Picture yourself running up a few flights of stairs. The first flight might be easy. The second flight will be a little harder. By the time you get to the third flight your body is starting to protest.
Now picture yourself running up those same flights of stairs carrying 100 pounds of weight on your shoulders. It doesn’t seem so easy anymore.
This illustration shows you what your body goes through when you try to exercise after eating a heavy meal. The last thing you want to do before you exercise is way your body down. Your body will have to work that much harder to digest the food you’ve eaten while taking a beating as you exercise.
Instead of filling yourself with three big meals each day, try breaking up those meals into five mini-meals.
That way no matter what time of the day you exercise you won’t be weight down by heavy food sitting in your stomach. Your body won’t be working hard to digest food. It’ll be working hard to burn fat.
You should exercise 3 to 4 times per week for at least 30 minutes. That’s a minimum. If you really want to lose weight and keep your body burning fat like a furnace, you need to step up your game and exercise 6 days per week, every week.
Let’s talk about the kind of exercise you will be focusing on.
They are two types of exercise that when put together burn fat faster than when you do just one.
They are cardiovascular, or aerobic, and strength training.
You want to build muscle because muscle burns fat better than fatty tissue. But you also want to increase your metabolic rate. Aerobic exercise such as swimming, brisk walking, running, or cycling are cardiovascular exercises and will speed up your metabolism for as much as 4 to 8 hours after a good workout.
Weightlifting and strength training have their benefits as well. While they won’t help you speed up your metabolism, they will help you build lean muscle mass.
Cardiovascular/aerobic workouts can be done right the privacy of your own home. You can fit them into your schedule any time you have a minimum of 20 minutes or more to dedicate to exercise. There are high-impact aerobics and low-impact aerobics.
The high-impact aerobics are meant to get your heart pumping. Not everyone can start out with high-impact aerobics because it is too strenuous. But if you’re used to being active it won’t take you long to get up to speed.
If you’ve been sedentary / inactive for a long time, or are not used to working out, I suggest you start out doing low-impact aerobics for the first few weeks of your program. Low-impact aerobics put less strain on the body and go at a slower pace. But they still get the heart pumping and still increase the metabolism. So don’t worry if you can’t keep up with the high-impact aerobics. You’ll still benefit by doing low-impact aerobics.
After your body becomes acclimated to the routine and you start to build a little more stamina you can progress to the high-impact aerobics. That’s where you really going to see a marked increase in your potential to burn fat.
Strength training builds muscles. Many people will join a gym and work with a trainer to help build muscle. But you don’t have to. There are lots of home gyms that are affordable and are small enough to fit in the corner of your bedroom. A small set of free weights and an exercise ball can also be useful if you’re worried about the price of a gym membership or trying to fit gym time into your busy schedule. As long as you incorporate strength training in your exercise routine, it doesn’t matter where you do it.
Don’t be put off by the idea of building muscles or worry that you’ll end up looking like a bodybuilder.
You can work your muscles hard without building them up so much that your body looks unnatural.
Your goal in strength training is to increase your body’s muscle because muscle burns fat faster.
When you work your muscles during strength training, you’re actually tearing your muscles down.
Your muscles then need a day or two to recover from the break down in order to build back up. If you concentrate on strength training every day, you never give your body a chance to recover and you risk causing injury to the muscle.
A combination of building lean muscle mass and aerobic exercise will give you the benefit of burning calories faster than just doing one of those exercises alone.
When planning your exercise routine, incorporate one day of strength training and the next day of aerobic exercise. This will speed up your metabolism and build your muscle mass without causing injury.
What you do on the days when you aren’t doing a heavy workout of aerobics or strength training?
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Those days aren’t free days to sit and be a couch potato. You want to keep your body active. Simply running around with kids doing errands is enough.
On those “off” exercise days, get in the habit of taking a 20 minute walk or playing a sport with some friends. I nice game of basketball or a few sets of tennis will have you moving enough to burn calories while you’re having fun.
Remember, you want to have a good time while you’re exercising. The easiest way to fall out of sync with your exercise regime is to get bored with it. You don’t want it to be a chore. You want to feel good, not feel like you have to exercise every moment of every day in order to reach your weight loss goal.
Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate! I can’t stress enough the importance of drinking 6 to 8 tall glasses of water
every day. If you’re burning fat during a workout, you need to flush those fat deposits away or they will be trapped in other cells.
Also, when you workout you sweat.
Sweating is your body’s way of cooling down. But if you lose too much fluid during a workout, and you don’t replace it, your body will start holding on to fluid for its own survival. Make sure you replenish your body with clean water during and after every workout.
