Great-Workout Blog

About two thirds of adults in the United States are overweight, and almost one third is obese, according to data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2001 to 2004.

Definition of “Overweight”

Overweight refers to having a body weight that is higher than set standards. This could be due to muscle, fat, bone, or even excess water. This can be a little confusing for some people. Many body builders are technically “overweight”, but this is purely due to the size of their muscles!

Definition of “Obese”

Obesity is when a person has an abnormally high proportion of body fat. High proportions of body fat often results in poor health. Even a person who is “only” overweight (but not obese) could still have a high risk of poor health. Being obese certainly doesn’t make things any better.

Effects of Overweight and Obesity

Here are some common risk factors for people who are overweight or obese:

• diabetes
• coronary heart disease
• high blood cholesterol
• stroke
• hypertension
• gallbladder disease
• osteoarthritis (degeneration of cartilage and bone of joints)
• sleep apnea and other breathing problems
• some forms of cancer (breast, colorectal, endometrial, and kidney)

Furthermore, obesity is also associated with:

• complications of pregnancy
• menstrual irregularities
• hirsutism (presence of excess body and facial hair)
• stress incontinence (urine leakage caused by weak pelvic floor muscles)
• psychological disorders, such as depression
• increased surgical risk
• increased mortality

Prevention?

The best way to reduce your risk of becoming another “obesity statistic” is to exercise regularly and eat the right food. Cardiovascular exercise is great for eliminating body fat and strengthening your heart.

Also, as great as exercise is, you’ll get much better results with proper nutrition. Wholesome, low fat foods are best. Avoid fast-food like the plague! Did you know that there are actually foods that burn fat. Try including some of these in your diet.

And one of the most important things is to create a workout plan. A good plan will help you develop healthy habits. Without a plan, you’ll find yourself falling back into old habits. And you wouldn’t want that now, would you?

What’s My Ideal Weight?

To help you create your goals, check out this body weight chart. It will help you figure out how much weight you should lose (or gain!).

A recent study highlights the fact that it is very important to decide what your fitness/weight loss goals are. The study found that, while Weight Watchers is a great program for losing weight, it might not be the best for general fitness.

So, although losing weight can be a great goal in itself, “weight loss” does not automatically equate to “good health”.

The University of Missouri recently conducted the study, which compared two groups of participants. One group participated in a Weight Watchers program for 12 weeks, while the other group took to the gym.

While the Weight Watchers group lost more weight - averaging 5 percent of their body weight - most of the weight lost was lean tissue. This means that they didn’t actually lose much body fat. Lean tissue is not something we should be trying to lose, as it can help keep our metabolism high. A high metabolism in itself can help keep our weight (and body fat) down.

In contrast with the Weight Watchers group, the gym group lost less weight, but they did lose a lot of intraabdominal fat. Intraabdominal surrounds the vital organs and can lead to cardiovascular diseases.

But the study did find that Weight Watchers is a great program for support. Most of the Weight Watchers participants remained in the program for the duration, while many of the gym participants quit.

So, if your goal is to lose weight and maintain good health, remember to eat well and exercise well.

If you’re like most people I know, you’re so busy, that you struggle to find the time to hit the gym. You might have good intentions, but you probably also have what feels like a hundred other conflicting priorities (i.e. work, study, family etc).

If this sounds like you, compound exercises could be just the thing you need.

By using compound exercises, you’ll make much faster progress than you would if you use isolation exercises. In fact, you should always include compound exercises in your workout routine anyway. But this becomes even more important when you’re pushed for time.

What are Compound Exercises?

Compound exercises are exercises that move the body through more than one joint. By contrast, isolation exercises require only one joint.

Because compound exercises use more than one joint, they use more muscles. Compound exercises generally require you to use your largest muscle groups too - like your leg and back muscles.

Benefits of Compound Exercises

Because compound movements exercise multiple muscle groups in one go, this is where you can save precious time. By exercising more muscles with one exercise, you won’t need to do so many different exercises. Therefore, you won’t need to stay in the gym for so long.

