How does fitness really help weight loss

We want you to think the next time you're tempted to diet your way out of so that unwanted weight gain, to stop and consider your fitness-based alternatives. One thing to always keep in mind as it relates to fitness and weight loss is that if you are unable to do it for life than it probably won't work. Here are the biggest reasons a comprehensive fitness approach is a more effective and sustainable weight-loss solution:

Fitness revs your cellular engines. Your cells' mitochondria are the calorie burning powerhouses in your body. Mitochondria need oxygen, so the more oxygen you consume per minute (VO2 max), the more efficient your cells become, and the more calories you burn.

Fitness balances your hormones. Over time, fit people experience positive hormonal changes that help keep them fit. Lower stress hormone (reduces inflammation), higher growth hormone (builds muscle) and lower insulin (controls cravings) are just a few of the hormonal benefits fitness brings.

Fitness grows on you. Unlike dieting, which few people can tolerate for long, fitness quickly becomes a way of life. The more fit you become, the more you're inclined to move. So for most fit people, seeking daily activity becomes an almost instinctive habit.

Fitness gives you a metabolic advantage. Fit people have more lean muscle mass and a higher metabolism, which helps them weather setbacks such as holiday binges that can pack on excess pounds.

Fitness is fun. People often overlook the emotional and spiritual benefits of exercise. A fitness lifestyle involves regularly participating in activities for the sheer enjoyment of them. It's more fun, it relieves stress, and it's easier to sustain.

One aspect of fitness that is often overlooked is that when you are working out you are not indulging in an activity that adds to you gaining weight. As you look at your day, there are countless activities that are not supporting your weight loss goals. Every time you workout even for 15 minutes it is 15 minutes that you are building a habit that promotes the results your want and takes you away from activities like eating while watching television that does noting to promote healthy living.

It is this last point that we strive day in and day out to pound home, that it is getting to the point that fitness for its own enjoyment is what we are after. One a person likes to work out because they like it, they will exercise forever.

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Fat Burning Cardio Workouts with Heart Rate Monitors

When it comes to weight loss the first thing many people think about is that they have to do tons of cardio. Many people spend hour after hours counting the calories burned on their treadmill. Others are using a heart rate monitor to stay in their fat burning zone for hours hoping the fat will burn away. One of the number one questions I get is "I do 6 hours of cardio a week and can't lose a pound." With proper hear rate monitor training, a person can optimize their workout to raise their metabolism and burn more fat not just during your workout, but all day long.

To understand heart rate training, we first have to understand how our bodies produce energy. We have two major processes that produce energy within our bodies. First, our aerobic metabolism utilizes oxygen combined with carbs and fat to produce our long lasting energy and the energy you are using to read this article. Your second way you produce energy is anaerobically. Your anaerobic metabolism creates energy for short durations of intense activity. Your only source of energy for your anaerobic metabolism is carbohydrates in your blood stream or carbs stored in your muscle cells. So aerobic burns fat and carbs, and anaerobic burns carbs only.

Proper heart rate training has three distinct training zones each designed to challenge your metabolism to become faster and more efficient which leads to burning more fat. Most people only exercise in one of them. When we train in the same zone everyday our body adapts to that workout and we stop getting the weight loss and fat loss we are after. To optimize your fat burning results we want to do each zone's workout once a week.

To create your optimal fat burning heart rate zones we have to find your anaerobic threshold. Your anaerobic threshold is the point at which your physical activity becomes so intense that your body is unable to produce enough energy aerobically. Your anaerobic metabolism kicks in to produce more energy to continue the activity. During intense cardio workouts both your aerobic and anaerobic metabolisms are producing energy to keep you moving. Online personal training website Liveleantoday.com utilizes a customized online profile to find your anaerobic threshold and create your fat burning heart rate zones. If you have the ability, the best test for your anaerobic threshold is a treadmill test where you are hooked up to an oxygen mask connected to a metabolic cart. The most common place to get this test done is at certain universities around the country.

