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.

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.

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.