Posts tagged as:

training

Do you know what to do?

by Donna on July 23, 2008

Do you know what to do when you reach a plateau? Let’s say you’ve been eating healthy and working out for 3 months. During those 3 months you saw continuous weight loss and you’re now down 12 pounds, but have not seen any additional weight loss for two weeks. What’s going on and what do you do about it?

I get this question quite often, the simple answer is: ‘step it up a notch’. Your body becomes accustomed to exercise in anywhere from 1 to three months of doing it. Once that occurs, your body sees no need to make anymore changes as it’s meeting your regular needs.

So nows the time to step it up a notch. If you’re using 5 pound dumb bells, increase them to 7. If you’re running on the treadmill or the elliptical for 30 minutes, increase it to 40 or raise the level of the program.

Once you do this, you should begin to see changes once again, as your body will adapt to the increased stresses you’re putting on it.

Just a word of caution, not too much too quickly. That’s how we get hurt and lose our interest in exercise, and that’s the last thing you want to see occur.

So have at it and have fun doing it!

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Couples Training…

by Donna on June 6, 2008

When you think of personal training, it’s usually one-on-one with client and trainer, as opposed to group training which is a group of people with one trainer in the front of the room. But what about a couple? You and your significant other working out together with a personal trainer. I’ve always had at least one couple to work with. I find it both fun and challenging. It would be impossible to do if each needed an individual workout routine, but when their conditioning is similar, I can manage to provide an excellent workout in our one hour session. Lately I’ve been getting more and more inquiries about it. Most ask if there is a discount, which there is, and others want to do it to spend more time with their spouse, or to be sure their spouse is doing some exercise. The only drawback I’ve found is the space. Sometimes we’ll need to move some furniture to have enough room for both to be exercising at the same time without bumping into one another. I see that it’s enjoyable for married couples who rarely spend time together. They get some needed discussions in about the kids, or the upcoming vacation. I feel like I develop a closer relationship with my long term couples since I’m involved in some of these discussions. But in the end, I’m there to see them attain their fitness goals, so while their talking, I’m pushing them on to the next exercise in the sequence, or making sure the level on the elliptical is high enough.

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Burn Those Calories

by Donna on December 20, 2007

I recently read a study which determined that just tapping your foot while sitting will burn more calories than just sitting. In fact, a completely sedentary person burns between 800 and 1,500 calories per day, creating the energy for the daily functions of all the cells in the body. This is called our basal metabolic rate, or BMR. Researchers also found that exercise burns calories not just while you are doing the workout, but also in the hours following the exercise. You use energy and burn calories to bring your body back to its normal resting state.

So that’s the good news, you burn calories when you’re not exercising and you burn calories after your exercise session is over, but, you burn the most calories while you are actually exercising.

Researchers found that the two most important contributors to burning calories during exercise are the contracting muscles and the increased work of the heart and lungs. The frequency and power of muscle contractions are by far the major factors in determining the number of calories burned during exercise. Faster heart rate and breathing also burn calories, but not nearly as much as movement of legs, arms, abdominal and back muscles. In fact, moving the biggest muscles in your body – your back, legs and abs – burn the most calories.

Over time, your metabolism changes as you convert your flabby muscles into firmer and leaner muscle mass. The more lean muscle mass you have, the higher your basal metabolic rate, the higher your BMR the more calories you burn even when you’re NOT working out.

It takes resistance or strength training to get this calorie burning benefit from exercise. However, cardio exercise will not only burn calories it will strengthen your heart muscle, the best way to avoid a heart attack. A good exercise regimen includes both resistance training and cardio training.
You can determine how many calories you should take in on a daily basis with the following formula:

Activity Level Calories per Pound
Very light (sedentary) 14

Light (if you walk) 15 – 17

Moderate (if you jog) 17 – 19

Heavy (if you’re a gym rat) 20 – 23
Use your “ideal” body weight, the weight you want to be, not the weight you are.

Example:
120lb X 18 (Moderate) = 2160 calories per day are needed to maintain 120 pounds of body weight daily
But choose those 2000+ calories wisely – keep this in mind:

Carbohydrates = 4 calories per gram

Protein = 4 calories per gram

Fat = 9 calories per gram

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