Fat Burning Zone

The first zone (zone 1) for optimal fat burning cardio consists of working out at a moderate intensity level. You want to workout at an intensity that you can sustain for long periods of time, greater than 30 min. consistently. With training, it is good to work up to consistent cardiovascular exercise for 60 min. The goal in zone 1 is to train your body to burn fat efficiently. Don't be so concerned about how many calories you burn during the workout. A proper fat burning zone workout trains your metabolism to burn more fat by efficiently training your body to release more fat out of your fat cells all day long while you are not exercising.

Anaerobic Threshold Zone

For the second zone (zone 2), we want to train as close as we can to our anaerobic threshold. A measure to find this point is the highest constant heart rate you can sustain for 15-20 min. The goal of zone 2 is to train your aerobic metabolism to burn energy as fast as it can. Your metabolism then adapts and you burn more energy 24 hours a day. Zone two is the workout that I see that every exerciser skips. Most people either spend all their time in the easy zone 1 or do high intensity training all the time which we are going to talk about next. Working out at the moderately high intensity in zone 2 is essential to training our aerobic metabolism which is our major source of energy all day.

High Intensity Zone

The third zone for optimal fat burning cardio is training at high intensities (zone 3). Another name for this zone is interval training. Interval training is where we workout for short burst of time, 1-3 min., and then walk or rest for short bursts of time, and then repeat the high to low sequence again. Zone 3 workouts train your body to produce energy greater than it has ever done before for short durations of time. It is more important about the rate of burning energy than total calories. Which means the faster you go the more calories you burn in a short period of time the better. One key to interval training is you have to be able to repeat the same speed and heart rate for each interval. Often people train to hard for the first interval and though their heart rate goes up they slow their speed down with each interval. Zone 3 workouts are considered the most efficient way to raise your metabolism and burn more fat. You actually burn 100% carbs during the workout as a source of energy. People that do consistent interval training on a weekly basis burn more fat 24 hours a day, even on days they don't exercise.

Each zone has key aspects to your total fat burning program. An optimal program consists of workouts in all three zones each week. Every person's heart rate is going to be different for each zone. Liveleantoday.com uses it customized profile to create the individualized heart rate zones to optimize your fat burning workouts. Heart rate zones between people can vary by over 20 beats, so training at your friend's zone doesn't work. Start training at all three zones each week and start burning more fat 24 hours a day.

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Periodization Training: A Body Building Perspective

If you divide your yearly training into phases or cycles, you'll maintain a better mental outlook, more motivation and your body will also respond better physiologically.

The first phase of training is the one that builds muscle size and pre-orients your muscles to be geared up (condition-wise) to go for strength and power which will theoretically allow you to even add more muscle size. Plus, you will condition your tendons and joints to handle the stresses of heavier weights to come.

It is recommended that you do 6-15 reps per set for size with the great majority of reps falling somewhere from 8-12 reps. Try 3-4 heavier "work" sets after a systemic warm-up plus 2-3 warm-up weight sets per exercise. As you might note, so far this sounds pretty much like a standard common sense bodybuilding workout.

The strength and power phases are next. This will be another 8-week cycle. To develop strength and power, the greatest athletes in the world generally work with 2-6 reps. Since we are geared to bodybuilders we adjust this slightly and in this phase, we advocate 4 - 5 sets of 5 - 7 reps. Here is how this cycle works. We'll use our previous example for the Bench Press where you ended Phase 1 at 235 for 10 reps. Do an active system warm-up, then with weights 95 x 10 and 155 for 10. On your final warm up set do 205 for 6.

Then go to your "target weight" which is actually only 10-lbs. above the weight you ended up at sets of 10 in your first phase. So, start at 245-lbs. x 3 sets of 5-6 reps. You are leaving yourself some extra so you continue to gain positively all the way through the cycle.

In physics, work is a measure of force and distance. (w = f x d). Power means doing a specified amount of work per unit time. If you can move mass M over distance D in 10 seconds and then (after training) move the same mass M the same distance D, but do it in 5 seconds, you are twice as powerful!

Our experience has been to spend a maximum of four weeks in the power phase and to use 2 -3 reps in benches and deadlifts, 3 - 4 reps in the squats and bent-over rows, and 5 - 6 reps for all other exercises. Again, follow your 2-3 warm-ups, and 3 power work sets and then do a down set of 10 reps with about 70% of your target weight, just as you did in the strength phase.