Also, you’ll find that you can lift much more weight when you perform compound exercises. This is partly due to the fact that more muscles are being used, but it also has to do with the fact that most compound exercises force you to use your large muscle groups.

“The Big Three”

Here are three compound exercises that are commonly known as “The Big Three”. These three movements are so effective, that most power lifters only use these three exercises when they train. They are:

• Dead lift (Mainly for your back muscles, but great overall body exercise. Your legs will love this exercise!)
• Squat (Hits mainly the legs, but works the whole body to some degree.)
• Bench press (Mainly for chest muscles, but your shoulders and triceps will get a great workout too.)

If you were to include only 3 exercises in your workout routine, make it these three. By performing these three movements, you’ll work your whole body.

More Compound Movements

Here are some more compound exercises:

• Leg Press (Legs)
• Lunge (Legs)
• Dumbbell Shoulder Press (Shoulders, triceps)
• Upright Row (Shoulders, biceps, forearms)
• Dumbbell Row (Back, biceps)
• Chin Up (Back, biceps)
• Parallel Bar Dip (Chest, triceps. Also shoulders to some degree)

So, if you’re struggling to find time for your workouts, try eliminating all/most of your isolation exercises and concentrate mainly on compound exercises. By doing this, you’ll spend less time in the gym, while getting equal or even better results.

Whilst, millions of people around the world strive to lose weight, some of us actually strive to gain weight. There are plenty of people who wish they weren’t as thin as they are. They wish they were carrying a bit more muscle. If you’re one of those people who are as skinny as a rake and can’t seem to gain weight, check out these 6 steps to gaining weight.

Set a Goal

Before you even start trying to gain weight, you need to decide how much weight you want to gain. By doing this, it will be much easier to track your progress. For example, say you currently weigh 60 kilograms. You might set your goal at say, 75 kilograms.

You should also set a deadline for your goal. For example, you could say “I will weigh 75 kilograms in 12 months time.”. Even better, set a date - instead of just saying “12 months”, set an actual date that is 12 months into the future.

You can also break your goal down into smaller milestones. This will help to keep yourself motivated. So, you could set milestones at say 65 kilograms, 70 kilograms, and then the ultimate goal - 75 kilograms. Each time you achieve a milestone you will feel great!

Eat More Calories than you Burn

Gaining weight is a little bit different to losing weight. To lose weight, you need to burn more calories than you eat. To gain weight, you need to burn less calories than you eat. But you don’t just want to put on fat - muscle is better than fat right? Make sure you’re eating lots of protein rich food, and plenty of carbohydrates too. These foods will complement your weight training schedule perfectly.

But don’t worry, it’s OK to eat some fat. Our bodies do actually need fat too! Having said that, it’s best to avoid saturated fats (so try trimming the fat off your steak!).

Lift Heavier Weights

If you’re going to gain weight, it’s better to get bigger muscles than more fat right? To get bigger muscles, you need to continuously lift heavier weights. Try to lift a little heavier than you did on the previous workout. This is what increases size of your muscles. The heavier the weight, the more muscle you’ll need to lift it. With proper nutrition, once your muscles have recovered from their heavy workout, they’ll be a little bit bigger than before.

But realize that sometimes you won’t be able to add more. That’s OK. Just lift the same that you did on the previous workout. Then, maybe your next workout will be better. The last thing you want to do is injure yourself because you’re trying to go heavier than you should.

A good indicator for whether you’re ready to increase your weight is the amount of reps you can perform. If you can do 8 or more reps on your last set, you’re ready to increase the weight so that you can only do 6 reps.

Use Compound Exercises

Compound exercises are those that require the movement of more than one joint to perform. Therefore, compound exercises require more muscles to be used during the exercise. And by using more muscles, you are able to lift heavier weights.

Also, the big compound exercises force you to use your largest muscle groups - like your huge back and leg muscles. When you increase the size of these big muscles, your body weight will skyrocket!

