Easy Fat Burn

Here’s a wonderful article about the joys and benefits of walking.

Of all the known workouts that are aimed to help you lose weight, walking to lose weight is the one that stands out the best. It is a tried and proven technique to lose weight and is effective on all individuals. Before you get excited and start walking to lose weight, you should know a couple of things regarding your fitness regime.

Plan and stick to your schedule. This cannot be emphasized enough. Earmark your weekly planner with days that you plan to walk. Make sure that you follow those up as planned and do this regularly. Walking has a lot of benefits in addition to losing weight.

Your body will be revitalized. Your heart will work more efficiently and you will significantly reduce the risk of heart diseases. Walking is also known to have a positive effect on your blood pressure and can help relieve your stress. Walking is a great time to catch up with your friends! You don’t have to think of losing weight as something mundane and needs to be done mandatorily.

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Are you sore after lifting weights? I’ll go to the gym, have a great workout lifting weights, feel on top of the world and then the next day, I can barely move. I thought I’d do some research to see why that happens exactly. Here’s what I found out:

Working new muscles and using too much weight while still having weak obliques are all prime reasons for back pain or soreness. The spine is a column of bones surrounded by tiny muscles holding it in place. And your core is a like a giant sheath of muscles that stabilize the spine from the front. So, if your core is weak, strength-training could stress the smaller muscles around your spine.

We know that the benefits of resistance weight training are seen quickly. When you follow a disciplined weight training program you will start to feel and look better and of course, you are healthier. But, the real key to benefit from weight training is REST. Muscles become sore after lifting weights because it makes tiny tears in the muscle fibers.

The muscles then need to heal and as they are healing, they are actually growing and becoming bigger and stronger. You really should not lift weights when muscles are sore. At least allow them to fully recover first. Another good tip is to get at least 8 hours of sleep per night. This has proved to be vital to the recovery process and to building more muscle.

When you hear, “no pain, no gain” keep in mind that this is terribly wrong. Lifting too, often actually works against muscle gain since muscles never have time to recover and grow. If you start to experience pain while lifting weights, then stop immediately. It’s good to listen to your body. Pain is warning that you are in danger of injuring yourself if you continue.

So, how do you feel better? It’s simply a matter of patience. With a few days of “actively” resting, the soreness and muscle aches should disappear. But, in the meantime, don’t do anything that would stress or strain your back. You can stretch gently and  ice the aches.  As your body continues to get stronger, keep in mind that to prevent future muscle soreness you can do some cross-training by swimming and walking.

Technorati Tags: core strength training, lifting weights, muscle soreness, muscles, strength-training, weigh training

As I mentioned in The Truth About Cardio – Part I, I signed up for Rob Poulos’ Fat Burning Furnace newsletter to give me some good pointers. Here’s the second installment from his newsletter. You can sign up for his newsletter below.

Here’s what Rob says:

In the last newsletter, I talked about the truth about long duration frequent cardio or aerobic exercise for fat loss, fitness, and health. What I concluded was that this type of exercise can actually give you the exact opposite results you’re after. Here’s a quick recap why:

With this type of exercise, your body will be burning stored body fat as its primary source for fuel. While this may sound good, its actually bad news. What happens after the workout is far more important than what happens during the workout. After this type of workout is over, your body responds by holding on tightly to its stored body fat so that it’s available the very next time you perform this exercise.

From a health perspective, this type of cardio can actually reduce your body’s natural ability to deal with stress (or life, as I like to call it!).  You see, long duration moderate intensity exercise conditions your body and cardiovascular system to be efficient. And efficiency means a smaller everything…heart, lungs, muscles, etc.

In effect, you are shrinking the core elements of your body’s powerhouse, and while it may get better at jogging for hours at a time, when faced with something truly stressful, you’ll be outmatched and in big trouble. How often does life require you to continuously jog for great distances? That’s right, almost never.

Now, a lot of experts out there have discovered that if you perform cardio with intervals (where you alternate short burst of high intensity with low intensity) is far better for fat loss and actually quite powerful and efficient. And normally I’d recommend it, but I don’t. Let’s talk about why that is.

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The Truth about Cardio – Part I

I got off to a rocky start on this so-called adventure. But… I will not be deterred! I signed up for Rob Poulos’ Fat Burning Furnace newsletter to give me some good pointers. This email seemed so radical to me, but in a strange way, made lots of sense. I plan on following his advice. Let me know what you think!

Here’s what came the other day to my email box:

If you’ve read any of my past newsletters or articles regarding exercise and its role in burning fat and getting healthy, you probably already know that I don’t recommend performing cardio or aerobics as your primary exercise method.

And I’m not only talking about traditional moderately paced long duration cardio, but that interval cardio stuff too. I’m not saying interval cardio doesn’t work, it does, and I’ll talk about that a bit later. But even still, I have a lot of people angry at me… in fact I get emails almost every day from people who think I’m nuts for telling them they don’t have to perform exclusive cardio of any kind.

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Painful beginnings when it comes to FINALLY commit to losing my over-40 extra weight that just NEEDS to come off! But, I am on a mission…. to burn the fat.

My goal! No more muffin top!

I do not have a lot of weight to lose. 10-15 lbs. and I would be most happy. But it means the following:

1. I have to commit to changing my lifestyle
2. I have to give up amend the amount of crackers with cheese that I eat on a daily basis.
3. I need to get back to exercising. Ugh! There, I said it again.
4. I need to find out the truth about cardio… does it work or is there an easier way?

I like my life the way it is… but I don’t buy new clothes – unless forced to because of some kind of event that my closet can not cater to.

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