, weight training burns calories and yes weight training increases your metabolism. Unfortunately, the calories you want to burn are the fat that are stored in the fat cells. You need cardio training at the right intensity levels to get that fat in the fat cells being used as energy.
Here is what I suggest. In order to get optimum results, you need train 3 to 5 times a week. If you can train 5 times a week, then do intense weight training on 2 days and the remaining, do 30 to 45 minutes of intense cardio. On the weight training days, try to do 20 minutes of cardio after the weight training session. If you can manage only 3 days of exercise, I suggest you hit the weights hard for 45 minutes and then do cardio afterwards for 30 minutes on each session.
Try this method out. It has helped me and my clients lose body fat. You can definitely do it if you put your mind into it. Before you start, try another amazing method. Find your own motivation. Ask yourself why you want to lose weight. Realize the main reason and think of it every time when you want to quit. It will definitely help you go through the tough times.
Tony Leong reveals his 5 secrets to losing weight in his Weight Loss system. He is giving it away for free for a limited time only. Go to http://www.tonyleongweightloss.com/topweightlosssecrets to download it now. Click here to get your free stuff
The number of overweight and obese women are steadily rising. Dr. Beverley Balkau, director of research at INSERM in Villejuif, France led a 2007 global study showing that 30 percent of women are overweight and another 27 percent are obese.
If you ask 10 women: “What is your least favorite body part?”- most would say their belly. Loosing belly fat is hard, but understanding what causes belly fat will help you know what to do. Here are some common causes:
Depression & Stress (emotional eating)
We all deal with depression, stress, anxiety, and anger differently. Many people associate food with comfort and happiness. Therefore, we use it as an emotional anesthetic for unwanted feelings.
Inactivity
Today’s woman is often career oriented and success driven. Double standards in the workplace cause many to be workaholics. Furthermore, some of these women are trying to balance a career with a family.
Nutritional & Awareness Ignorance
Food labels are often misleading. Most people think if something says “low fat,” it is okay to eat, but this is wrong. Manufactures use ticks like: decreasing the calories based on smaller portions, claiming fat free based on food weight vs. content, claiming 0 grams of trans fat per serving vs. 0 grams of trans fat, etc.. If you are not aware of what is making you have belly fat, loosing belly fat is hopeless.
Convenience
The fast food grab and go is convenience for time, but not so convenient to loosing belly fat. High energy foods provide a one stop meal, but are loaded with sugar and carbohydrates.
Fad Diets
It is a proven fact that fad diets actually cause you to gain more weight. A fad diet either starves you or totally eliminates a food source. Then, when you inevitably do not live up to the diet, you overindulge. Thus, you regain twice the weight that you lost.
Of course, there are other factors like: disease, genetics, life sustaining medication side effects, etc.. that can not be changed. However, all of the listed causes can be eliminated with lifestyle changes. There is not a magical solution loosing belly fat, but here are some suggestions to get you started:
Exercise Five Days/Wk.
Incorporate 30 minutes of aerobic exercise.
Adopt A Healthy & Sustainable Diet.
Ask your doctor to weigh you and give you a guide for caloric intake. Your height, age, and current weight will determine how many calories you need per day. Buy a basic nutrition book that will guide you to know what food sources are saturated fats, monounsaturated fats, etc..
Replace Emotional Eating With Constructive Outlets.
A psychologist, stress management program, or behavior specialist may be needed to help you explore how to do this. Anything from gardening to acupuncture can serve the purpose.
Keep A Diet Diary.
This will help you find your dietary problems and reinforce the changes you make.
Ask About Weight Loss Pills.
These should only be tried after diet and exercise alone does not work. Do not take any OTC weight loss drugs. They are not FDA approved. Talk to your doctor about prescription Orlistat.
Most of us know that we have that extra inch or two, and think about loosing that belly fat all the time. We often claim to lack the motivation or time. But, think about the decreased time when obesity causes diabetes or heart disease!
This article was written by Marc Hill. As always, I am looking for the whole mind/ body approach when it comes to solving life’s problems. My review of weight loss programs can be found at: ksnreview.com
Believe it or not, the pace at which you go at your food can really make some difference to your body weight. If you would like lose excess fat you need to heed this fact.