Whilst compound exercises require multiple joints to perform, an exercise that requires only one joint to perform is referred to as an isolation exercise. These exercises are used to isolate a particular muscle. Whilst these exercises are great for concentrating on a single muscle group, they’re not as effective as compound exercises for gaining overall muscle mass - and therefore, gaining weight.

By all means include some isolation exercises in your workout routine, but make compound exercises your focal point.

Some great compound exercises include dead lift, squat, and bench press.

Use Low Reps

To build big and strong muscles, you need to use weight that is so heavy, you can only perform between 6 to 8 reps. By lifting heavy weights with low reps, you will work your muscles hard.

But, make sure you warm up with a set of higher reps first - say 12 to 16 reps. Then gradually increase the weights through your sets until you’re barely able to do 6 reps.

Monitor your Progress

Weigh yourself every day. Make sure you do it at the same time each day - first thing in the morning is perfect. Keep a log of your gym schedule, the weights you’re lifting, and most importantly, your weight. Over time, you’ll see the entries showing heavier and heavier weight. This will help keep your motivation up!

Gaining weight can be easy, as long as you have a good plan. If you follow the above steps to gaining weight, your body will have no choice but to gain weight!

There is no doubt that a smart fitness plan includes time set aside each week for exercise. By ensuring that you have a window of time where you concentrate on only working out, you not only get into the habit of exercise, but you ensure that you will be able to make the most progress towards your fitness goals. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that you shouldn’t also work to include a bit of exercise into the other parts of your life. Even by getting in a little more walking into parts of your day, you actually help burn off a surprisingly large number of calories if you do it often enough.

Here are a few easy ways to get more walking into your everyday life.

Wear a Step-Counting Device

A pedometer is just a small device that you can strap onto your belt and informs you of how much you walk during the day. It works by actually measuring bumps. Every time there is a jostle or a shake, it assumes that you have taken one step. Believe it or not, studies show that people who wear a pedometer on average do a whole lot more walking than people who don’t. It seems that when you actually have something telling you how much you are walking, you are generally inclined to do a whole lot more of it.

What’s great about pedometers is that there is actually a huge range of them to suit your needs. Sometimes banks even give away cheap pedometers as part of customer appreciation or a promotion.

Walk More at the Grocery Store

When most people go to the grocery store or the mall, they usually try to park and close as they can to the entrance to avoid having to walk a long distance from the store to the car. However, it can be much easier to simply park further away and use going to the store as an opportunity to get more walking in. And really, trying to get spot up close usually doesn’t save you any time anyway because you typically have to wait until someone else leaves their spot. By parking further away, you don’t spend any more time at the grocery store than you usually do, but you are able to burn more calories.

Find Social Activities that Involve Walking

Socializing with friends doesn’t always have to mean sitting around at a restaurant or watching a movie. You could go for a walk in the park or even at the mall. Going to the mall is an especially attractive option if you ever discover that the weather is too nasty for a nice outdoor stroll. If you are worried that being around so much stuff that you can buy might tempt you into running up your credit card, you might consider just keeping your wallet in your car.

It is important to remember not to separate fitness from your everyday life. How fit you become is determined by the decisions you make, whether inside the gym or out.

Christopher William McCombs is a personal trainer in Signal Hill California. Chris teaches a radically different approach to losing fat to local OC residents and he makes the workouts fun. Chris is also a Fitness Trainer Marketing expert and helps fitness trainers all over the globe to triple their income while cutting their work hours in half.

Making certain that your muscles are always developing can be a seriously complex business. Yet strangely, a lot trainers start focusing on the more complex aspects of weight training long before they have ever mastered the very basics. In fact, you can see this in gyms all the time. Trainers pour in, do the exact same exercises that they have always done for God knows how long, without ever making any noticeable muscle gains.

If you don’t want to be a member of the teeming millions who just works without progress, you have to start thinking about some ways you can ensure that you always keep progressing.

Slow it Down

Obviously, you are going to have to use momentum on some more complex exercises, but you should never be in a contest to see how fast you can swing the weights around. By taking your time on every repetition, you increase the amount of stress on your muscle, which ultimately spurs more muscle growth.

