Posts Tagged ‘Working’

Think Working Out Will Help You Lose Weight? Make Sure You Are Doing It Right

If you want to lose weight, you probably already know that’s best done in two parts: watching what you eat and exercising. But that’s often easier said than done.

To lose one pound a week, you need to create a calorie deficit of 3,500 calories. That means every day, you need to create a 500 calorie deficit. How are you going to do that?

Do it by cutting 250 calories from your diet, and then burning another 250 calories through exercise. It’s a simple equation but not always easy. Far too often, people underestimate what they’re eating and overestimate the amount they’re burning through exercise – both of which equal a weight loss plateau.

Burning 250 calories a day through exercise doesn’t have to be hard. If you do it right, you’ll find you’re burning those calories with no problem. If you want your fitness routine to support your weight loss, get the go-ahead from your doctor to exercise. Then try following these guidelines:

Get out of your comfort zone: Instead of investing in a fancy heart rate monitor, use something called “perceived rate of exertion” to gauge how hard you’re working during a workout. Use a scale of one to 10, with one being the amount of energy it takes to walk around the block and 10 being such vigorous exercise that you cannot speak. Aim for between seven and an eight for your workout – where you can speak a sentence, but can’t carry on a full conversation. That’s when your body will start to say, “This is new – I need to use some more energy (i.e. burn calories).”

Don’t overestimate: We’ve all done it: hopped on the treadmill or elliptical trainer, worked out for 20 minutes or so and marveled at how many calories the machine says we’ve burned. The problem is that number is often overestimated and doesn’t take into account factors like your gender, age, weight and height. Instead, try to get an accurate estimate of how many calories you burn by using an online activity calculator that requires you to enter your gender, weight, etc. This way, you won’t overestimate how many calories you’re burning during an activity.

Make it sustainable: Yes, you want to burn calories, but don’t go too gung-ho on your activity – you’ll never be able to sustain that level of activity in the long term. If you say, I’m going to five spinning classes a week, that’s going to last two weeks. After that, your legs will be fried and you’re going to give up.

Don’t sweat it: Sweating during an activity is great, but don’t automatically assume that the amount of sweat you produce equals a huge calorie burn. Sweat is just water weight. You should be replacing that water during and after your workout. Sweat loss does not equal fat loss. How much you sweat also depends on where you’re doing an activity. For example, you’ll sweat a ton during a gentle hot yoga class, but you won’t burn a ton of calories. Or, you may not sweat very much on an outdoor run in the middle of winter, but you may burn a decent amount of calories.

Keep it varied: The more you do an activity, the more your body gets used to it – and therefore it burns fewer calories. An experienced marathon runner, for example, will burn fewer calories on a 10K run than a new runner because the marathoner’s body is far more used to running. By changing up your workout from time to time, you’ll keep putting new stress on the body and it won’t adapt by expending fewer calories.

Are You Working Out But Not Losing Weight?

Very often it seems that people who are not working out very hard, are able to lose weight faster and more effectively, than people who are working hard. There could be many reasons why you are working out but not losing weight and the main thing, is not to get frustrated and give up. These things to happen and you need to find the posititves from the negatives.

So you are working out but not losing weight?

One of the reason why people are not happy with their progress, is because every time we turn on the TV, read magazines or surf online, then we see stories of people who lost tons of weight very quickly. So it seems that these incredible stories are very common and natural. But really they are not very common at all, because 95% fail to lose weight permanently. See, it is one thing to get rid of weight for a short period, but a completely other thing to get rid of it permanently. Most of these people who lose weight very quickly, sooner or later re-gain the weight. But you do not hear that, all you hear is how quickly someone got rid of their weight.

Another problem is that people do not analyze, what they are doing. If you are doing the same workout over and over again and not losing any weight, then obviously something is wrong and needs to change. Do not take the advice you get from fitness experts as the absolute TRUTH. People are all different and what works for some, may not work for others. So do not be afraid to try new things and experiment. Even set-backs are not failures, but feed-backs. If you hit a fat loss plateau, and want to start making progress again, then you got to find out what went wrong and then fix it. The more you keep track of your workouts and nutrition plans, the more experience you get and experience is everything.

Diets Not Working? No Motivation to Exercise? Then How Do I Lose Weight?

Getting the body we all desire is no easy achievement. Diets fail because they are too restrictive and most of the time really dull. Exercise, well that is just damn hard work and boring on your own. This is where personal trainers can help; exercising under the guidance of a Personal Trainer is by far the most effective way to achieve specific related goals. They inspire motivation to exercise and get you on the right path to whole food eating without dieting!

Gymnasiums get a surge of people joining in the New Year with resolutions to ‘lose weight and tone up’. They go avidly for the first month. The second month sees boredom set in as the initial motivation vanishes. They attempt a bit of resistance training and find a lack of knowledge on exercise selection scares them away, so by the third month they give up, with no results at all.

Pounding away on the treadmill day after day can be very boring indeed. Even the introduction of Cardio Theatre (TV screens to those who do not understand ‘gym-speak’) does not help those with zero motivation. Personal Trainers on the other hand come with built in motivation. There’s nothing like a standing appointment to get your butt in gear for a workout. Not only that, a trainer provides some accountability so, even when you don’t have a session, you know your Personal Trainer will be asking if you did your planned workouts. Just knowing that may make it harder to skip your workouts.

A Personal Trainer can bring a fresh perspective and new ideas to challenge both your body and mind and add variety to your workout; like moving you away from the cardio machines and using equipment like a simple step or skipping rope. You’ll find it refreshing to have new workouts and new exercise toys to play with.

Knowing how to set up a balanced schedule that includes all the activities you need to do can be confusing. The great thing about a Personal Trainer is that they can help you maximize your time while helping you stay within your own limits so you don’t overdo it. They can also help you set goals and map out a specific schedule so you know when, how and where you’ll fit in your workouts. A lot of exercisers can tend to slack off on workouts, especially when things get tough. A Personal Trainer can motivate you to push past those self-imposed limits, encouraging you to lift heavier, go longer and challenge yourself more than you would on your own. You’ll find it’s very hard to slack off with a trainer standing over you, telling you to do just…one…more…rep!

Specific issues like arthritis, heart disease, injuries, etc, can be helped by working with an experienced trainer. They can produce a program to help with the control of an illness and help to heal injuries and avoid any further problems. It’s also a great idea to work with a Personal Trainer if you’re pregnant and want a safe, effective workout to keep you fit and healthy.

As you can see a Personal Trainer is not just someone that stands over you whilst you jog reluctantly on the treadmill. A Personal Trainer guides and motivates you to reach your peak fitness potential. They assess your fitness needs and develop plans based on them. They themselves are energetic and motivating, always encouraging you to reach maximum performance and instruct on proper nutrition. So, can you afford not to have one!