Your Fitness

What is the minimum amount of exercise needed for health and fitness? Although it depends on the person, lifestyle, and goals, the wisdom is that 20-60 minutes per day of cardio, weight lifting, or muscle stretching is necessary.

While no one can deny that these numbers produce optimal results, it is possible to achieve great things in less time.

The truth is that most terribly out of shape individuals have lost crucial “body-mind” link, a connection that helps them to feel the hunger for natural health movement. They hate sweating, do not like to walk, and often confuse thirst or emotional pain with actual hunger.

For those of us who have to pave the way for a new exercise routine, even five minutes a day can be a door to save lives in a healthier world.

Here are the rules:

1) To get the most out of this routine, which should extend throughout the day.   I recommend sixty seconds of work at 9 am, 12 pm, 3 pm, 6 pm and 9 pm. This approach is called “Grease the Groove” and has an unusually powerful effect.

2) Focus on the abdominal muscles. They are the largest group of voluntary muscles of the body. They help posture, digestion and sexual function. They are critical to athletic performance, the energy transfer from the bottom of the upper body. When it comes to appearance, the abdominals are called “the window of health”-that is judged most often by our belt lines than any other physical factor.

3) It is virtually impossible to to tone up the stomach muscles without benefiting the other muscle groups throughout the body.

What exercises are best? I would suggest a three-pronged approach: a difficult exercise, a light exercise, and one that can be done in public while walking or driving.

1) A roller wheel. These are available at any sporting goods store about five U.S. dollars and are the only ab exercise develop their money worth. Start rolling from your knees.  In time you will be able to perform the exercise from a standing position.

2) Hip lifts. Lie on your back, brace your hands at your sides, cross your feet and lift your knees and feet off of the ground. Now contract the abdominal muscles and lift the hips from the floor. Relax and repeat the hip lift for sixty seconds.

3) Power breathing. Contract your stomach muscles hard while walking or driving. Combined with proper breathing techniques, this may be the perfect ab exercise. There are many yoga, Tai Chi, and martial arts teachers who can teach you the correct technique of breathing, if you have not had this training then I would suggest you find a teacher!

While the “Grease the Groove” technique is powerful (and can be used to develop strength, flexibility, or coordination) is not a substitute for your normal cardiovascular workouts. Is offered as a complement to your normal exercise session or for those days you just can not find the time to get to the gym.  It will hopefully provide you with yet another avenue to lead you to greater fitness.

 So you want to burn fat?  Join the club.   With obesity levels in the U.S. pushing nearly 1 in 3 people it is on the mind of just about everyone.   If you want to get serious about your fitness and burning off the unwanted fat then you need to look into what is called High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT).

HIIT is short periods (intervals) of intense exercise followed by a resting period where less intense exercise is performed.  The question you may be asking is why is High Intensity Interval Training supposed to be so effective?  What makes it better than steady state cardio workouts?

You are probably familiar with steady state cardio.  That means hopping on the treadmill and jogging for about 30 minutes or so.  You try to get your heart rate into the fat burning zone and hopefully the fat will melt away.  When you get your heart rate into the fat burning zone (about 65 - 75% of your max heart rate) you will be burning fat at a good clip.  You will be getting most of your energy from your fat.  This is good.  You definitely will burn fat and lose weight by doing steady state cardio.  However, there is also a downside.

Outside of being boring, you will only burn calories while doing the exercise itself and maybe for another hour or so after that.  Maybe that doesn’t sound so bad but you will see in a moment that it is definitely not preferrable.

Your body will also adapt to your workouts at some point making them much less effective (that means you won’t burn much fat).  The other problem is that if you perform steady state cardio for too long you lose muscle mass.  Think about it; have you ever seen a muscular marathon runner?  There is a reason for that.  After about 35-40 minutes of  steady state cardio you begin to release a hormone called cortisol.  Unfortunately, cortisol will break down the protein in your body for energy instead of fat.   Less protein means less muscle.  Not enough protein means muscle loss.

So what does HIIT offer that steady state cardio doesn’t?  Research has shown that interval training will increase your ability to burn calories at an elevated rate for up to 48 hours after you workout.  This is a result of Excess Post Exercise Oxygen Consumption (EPOC).  You can click the link to learn more about why it works that way rather than go into a big discussion about it here.

One of the other positive side effects of High Intensity Interval Training is that it causes your body to release testosterone and human growth hormone.  Both of these are essential in building muscle and helping you to lose fat.  HIIT by its very nature cannot be done for long periods of time therefore cortisol never gets released.  A typical HIIT workout will only last about 20 - 25 minutes.

The other positive part about HIIT is that you body never quite adapts to it.  You can vary the interval times of intesity and rest and keep your body off balance.

So if you are at a fat loss plateau or need to ramp up your fat loss efforts then take a look at High Intensity Interval Training.

A few years ago I first heard about Crossfit.   I ran across their website during a lunch hour at work and immediately was taken in by what they had to say.

CrossFit has gone on to become the preferable strength and conditioning program for military special ops groups (Navy Seals, Army Rangers, etc), as well as, police and fire departments, marital artists, MMA fighters, professional athletes and people just like you and me.