Generally, it is preferable if each exercise lasts about four seconds, with two seconds to lift the weight and two to lower it. Unfortunately, even experienced trainers often underestimate the importance of the negative portion of the exercise. Lowering that weight just as slowly as you lift it will help you see bigger gains in the long run.

Do Something You Have Never Done Before

Variety is far more than just the spice of life, it is also the spice of a healthy fitness regimen. Your muscles are surprisingly adaptive, so if you go day in and day out doing the identical exercises that you have been doing for years, you do yourself no favors.

Every six weeks, you should switch things up and start doing exercises that you may not be used to. Yes, it will take a little time to learn proper technique, but you will be rewarded in the end.

Focus on Compound Exercises

The more muscles that each exercise recruits, the better. The compound exercises have numerous advantages over more simple isolation exercises. Firstly, they simply can make your workouts shorter because they work more with less movement. Secondly, by recruiting more muscles, you actually encourage more production of testosterone, which can help your gains greatly.

Cut Your Workouts Down to Size

It’s great if you get a lot of stimulation from going to the gym, but if you really want to see constant progress, each individual weight training session shouldn’t last more than an hour. After this point, all the energy that you are expending is actually causing your body to eat muscle.

If you are one of the those lucky people who happen to have a lot of time on your hands and enjoy devoting yourself to your training, it is possible to manage a split routine, where you split different parts of a long workouts into two separate workouts during the day. For the rest of us who have to hold down a job, keeping it under an hour a day should work sufficiently.

Fitness Expert Chris McCombs is a West Hollywood Personal Trainer California. While walking out of a burrito joint Chris discovered a radical approach to burning fat at a rapid rate which he helps people all over do today. Chris is also a fitness trainer marketing expert and helps personal trainers and other people in the fitness industry to triple their income and cut their work hours by more than half.

According to a new study by McMaster University, short bursts of high intensity sprints can be just as beneficial to the cardiovascular system as longer, endurance type exercises.

The study compared individuals performing 30 second sprints, three days per week, to those performing 40 to 60 minutes of cycling, five days per week. The sprints were performed with high-intensity. The cycling was performed with moderate-intensity.

The research found that the short, high-intensity, sprints improved the structure and function of the individuals’ arteries as much as the endurance type exercise did for the other individuals. In particular, the exercise can improve the arteries that pump blood to our muscles and heart.

The study was led by kinesiology doctoral student Mark Rakobowchuk, and is published online in the journal American Journal of Physiology. Regulatory, Integrative & Comparative Physiology.

Source: ScienceDaily

Cardiovascular exercise is the most efficient way to burn fat. It has a lot of other benefits as well, including giving you more energy. But, of course, no one wants to work out for months or more without seeing results. They want to see the progress, but their energy levels and their waistline, week after week.

If you are really interested in getting everything that you can out of cardiovascular exercise, just follow these simple tips.

Exercise on an Empty Stomach

If you are the type who has trouble losing fat, you might really benefit from exercising first thing the in the morning, even before you have had anything to eat. The reason for this is that at this time your body has the lowest levels of glucose, so when you start doing your cardio exercise, it turns straight to your body fat for fuel, rather than any food you may have recently happened to eat.

If exercising this early isn’t feasible for you, you can get a similar effect simply by making sure that you do your cardio at least two hours after you have had your last meal.

Listen to Music

The number one complaint about cardiovascular exercise is that it’s boring. Unlike weight training, where you might switch exercises every couple of minutes, when doing cardio, you essentially have to do the same motion over and over for half an hour or more. But if you feel bored with your workout, you will put less effort into it and ultimately get less out of it. The only way to fight this is by making sure that you stay entertained, and the easiest way to do this by listening to some music. Some tunes can help keep your mood up, which can improve the quality of your exercise dramatically.