When you up the time you spend at meals, you don’t need as much in order to feel fuller. Here are a couple of tricks to aid you release from the negative routine of hurrying at mealtimes and thus eating too much.
Chew the food over and over before actually sending it to your stomach. If you spend longer chomping your food your belly feels fuller but doesn’t really need so much food. As well, this means you are able to break down the food more easily.
Down what you are chewing prior to piling more on your fork. Try putting the spoon on the plate until you swallow your food and are ready to start with another mouthful. One more point here with the fight to lose body fat fast is that this it is very much mind control.
Over eating, from eating too fast, is only a habit that has to be broken. The French illustrate this point well as they don’t eat so much and they take time to eat it as well. They keep the weight off from two things.
Another relevant point here is that European families eat as a family more regularly. This means there is more chance for developing conversations and that will also reduce the pace of food consumption. Also it’s a chance to improve inter-family relations.
You will find that once you start eating a bit slower you will actually get to enjoy the meals far more. You will give yourself more time to savour the flavors of the food.
It is extremely easy to have too much as your body reacts slowly and to tell you it’s full. A lot of people overeat when they eat too quickly simply because they believe they are still hungry. Just eat until you feel comfortable not until you’re full to the brim.
How to lose stomach fat and at the same time gain muscles is a real mystery. Many people get the advice of joining the gym and try different heavy workouts. In the process you may get frustrated as the style may not work for you. There is a chance that you may even quit in the middle; also the expensive gyms may not be affordable for everyone. Taking this fact into account I really want to suggest my readers few techniques that will help in reducing stomach fat. Also you never have to join expensive gyms or purchase expensive machines.
How to lose stomach fat is really an important subject that is needed to be solved at right time. The extra stomach fat is the real reason behind many complex diseases. Hence first of all plan a daily routine healthy diet plan. Starving yourself will no longer help you, but try and eat 4-5 small meals every day. Include fresh fruits, green vegetables, whole grains, etc and avoid snacks. Try and select diet that is high in protein, low in carbohydrates, and avoid sugar, saturated fats, and dairy products. Diet plan is the first step towards losing belly fat, hence don’t avoid it and do take it seriously.
The next answer to how to lose stomach fat with no gym is exercises. You can add simple cardio exercises or aerobic exercises to your daily routine. Brisk walking, running, jogging, swimming, playing sports that you like, can also help you a lot. Such routine can also add joy and will certainly help in reducing some amount of stress from your life. Stress is also an important factor in the effort of losing stomach fat. Hence include such fun loving exercises in your daily routine. Even if on some day you miss the daily routine, don’t worry and just keep your body moving. I mean to say that just choose to take a walk if your office is nearby, choose stairs instead of elevators, or even do some house work like washing clothes, etc. The key is to just keep the body moving.
It’s true that it is not possible or affordable for all individuals to join gym. In fact it’s not necessary to join the gym because it is quite possible to lose stomach fat without gym. The gym is also not a permanent solution to lose stomach fat. You may gain fat at quick pace once you stop going to gym. Hence in order to lose stomach fat permanently stick to the basics, i.e. healthy diet plan with sufficient exercises.
Finally, don’t believe in counting calories all the time. There is no need to do that if you follow a good healthy diet plan. At times you may need to sacrifice some foods that you like most. Nothing is important when it comes to your health. There are many substitute tasty foods that you can include in your routine diet plan. Remember your belly fat can be major issue, hence don’t neglect it and it’s not necessary for you to join gym to loose stomach fat.
Tony Leong reveals his 5 secrets to losing weight in his Weight Loss system. He is giving it away for free for a limited time only. Go to http://www.tonyleongweightloss.com/topweightlosssecrets to download it now. Click here to get your free stuff
Getting a fat belly is easy when you don’t eat the right foods or do any form of lose belly fat exercise. To lose body fat or lose fat belly, you have to watch what you eat. For rapid belly fat loss, the kind of caloric intake is essential. You don’t expect to eat high fat foods and lose the fat. You should be eating a minimum of 1 gram of protein per body weight pound. This means that if you are 150 pounds in weight, you should be eating about 150 grams of protein each day. For complex carbohydrates, you would need a minimum of 2 grams per body weight pound. This will limit your body fat to up to 20% of your intake of calories and help you to lose fat muscle.
