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Monday, August 28, 2006
Top 5 Tips to Make a Full-Body Workout Work for you
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Start with body-weight execises such as lunges, push-ups and squats. You want to work toward lifting your body weight with correct form and range of motion before you actually start lifting weights. Perform compound exercises such as deadlifts, squats and lunges - these will burn the most calories and let you work all of your muscles with fewer exercises.
Use a circuit-type routine, and keep your rest periods short. Pair upper-body exercises with lower-body ones and go back and forth between the two. Keep each of your rest periods 30 to 60 seconds long, with each set lasting 40 to 60 seconds.
Use no more than 24 sets per workout in total - this could be two sets of 12 exercises or three sets of eight exercises. Your workout should take less than an hour; beyond an hour, you’ll start to have diminishing returns.
Take at least one day off a week to let your body rest and recover. You will achieve results from your recovery period, not from your workout.
Don’t get stuck in the same routine for months on end. You have to change it up every four to six weeks. In order for your body to keep changing, you must continue to alter your routine, so as your body adapts, make a change.
Permalink | | Categories: Toning
The 3,500 Calorie Problem
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Do you know how many calories there is in a pound of fat? It’s a whopping 3,500 calories. To put that into perspective, let’s say you are 50 lbs. overweight. Multiply 3,500 to 50 and you get 175,000 calories. That’s 175,000 calories of blubbery fat you don’t need. Let’s look at it with another perspective. When you see one of those diets that say you can lose 10 pounds in one week, it is not likely you lost 10 pounds of fat. That would mean that you would have expended 24,500 calories in week and that is not likely even with exercise.
If your caloric expenditure at rest is 1,250 calories (not uncommon for many women), then you could survive on that for 140 days. Now, you could be thinking, “If I just quit eating for 140 days I could drop this 50 lbs.” Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. I’m just trying to put it into perspective.
So, I’m going to put it into a perspective where proper diet and exercise is incorporated. Hypothetically, let’s say as a result of weight training your caloric expenditure has increased to 1,600 (this is achieved by an increase of 7 lbs of lean muscle, an additional 250-350 calories per day). Then we add approximately 700 calories used due to cardiovascular exercise, weight lifting, and some other activities you could do in a day. This comes to 2,300 calories.
But, you can’t forget that you must eat so you don’t waste muscle. So, let’s say you ingested 1,900 calories, but 20% of those calories were used in digestion alone (known as thermic effect of food). That leaves you with 1,520 calories. Subtract 1,520 from 2,300 and you will get 780 calories. Given that you had a sound workout and eating program, that 780 calories would mostly come from fat in the body. During the course of the week, let’s say you used 780 calories everyday and it all came from fat. That would add up to 5,460 calories. Divide that number by 3,500 calories (the amount of calories in one pound of fat) and you will get 1.56 pounds. That means you just lost 1.56 pounds of fat in one week. This means you could lose all 50 lbs. (the right way) in eight months and keep it off.
One of my most dedicated clients, let’s call her Julia, truly utilized this concept. From June 15, 2005 to December 23, 2005 Julia lost 45.85 pounds. That’s 1.91 pounds of body fat per week or approximately 46 pounds in 6 months. Her body fat percentage dropped from 34.8% to 18% (has since December capped off at 16%). If she did it through diet alone, she would be at great risk of getting all the weight back and developing chronic diseases. But, as a result of building a body that burns more calories and changing her lifestyle, she isn’t at risk. I hope that with this illustration, you truly understand that importance of incorporating proper eating habits, weight lifting, and cardiovascular exercise to improve metabolism.
If you have a topic you would like me to cover, don’t hesitate to e-mail me at kelly@kellyhuggins.com.