To make sure you are getting enough water every day, try filling a half gallon container with clean water and putting it in the refrigerator. Fill a sports bottle with water and keep replenishing it as the day goes on. At the end of the day you’re half gallon container should be nearly empty. If it is not, you’re not thinking enough water.
Now picture yourself running up those same flights of stairs carrying 100 pounds of weight on your shoulders. It doesn’t seem so easy anymore.
This illustration shows you what your body goes through when you try to exercise after eating a heavy meal. The last thing you want to do before you exercise is way your body down. Your body will have to work that much harder to digest the food you’ve eaten while taking a beating as you exercise.
Instead of filling yourself with three big meals each day, try breaking up those meals into five mini-meals.
That way no matter what time of the day you exercise you won’t be weight down by heavy food sitting in your stomach. Your body won’t be working hard to digest food. It’ll be working hard to burn fat.
You should exercise 3 to 4 times per week for at least 30 minutes. That’s a minimum. If you really want to lose weight and keep your body burning fat like a furnace, you need to step up your game and exercise 6 days per week, every week.
Let’s talk about the kind of exercise you will be focusing on.
They are two types of exercise that when put together burn fat faster than when you do just one.
They are cardiovascular, or aerobic, and strength training.
Weightlifting and strength training have their benefits as well. While they won’t help you speed up your metabolism, they will help you build lean muscle mass.
Cardiovascular/aerobic workouts can be done right the privacy of your own home. You can fit them into your schedule any time you have a minimum of 20 minutes or more to dedicate to exercise. There are high-impact aerobics and low-impact aerobics.
The high-impact aerobics are meant to get your heart pumping. Not everyone can start out with high-impact aerobics because it is too strenuous. But if you’re used to being active it won’t take you long to get up to speed.
If you’ve been sedentary / inactive for a long time, or are not used to working out, I suggest you start out doing low-impact aerobics for the first few weeks of your program. Low-impact aerobics put less strain on the body and go at a slower pace. But they still get the heart pumping and still increase the metabolism. So don’t worry if you can’t keep up with the high-impact aerobics. You’ll still benefit by doing low-impact aerobics.
After your body becomes acclimated to the routine and you start to build a little more stamina you can progress to the high-impact aerobics. That’s where you really going to see a marked increase in your potential to burn fat.
Strength training builds muscles. Many people will join a gym and work with a trainer to help build muscle. But you don’t have to. There are lots of home gyms that are affordable and are small enough to fit in the corner of your bedroom. A small set of free weights and an exercise ball can also be useful if you’re worried about the price of a gym membership or trying to fit gym time into your busy schedule. As long as you incorporate strength training in your exercise routine, it doesn’t matter where you do it.
Don’t be put off by the idea of building muscles or worry that you’ll end up looking like a bodybuilder.
You can work your muscles hard without building them up so much that your body looks unnatural.
Your goal in strength training is to increase your body’s muscle because muscle burns fat faster.
When you work your muscles during strength training, you’re actually tearing your muscles down.
Your muscles then need a day or two to recover from the break down in order to build back up. If you concentrate on strength training every day, you never give your body a chance to recover and you risk causing injury to the muscle.
A combination of building lean muscle mass and aerobic exercise will give you the benefit of burning calories faster than just doing one of those exercises alone.
When planning your exercise routine, incorporate one day of strength training and the next day of aerobic exercise. This will speed up your metabolism and build your muscle mass without causing injury.
What you do on the days when you aren’t doing a heavy workout of aerobics or strength training?
Those days aren’t free days to sit and be a couch potato. You want to keep your body active. Simply running around with kids doing errands is enough.
On those “off” exercise days, get in the habit of taking a 20 minute walk or playing a sport with some friends. I nice game of basketball or a few sets of tennis will have you moving enough to burn calories while you’re having fun.
Remember, you want to have a good time while you’re exercising. The easiest way to fall out of sync with your exercise regime is to get bored with it. You don’t want it to be a chore. You want to feel good, not feel like you have to exercise every moment of every day in order to reach your weight loss goal.
Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate! I can’t stress enough the importance of drinking 6 to 8 tall glasses of water
Also, when you workout you sweat.
Sweating is your body’s way of cooling down. But if you lose too much fluid during a workout, and you don’t replace it, your body will start holding on to fluid for its own survival. Make sure you replenish your body with clean water during and after every workout.
To make sure you are getting enough water every day, try filling a half gallon container with clean water and putting it in the refrigerator. Fill a sports bottle with water and keep replenishing it as the day goes on. At the end of the day you’re half gallon container should be nearly empty. If it is not, you’re not thinking enough water.
