Weight Training
Weight Training is a great way to get healthy after a winter of vegging out. However, it is very hard for people to notice small victories in their bodies. There are ways that these can be seen, and I will take you through the process, step by step.
First, it is important to know what you are putting IN your body. Keep a food diary, and write down everything you eat during the day. Write it down BEFORE eating it, or RIGHT AFTER. Do not try to remember this! Enter in approximate amounts and the type of food eaten. If it is a dish with mixed foods and ingredients, try to write down everything that is in it, along with the amount of food.
Second, weigh and measure yourself. Measure your neck, chest, waist, hips, biceps, and thighs. This gives you a good starting point. If possible, either measure, or have your body fat, measured. This is also a benchmark that you can use to gauge your successes. Calculate your BMI using any of the online calculators, such as the one found at http://www.nhlbisupport.com/bmi/. The scale is as follows:
If you are within your normal BMI range, focus on a more toned body, and a healthier body. You may be within your BMI, but could still use the exercise to become a healthier person.
Keep a record of what you eat in calories in a free online food tracker. Fitday.com has an excellent free program, where you can enter in foods and amounts, and the program will update and break the food down into protein, carbs, sugars, fat, etc. It also has a function where you can enter in your own foods, in the case of recipes.
Third, keep a log book of your exercises. The type, length of time, weight (if applicable) and repetitions should all be recorded. Do this every time you work out. Like the food diary, it is hard to remember things the next morning, that evening etc. With a record book of your training, goals can be met. Set a goal and write it down. Once you meet this goal in your log book, make a note of it.
Lastly, take pictures of yourself. No, these do not have to be naked pictures, but some where you can clearly see your physique when you begin is a good idea. Every two to three weeks, take more pictures. As you progress through working out, getting more in shape, and eating right, you will notice the changes. These are more obvious in the pictures than in the mirror. You will probably be looking for minute changes in the mirror daily, but pictures from a few weeks ago will really tell the story on how far you have come.
I hope this short guide helps you in the quest for a healthier “you!”
"The day of isolated movements on machines is over," predicts Doug Jeffries, owner of Results Gym, which has four locations in Washington. Although the traditional 15-piece circuit won't vanish at any of his clubs, Jeffries and his team are removing duplicates and dedicating the newly open space to what is called functional training. The idea is to place front and center the exercises that mimic the tasks of daily life, such as squatting and grabbing something off the floor and standing on an unstable surface without falling.
Ed Ingebretsen, Results's director of training, has always steered his clients away from what he refers to as "rehab equipment" and toward the toys: medicine balls, resistance bands, kettlebells, Bosu balls, boxes, agility ladders, cones.
"Fitness isn't sitting on a machine," he says. And for every machine, he explains, there's a real-world equivalent that's a better choice. You could bang out reps on a leg-press machine, or you could do squats, which also engage the core and improve balance. You could do leg extensions and curls on machines, or you could combine the two moves into a lunge and add upper-body work with biceps curls.
"Functional training allows you to smarten up," Ingebretsen says. "Once people get liberated from machines, they don't go back."
That liberation is happening more, according to the American Council on Exercise, which named functional training one of the top trends of 2010. The group specifically called out the rise of the TRX suspension training system, which involves a set of straps with handles that affix to a ceiling (or tree, or anything). You grasp the handles and use the weight and angle of your body to control the resistance as you push and pull. Results, the regional training center for TRX, introduced the product to personal training clients years ago and is gearing up to start group classes by summer.
Jeffries is also set to launch a project in February that will take functional training to new heights, literally: to the top floor of a historic mansion in Adams Morgan. Dubbed Stroga (a blend of "strength" and "yoga"), the facility will offer yoga classes and 45-minute small-group functional training sessions. The plan is to have toys galore and even an area with artificial turf for sprinting, but no cardio equipment and only a few weight machines.
It's a radical shift considering that one of the hottest trends in the industry just a few years ago was the Curves model, which is based on sending members through a circuit.
But there's plenty of reason to believe that folks are craving a fresh approach. Take, for example, CrossFit. Designed to be the ultimate functional training program, it blends gymnastics, Olympic weightlifting and calisthenics. CrossFit has become hugely popular in the past five years, going from just a handful of affiliates to more than 1,000 worldwide.
