5 pounds of fat next to five pounds of muscle

Crazy For Cardio Workout

Crazy For Cardio Workout

• 20 Jumping Jacks
• 20 High Knees 
• 10 Burpees
• 20 Speed Skaters
• 10 Lunges
• 10 Side Lunges
• 20 Mountain Climbers
• 20 Jumping Jacks
• 1 Minute Plank

Sore or Sorry

Muffin Top Blaster Workout

Arms Workout

Full Body Workout

Trouble Area Target Circuit Workout

3,500 Calories = 1 Pound of Fat

Don't Quit

No excuses, workout!

Fitness Motivation

The All-Cardio Challenge

Want this body?

Benefits of Losing Fat (Weight)

Ways To Burn More Fat

The picture above shows 15 great, easy ways to help your body burn more fat. Most everyone I know would like to learn some simple ways that they can help their body burn more fat faster so I would like to share a few things that work. 

Your body is a marvelous machine. Though you may feel that you have too much fat on your frame, your body is really just doing its job. Our bodies have evolved over millions of years and learned to store fat when it is available so we do not starve when it is not.  Both fortunately and unfortunately in today's society we have an abundance of fat and calories available to us at a low cost. We also tend to eat a lot of refined, processed foods that contain fat producing ingredients such as: hydrogenated oils, refined white flour, white sugar, and corn syrup.

These two reasons mean that we tend to put on the pounds like never before. If you want to stay lean and fit in today's times you have to make a conscious effort. Fortunately, there are a number of ways to actually burn fat naturally.

1. Jumpstart your metabolism each morning:

Your metabolism simply refers to the rate at which your body burns calories. Anybody who is exercising is going to burn calories faster than when not exercising. However, all of us also burn calories while at rest. This is called our basal metabolic rate (BMR). The clincher is that the BMR for each person is a bit different; some people just burn more calories when they are sitting still.

The good news is that you can jumpstart your metabolism by exercising. Even if you do not have the time to exercise for the recommended 20-60 minutes each day, you can jumpstart your metabolism to burn at a higher rate. Just do some exercises in the morning, like pushups, sit-ups or leg squats.

2. Drink more ice water:

Ice water actually requires more calories to burn than does regular, room-temperature water. This is because it actually requires calories to heat up the water so that your body can process it. So, drink at least 6-8 glasses of ice water every day and watch the calories melt away.

3. Green tea, anyone?

Green tea is a popular drink in East Asia. It contains two chemicals (cannatic extract and gymnemic acid) which, together, act to partially keep your blood from absorbing sugar. And, green tea also helps block a key digestive enzyme required to process carbohydrates. Try drinking green tea before meals.

4. Pack on more muscle:

Nutritionists and scientists have proven that muscle burns more calories than does fat. So, spend some time at least 2-3 days per week strengthening your muscles by lifting weights. As you do, your body's BMR (see above) will naturally increase.

5. Like hot sauce with that?

Top nutritionists have shown that regularly consuming hot, spicy foods like cayenne pepper, chili sauce and hot salsa actually increase your metabolism by up to 25%. So, sprinkle the hot sauce on more of your foods to watch the pounds burn away!

Using these five tips and the ones listed in the graphic above will most definitely help you burn off those extra pounds in no time. Just don't get discouraged and keep at it and you will see results!

Only Lost 1 Pound

Wow, this photo is real motivation for me! Even if I only lose 1 pound of fat, this is what all comes out of my body! So gross! This makes me feel accomplished and motivated. I hope that it does the same for you!

Fat VS Muscle

We all know that it is better to have muscle than fat and the photo above is a great illustration of how much less space muscle takes up in your body as opposed to the same amount of fat. It is a fantastic example of why you should really go for muscle instead of just losing weight to be slimmer.

If you have a hard time believing that gaining muscle should be a big part of your loosing weight regiment, here are a few things that should convince you otherwise:

1. For every pound of lean muscle mass your body burns 50 calories per day even while you are resting and not doing anything! So by just having muscle mass your body will burn more calories per day on it's own!