Here are some examples of food to include in your daily diet and you will learn to lose fat how – faster!
1 Scoop Whey Protein
6 Servings Egg White
3 ounces Turkey Breast
4 ounces Tuna
2 ounce Salmon
2 ounce Sardines
1 ounce Almonds
2 ounce Sirloin Steak
3 ounce Chicken Breast
Natural Ways to Loose Stomach Fat
Cut out the processed foods and stick to raw vegetables and lot of freshly made fruit juice. Aloe Vera Juice is one of the best ways to lower body fat in less time because it attacks the digestive system to make your foods more easily digestible. It also detoxifies your body to get rid of the acidity in your body.
The body is naturally acidic and the foods that you eat add more acid to the body. You want to eat increase the PH (alkaline) balance in your body and Aloe Vera Juice is the perfect natural method to do so.
Get the Aloe Vera Plant and scrape one of its pups with a knife or cut it up in small pieces and blend it into a gel. Mix it with egg white, and a little lime juice as well as honey. Drink that once or twice per day and you will lose belly fat. However, you have to cut out the other nonessential foods from your diet that have trans fat and too much sugar.
Aloe Vera Juice increases your metabolism because of the properties included in it. It strengthens the immune system and gives you more energy. Its natural properties are safe.
Get one of those exercise balls and do some sit ups each day. It does not have to be too many and when you do these sit ups using the ball, it prevents any back pain and it makes it more fun for you to do. You can even get away with just three times per week. I find that this really helps.
Here are some Alkaline Foods to add to your lose fat diet and Acid Foods to stay away from:
Alkaline Vegetables: Red Cabbage, Spinach, Green Beens, Asparagus, Carrots, Leeks, Turnip, Beetroot, Garlic, Celery, Cucumber, Broccoli, Brussels, Peas, Onion and more
Alkaline Fruits: Lemon, Avacoda, Grapefruit, Watermelon and Tomato
Stick to salads, fresh vegetables and healthy nuts and oils. Try to consume plenty of raw foods and at least 2-3 litres of clean, pure water daily. Flax, Sesame and Sunflower seeds are great alkaline foods.
Stay away from diary, foods that are fatty, milk and cheese.
Click Here to learn more about Aloe Vera Juice - how to benefit from Aloe Vera Juice and its reputation of fat burning fruits.
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I had a comment on the last water post recently which I chose to delete – but on reflection I kind of wish I’d approved it. I deleted it because all it said was
“Very interesting but I don’t agree with you”
I deleted it because whoever wrote it just said they didn’t agree but failed to explain why they didn’t agree. So – here is another reason why drinking plenty of water does help you burn more fat..
Keeping your body hydrated not only flushes out toxins and retained water that you are storing up – it also gives you more energy. I have stumbled upon this by taking up the ‘glass of water every hour’ as part of a different course that is not directly fitness related.
The course I am doing is aimed at achieving what you want and focusing on goals until they are achieved, one of the major elements is developing certain habits that give you more energy to get more done and bring you closer to your goals. A glass of water an hour is one of the habits.
Now I have been doing this for a couple of weeks and the effect is phenomenal – business and achievement goals aside I am bounding up flights of stairs like I’m a kid again and able to put in almost double the amount of cardio into my workouts – yes double – even on work days when I would usually be ‘tired’.
The hourly glass of water is the only change I have taken on so far and there are other very simple habits to come that will give me even more energy to burn even more fat and get even more done while still taking in the same amount of calories.
Here’s another one for you- chew each mouthful of food at least 30 times. Do this and you take the pressure off your digestive system freeing up more energy to burn off in your workouts. Also chewing 30 times gives you a chance to realise when you’re full and not overeat. Little things make big differences and a glass of water an hour has made a huge difference for me.
Disagree with me if you want – but please give a reason why if you want me to approve the comment…
P.S. The course is called Simpleology 103 (Google it) if you’re interested, I’m doing 101 and 102 as well – it’s going to be a great year!
Sometimes it’s hard to stay motivated and keep up an ongoing fitness regime after the initial spurt that set it off. Especially so when you’ve established a routine and know exactly what to expect.