Make the Exercise Between Twenty and Forty-Five Minutes

Ideally, the exercise should be long enough to really get your heart pumping, but short enough so that it doesn’t totally wear you down. Unless you are doing cardio in order to train for an endurance competition such as a triathlon or marathon, something between twenty minutes and forty five minutes should be sufficient. If it lasts more than an hour or so, you actually risk having your body start breaking down your muscles for fuel.

Keep It High Intensity

While people with hip problems or the elderly obvious might benefit more from leisurely strolls for safety reasons, the rest of us should strive to make cardiovascular exercise as heart pumping as possible. If you are really interested in making cardio exercise as effective as possible, you want it burns as many calories as possible. And the best way to make it burn the maximum amount of calories is by ensuring you are pouring the maximum amount of effort into it.

If you are running for cardio, this doesn’t mean that you should always be doing a full on sprint, but it does mean that you should be putting forth enough effort to make you breathe heavily. If you are new to exercise, you may have to build up your stamina to the points where you exert this kind of effort for the full exercise time.

Fitness Expert Chris McCombs is a Westwood Personal Trainer. While walking out of a burrito joint Chris discovered a radical approach to burning fat at a rapid rate which he helps people all over do today. Chris is also a fitness training marketing expert and helps self employed personal trainers to triple their income and cut their work hours by more than half.

The U.S. President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports has recently introduced an adult fitness test. The test, which is for adults over the age of 18, allows U.S. residents to measure their fitness against other adults of the same age.

The fitness test includes exercises from three main components: aerobic fitness, muscular strength and flexibility exercises.

Aerobic fitness is tested by either a 1-mile walk or a 1.5 mile run. The strength test is achieved with push-ups and half sit-ups. Flexibility is measured using the sit-and-reach exercise.

Here’s what the Adult Fitness Test website says about the three main components:

On aerobic fitness:

…relates to the heart, blood vessels, and lungs working together to deliver oxygen-rich blood to the muscles during exercise. A high level of aerobic fitness is associated with lower risks of several diseases, including high blood pressure and coronary heart disease

On Strength:

…critical to both your health and ability to carry out daily activities, such as performing household tasks (yard work, carrying groceries) or job-related tasks (lifting or moving heavy objects)

On Flexibility:

Being able to move all of your joints through their full range of motion is important for good joint function as well as being able to walk, lift, and step normally. For example, if your knees cannot extend all the way, walking with bent knees puts extra stress on the hip and low back…

The adult fitness test can be completed online. You simply enter in your scores from the above components, as well as entering some basic details such as age, gender, height, and weight.

As well as giving you a comparison against other adults, the results of the fitness test can provide you with a baseline for improvement. This could come in handy when planning and measuring the results of your own workout sessions.

To complete the adult fitness test, go to www.adultfitnesstest.org.

I recently wrote about the danger of overtraining. In this article, I discuss the main symptoms of overtraining.

• Constant soreness - This could be soreness in your muscles and/or joints. You may also experience general aches and pains without being able to pinpoint a particular muscle group or joint.
• Headaches
• Constant fatigue - You have no energy, you constantly feel tired or “washed out”.
• Sudden drop in performance - For example, you can’t lift the same weight or perform the same number of reps that you used to be able to
• Elevated resting heart rate
• Unwanted weight loss
• Increased susceptibility to infections
• Increased incidence of injuries
• Moodiness/Irritability - You find that you get irritated very easily. Little things annoy you.
• Depression
• Loss of motivation - You don’t have the same enthusiasm for training. You might even find that you don’t look forward to training anymore.
• Insomnia - You can’t sleep when you should be sleeping.
• Decreased appetite
• Decreased sexual performance

Treatment for Overtraining

If you find yourself experiencing any of these symptoms, you could be overtraining. If you suspect that you’re overtraining, reduce or stop all exercise immediately. Allow yourself to rest for a few days. Drink plenty of fluids and ensure your diet is good. Get at least 8 hours sleep per day. Try a sports massage to relieve any injuries you may have due to your overtraining.

If you find that symptoms persist, see your local GP. Many of the above symptoms could be caused by other factors too - overtraining isn’t the only cause of these symptoms.