Phase 4 is the rest cycle, a must for great results and essential for building strength and lean mass. Be sure to add about a week of rest into your online workout program, about 1 week every 12. You'll love the way you feel afterwards!

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Alpine Climbing and Fitness

I have written before in this publication about indoor rock climbing and its fitness benefits. Now I want to turn my attention to the sport of "alpine climbing" and its variations, and how this activity can become a part of a fitness lifestyle that is truly in concert with what we call the "inner athlete." Another term for alpine climbing is simply "mountain climbing". Though most people would think of mountain climbing as something that would involve a very high peak and trekking through snow to get to the top, the purpose of this article is to show the value of participating even in less extensive climbs that test fitness and require some planning, but can be done in a short period of time or even over the course of an afternoon. As a personal trainer I was always looking for things that would effectively motivate my clients to adhere to a fitness program and reach their goals. Whether the goal was weight loss, building muscles, toning up their bodies or having more energy, I knew that the "Inner Athlete" that we mention frequently on our website exists in everybody, so it was up to me to find an activity that allowed a client's version of that inner athlete to come out. Training to get their body fit enough to climb a mountain was frequently the ticket. It is a very simple idea: get your body from the bottom of the mountain to the top, and once you are up there, enjoy the view and the fruits of your labor. A lot of clients were really intrigues by the idea, so we built their cardio programs and resistance training programs around it.

As I write this article, recently I have been riveted by the current Discovery Channel series "Everest, Beyond the Limit". The series follows the journey of a group of climbers led by a professional guide as they attempt to reach the summit of the world's highest mountain. In the series, viewers are treated for really the first time with EXACTLY what it looks and sounds like way up at those rarely traveled altitudes. In addition, a TV series has never before focused on the actual life these climbers lead as they spend almost 2 months on the mountain itself, getting used to the altitude and building the specific fitness required to achieve the summit. The hardship these people endure to reach their goal is almost beyond the understanding of most people, as the prolonged exposure to the increasing altitudes of Everest causes the climbers' minds and bodies to gradually shut down and stop working properly. It is enough to make even a pretty experienced fitness professional and adventurer like myself question the value of doing something that extreme to my body. Even having done some alpine climbing myself, including summiting Oregon's Mt. Hood (11,249ft) and Washington's famous Mt. St. Helens (8,364 ft), I still found it tough to imagine wanting to put my body through something so tortuous. The altitudes on the mountains I have climbed are only around 1/3 as high as those on Everest (29,035ft)

That's not what this article is about, however. Only a few thousand people in the entire world have ever stepped onto the summit of Everest, but virtually anyone can find a "climbing" adventure that suits their fitness and personality. The experience of the thrill of climbing is something that is realistically within anyone's means when actually trained for. Most people have just never really considered it possible or know where to start. Looking beyond the extreme nature that is present on Everest, the sport of "mountain climbing" can be participated in by almost anyone with a solid basic level of fitness. There some real and absolutely extraordinary fitness benefits that extreme climbers have achieved by the time they are done on Everest, and a version of those benefits are within the reach of "normal" people. These are people who may want the adventure of climbing a mountain to motivate them, but can realistically be achieved on a much smaller scale attainable by virtually anyone.

Physiologically, climbing is one of the most effective aerobic activities that can be performed. The steady state effort required to train for and perform climbs builds tremendous fitness in the heart and circulatory system. It is also typically low impact and easy on the joints which makes it an activity that virtually anyone can perform at some level.

Psychologially, climbing has a typically very simple appeal: getting to the top of a mountain feels good and is a very easy goal to define. "I made it to the top" is a very attractive thing to feel. Everybody wants to feel a sense of accomplishemnt in their lives, and too often our fitness success or failure is defined by the weight scale. All shapes and sizes of, people can climb, and the mountain doesn't care what size you are, it only cares if you made it to the top of it or not. So, best of luck in your climbing adventures, no matter at what altitude you finish!

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