In my case it’s all too easy to just waste away an hour in the jacuzzi, sauna and steam room while I wait for my girlfriend to do her workout in the gym upstairs. If there’s time to spare I can go and wait in the main bar or the golf bar and read newspapers or watch sport on the TV - hmm nice workout there!
This has happened a few times recently and it’s so easy when I go in with the expectation like “I’m going to do my chest workout”, or my “lats routine” or a big cardio blow out - the build up is so much that if I feel slightly tired I’ll just make an excuse and justify to myself that i shouldn’t train when I’m tired because I might do myself some damage and we couldn’t have that now could we!
So this weekend I tried the reverse tactic and went along to the gym with the express intention of just lazing around in the spa and bar with papers and TV.
What happened?
I went up to the gym thinking “I’ll just do a bit and stop when I’ve had enough”
The result:
Probably one of the toughest workouts I’ve done all year! I did 2 more sets of everything at least, 1/2 an hour on the treadmill and really hit the abs in a way that broke my pain barrier.
My choice of music made a big difference as well. Instead of the usual mix of heavy rock, rap and dance I usually listen to I chilled out to some accoustic guitar and Pink Floyd (”Breathe”, “Comfortably Numb”). This effected my weight workout quite profoundly because I did all my reps a lot slower which is very good for putting on lean body mass.
The reverse psychology got me back training hard this weekend - so if you’re finding it tough to motivate yourself - go with the intention of doing nothing. Tell yourself that you’ll do maybe 10 minutes of cardio or a couple of sets of something. Then take it 1 rep at a time.
Change your playlist to something mellow, ambient and relaxing - next thing you know you might find yourself still there 2 hours later pushing past limits you never knew existed.
I’ve written about the importance of failure in any fat loss program but what about when it comes to cardio?
The combination of taking a bit easy last week and no training over the weekend because of the intensive investing course I was at - when I finally got on the treadmill last night after doing my chest and triceps I got the most awful stitch after about 10 minutes.
So me being the glutton for punishment I am I thought I’d ramp up the gradient (pun not intended - sorry!) and pile on a bit of speed for the higher speed intervals (you do know what interval training is right?)
Because running through and beating a stitch is an actual benchmark of increasing fitness. When you keep going despite having a stitch and the stitch eventually goes away then you’ve broken a fitness barrier and got closer to achieving your goal.
So just like importance of failure in any fat loss program when it comes to weights, I suppose a stitch is the cardio equivalent of doing reps until failure.
It’s amazing that just a week of not training can cause such a loss of progress, oh well the investing course was well worth it and when that all comes together - I’ll be able to train whenever I want without having to fit it round a 9-5..
Can’t wait!
Getting the most out of a workout is a bit like learning to play the drums or drive a car for the first time. The amount of different things to do all at once makes it a bit overwhelming to begin with.
Firstly there’s the exercise you’re doing, then you have to remember to activate your core, are you breathing correctly, are you doing the thing with your tongue being in the top of your mouth?
It’s very easy to forget one or two - especially when you’ve got your favourite workout tunes thumping away in your headphones.
Sometimes it’s just not possible to activate your core during some exercises so you might need to compensate by doing some extra swiss ball work and abs training.
I think I’m turning into a gym addict - I’ve definitely become an every day person - lets hope it lasts!
So I made 2 km on the rowing machine in under 8 minutes for the first time in 2007! For some that may not be too much of a big deal but it’s been one of my personal demons for a few months now.
Even over the last few weeks getting past the 8 minute barrier seems to have been jinxed by things lke my ipod holder slipping down my arm or the footstraps coming loose or something that’s made me have to stop - but not tonight (although I did have to distribute pressure from my feet on the straps so neither of them came loose making me have to stop and do them up)!
I love reaching milestones in any aspect of life. The only downside is that every time I go on the rowing machine I’ll expect to break 8 minutes at the very least or I’ll have not progressed. Tonight’s time was 7:56 so my new goal will be 7:45.
If you don’t constantly push yourself to improve you won’t get anywhere. Results come from forcing yourself out of the comfort zone and taking it to the next level.
If wat you’re doing doesn’t challenge you any more - take it up a notch!