The CrossFit program is scalable so no matter what your level of fitness you can begin doing CrossFit workouts.  If you are an elderly individual or a supremely conditioned MMA fighter you can benefit from a CrossFit workout.

What I fell in love with was that they had a different opinion of what real fitness was all about. Most of us have imbalanced views of what fitness is. If you have a running background, you might think that being fit means you have the ability to run 10 miles at a 5 - 6 minute pace for each mile.

If you are a weightlifter you might believe that being fit means that you can bench press in excess of 400 pounds, squat nearly 600 pounds and deadlift about 500 pounds.

If you are a bodybuilder you might believe that being fit is easy to determine. If you have large muscles and rippling abs, then you have arrived.

The point is that we have a tendency to define fitness by the standard defined by the fitness area that we gravitate towards the most. Although, all of the above things are positive and beneficial they don’t necessarily define fitness. What good is it if you can run 10 miles but struggle carrying two gallons of milk in from the store?

It is nice to be able to lift heavy weights but if you are tired after walking a couple of flights of stairs then I would venture to say that your overall fitness level is not too great.

Crossfit looked at this problem and developed a workout protocol that attempts to build proficiency in all areas of fitness. They focus on endurance, strength, and flexibility. They incorporate running, body weight exercise, olympic lifts, kettlebell training, medicine ball training, etc.

The nice thing about CrossFit is that they post WOD (workouts of the day) each day at their site.  These workouts are designed to prevent your body from adapting to your exercise routine and to provide you with the avenue to increase in strength, endurance, flexibility and even confidence.

If you haven’t checked them out swing by their website and give it a once over.  You will be glad you did.

I have become a real fan of Body Weight Exercise over the last couple of years.  It is probably as a result of a variety of factors.  The first is that I came across an alternate definition of fitness from  Crossfit workouts.  Crossfit is not exclusively a body weight exercise protocol but they incorporate many body weight exercises in their workouts. They include a number of Olympic lifts, running, gymnastics, and kettlebells as well.  I will do a post of Crossfit shortly for those of you who are not familiar with them.

The second thing that influenced me was a program called Turbulence Training by Craig Ballantyne. Craig has been a contributing author for Men’s Health for years and developed Turbulence Training. I began performing a few of his workouts without much in the way of expectation and was pleasantly surprised at the workout that it gave me.  It worked my muscles to a great level and elevated my heart rate.

I hate running. I understand that value that it may have in the overall scheme of your fitness but if I could find a replacement for it and still accomplish the same level of fat burning I would never run again.  As I have gotten older now (44) my joints like running even less than I do. So body weight exercises were a heaven sent gift.  A 20 - 30 minute body weight exercise routine builds muscle and burns fat at the same time.  This is quite the powerful combo.

In the future I will post some body weight exercise routines.  You will find these quite challenging and difficult.  You will be amazed at the results and thrilled at the amount of fat that is being burned.  So stay tuned as we explore the benefits of body weight exercise for your fitness.

Often we allow ourselves to get boxed in when it comes to maintaining our fitness level.  We compartmentalize our fitness.  If we want to burn calories and lose weight we do cardio.  We hop on a treadmill or a bike or an elliptical machine or if we are really daring we don our running shoes and head outside.

If we want to increase strength or better our muscular tone we do resistance training or strength training or weight lifting.  But for whatever reason we rarely think about trying to accomplish both with the same exercise routine.  It is one of my goals to challenge your thinking in this regard.  You see we can burn calories, lose weight, build muscle tone and build strength quite often through the same set of exercises.

Today I want to discuss an exercise that fits into this category.  It will both give you a great cardio workout and help build muscle tone all at the same time.  Now I don’t recommend doing this exercise non-stop for 30 minutes for a couple of reasons.  First, you won’t be able to perform it for that long and second, any exercise performed for 30 minutes straight is boring.  That is one of the reasons I despise running.  It is boring.  And the ultimate upshot is if I consider it boring then there is a good chance that I just might decide to skip it today.  This is not good for developing your fitness level.

The exercise I want to introduce to you today is Burpees.  Burpees are a multi-function exercise.  They are a body weight exercise that  includes a squat, a push-up and an explosive jump.  These parts combine to create a lethal fat burning exercise.   (It is lethal to your fat, not you.)

Let me describe how to perform a burpee.  You will start out in a standing position with your feet about shoulder width apart.  The first part of the move is that you will squat down.  Then you will quickly place your hands on the floor in front of you and will simultaneously quick your feet back so that you are in a push-up position.  You will then kick your feet back to where they started from (removing your hands from the floor) and from the squatting position explode and jump as high as you can.  Then repeat and repeat and repeat.

The idea is that the exercise be done in a flowing motion without breaks in between each part.  If you are having trouble with understanding my explanation then I have found a video from YouTube for you to watch.  The video is from the wonderful people at Crossfit .  They even throw a little ring exercise variation in for you at the end.

Burpees are intensive exercises.  Try to work your way up to where you can perform 20 - 25 without stopping and work them into your overall exercise routine.  You can add 3 or 4 sets to your fat burning workout and I believe you will be pleased with the result.

So get to exercising and let me know what you think of burpees if you have never done them before.  See you soon!