2. An intense weight training workout will actually increase your metabolisms speed for up to 40 hours after you have exercised! Wow, that's a long time for your metabolism to speed up after just one work out! This means you will burn even more calories while not doing anything.

3. During weight training, your body uses your stored carbohydrates for energy - so the more intense your workout, the more carbs you burn. Burning carbs is one of the most essential keys to weight loss so this is very important!

So let's get out there and do some weight training so we can lose weight, stay fit, and look great!

Running To Lose Weight

Running To Lose Weight

6 Essential Tips to Increase Fat Loss

The running:

There are several ways you can run to lose weight:

• Run at a constant pace for a set amount of time
• Interval training – where you do bursts of higher intensity

Both of these will be discussed in more depth further down the page.

To get the best results out of your running you need to work in your optimum training zone. We can do this by using your heart rate. To find your Maximum Heart Rate (MHR) you do the following:

220 – your age = your MHR

Once you have your MHR you can then work out what your heart rate you should be when exercising, you should be looking to exercise at between 70-85% of your MHR.

MHR x % intensity = target heart rate.

Running at a constant pace

This is self explanatory, you will run at the same pace for approx 40-60mins per running session. The duration you run for will depend on your current fitness level, if you are just beginning to exercise then start out at 20mins and then you can increase your time as you become fitter, this could be done by increasing your time by 1 min each time you exercise until you are able to jog/ run for 45-60mins in total. You should be working at approx 60% of your MHR if you are just starting to exercise and then as your fitness increases you can increase the % until you are exercising between 70-85% of your MHR. Exercise 3-5 times per week.

Interval Training

Interval training is where there are bursts of high intensity work between reduced intensity work. For example:

8-10min warm up – low intensity
1min moderate intensity
1min high intensity
1 min moderate intensity
1 min high intensity etc continuing for the desired time of the work out.
10 min cool down

The ratios can be changed so you could do 1min reduced 30 second high intensity etc. When talking high intensity you would be looking at exercising at 85% of your MHR.

If you do not use a heart rate monitor

Knowing the intensity to work out when you don’t use a heart rate monitor.
You do not need to use a heart rate monitor to know when you are working out at different intensities, you will be able to feel it. If you can have a conversation with someone easily and breathing normally then you are working at a low intensity, high intensity would be when you are working as hard as you can this will feel between a hard and very hard pace. So moderate intesity is in between low and high intensity, you will be finding the pace somewhat hard but you feel ok and can keep going at the same pace.  Once you start jogging and running you will find it easy to tell what you feel is moderate intensity and high intesnsity.

Your Heart

If you have any heart issues please get advice from your Doctor first before starting any kind of exercise programme.

If you are taking heart medication you will not be able to rely on using a heart rate monitor when exercising as the medication will affect how your heart rate works so speak with your Doctors first before starting an exercise programme.

Too much running

Remember to take rest days each week as your body needs to recover. There is another issue that isn’t often discussed and that is if you only do cardio exercise and no resistance training then you are at risk of not only burning off fat but also losing lean muscle. If you lose lean muscle your metabolism slows down. Depending on how you want to look physically there is also a chance you will look slim but have very little muscle tone so all your hard work will have made you lose weight but you wont have a firm toned body. To prevent this happening you should include resistance training in your exercise programme.

Resistance training will even help you lose weight, this is because the more muscle you have the better your body burns calories, more muscle increases your metabolism so you will be burning calories when you are not working out. You will also be firming and toning your muscles up which will make you look great.

Don’t worry about “bulking up” by doing resistance training, this is very hard for women to actually do due to having only a small amount of testosterone. It takes guys quite a bit of time to get bigger muscles and they have a much higher amount of testosterone so don’t think you will lift a few weights and suddenly look big and muscley because it just won‘t happen.

Don’t be afraid of using heavy weights either, if you are doing 3 sets of 12 reps then the weight you choose needs to be heavy enough that you can only do 12 reps and no more without losing form, if you can do more reps then use a heavier weight.

Don’t use the scales as a judge of how much weight you have lost because by doing resistance training and increasing your muscle mass you may not see much difference. This is because muscle is more dense than fat and so when you gain muscle it will take up less room than fat but would end up weighing more