In Washington, that boom started four years ago at Balance Gym in the District's Kalorama neighborhood, which Mark Crick and Graham King founded with just $3,000 in equipment in the hopes of focusing on machine-free, athletic-style training. They soon opened their doors to CrossFit DC, the area's first CrossFit affiliate. (There are now nearly 20 in the region.)
The model has proved so successful that six months ago, Crick and King took over the three-story Thomas Circle Sports Club downtown to see what they could do on a larger scale. The revamped building now includes a 3,000-square-foot studio exclusively for private training and CrossFit and a vast area next to the weight machines for anyone who wants to get functional with their workouts as well as a boxing ring and a pole-dance studio.
But for the first three months they didn't touch a thing. "We needed to build trust to prove we're not just crazy people with sandbags and sledgehammers," Crick says. Change is hard, and they didn't want to alienate the previous members by "taking away their teddy bear," as King explains.
Results will undoubtedly face those transition issues as well after the four gyms get their makeovers. "Functional training is more intimidating. It's less of a comfort zone," Jeffries says. Unlike machines that have a seat to let you know where your rear end goes and only move in one way, your body can do an infinite number of things. The process requires more guidance, which is something Results will offer. "If you build it and then show them how to use it, they will come," Jeffries adds.
His faith in the evolution of fitness comes from 15 years in the industry. When the first Results opened on U Street, there were more StairMasters than treadmills, and yoga was on the schedule once a week. "Times change," Jeffries says. And it's a good thing, too, because if they didn't, we'd all be very bored.
Cardiovascular Exercise Burns Off Fat
In my last article, Avoid any excuse to Get Fit, I talked about easy ways to train at home without the use of any equipment. I explained why it is important for an overweight person who wants to lose weight successfully through exercise to go slowly so as not to over exert and in this article I want to discuss why cardiovascular exercise is important with weight loss.
Doing either weight training or cardiovascular training alone will not build a stronger, lean body. Cardio and weight training must be performed together or on alternate days to achieve long-lasting results.
Weight Training
Working with machine weights, body weight training, or using free weights will build muscle mass but weight training alone is not enough to burn off fat. Weight training should be any overweight person’s best friend. Many people who wish to lose weight go overboard on their calorie counting and may not take in sufficient food so the body’s metabolism starts to slow down. This is catastrophic. Using weight training, the body can be tricked because; when lean muscle tissue is added to the body it has no option but to burn more calories at rest. Expect to burn around an extra 50 calories per day for each pound of lean muscle tissue added to the body. This may not seem a lot but over a year, it equates to over five pounds in weight loss. This is real fat loss not water. Five pounds of sugar is equivalent to the fat lost.
Cardiovascular Training
Weight training is so important for anyone who wishes to lose weight but how do you burn off the excess fat to reveal the new lean muscle tissue? By getting the heart pumping and performing cardiovascular training, such as walking, running, skipping, cycling, swimming, tennis, badminton etc. When the heart is forced to pump through cardio, huge amounts of calories are burnt. Another thing to remember with weight loss is that it does not happen overnight. In a month, there will be a significant change if both weight training and cardio exercise effectively worked at. Clothes may feel looser, the muscle tone may start to show, and you will be more than likely craving healthier foods and feel healthier in yourself.
Weight Training and Cardio Together
This is why it is important to know that no matter how much cardio exercise you do, if you do not have lean muscle tissue to work with, the metabolism will start to slow. Cardio exercise will more than likely burn calories for a couple of hours afterward but weight training goes one step further and burns fat for up to forty-eight hours. An ideal fat burning workout would include a little weight training such as press-ups, sit-ups, burpees, jumping jacks, squat thrusts etc, and cardio exercise like walking or power walking (which burns more calories per mile than jogging). The bigger the muscles are used with cardio exercise, the bigger the calorie burn, so the legs worked during weight training and cardio will help anyone to lose weight and tone up. Spinning, jogging, and walking are perfect examples of effective cardio exercises that will help to shed fat.