Gravity Fx Fitness

Are your workouts keeping you on the right path to weight loss so far?  I’ll share some tips to help keep you on the “straight and narrow” road.

Recently I was talking with someone about her exercise program.  She said that she went to the healthclub and had to wait for 15 minutes in order to find a parking space!  Apparently many people had taken their New Year’s resolutions seriously.

Then someone else commented to just wait another month and there will be more available parking spaces as people “fall off the wagon.”  Meaning that most people won’t stick with their new found exercise regimen.

So why is it that so many well intentioned people fail to meet their goals?  Let’s take a look.

One of the biggest issues in my opinion is the time factor.  You go to the gym or healthclub and you are usually told that you have to do your weight training.  Very good advice.  Gaining lean muscle tissue through strength training is crucial to elevating your metabolism.

When you do resistance training, your muscles incur microscopic damage and the repair that follows can keep your metabolism elevated for several hours afterwards, sometimes for 24 hours or so, depending on how intensely you worked them.

Obviously, this increased metabolic rate will burn more calories and more fat!

So doing weight (resistance) training is pretty good advice. Next you will hear that you need to do cardiovascular exercise to burn fat. You are told that you need to spend 30-60 minutes on the treadmill, stationary bike, stepper, or elliptical machine at a steady pace in your “fat burning zone.”

While this mythical fat burning zone is greatly overrated, you will burn calories while doing this cardio exercise.

So let’s add up the amount of time spent so far.  You may have spent 5-10 minutes doing a “warmup.  Then you have 30-45 minutes spent doing the weight (resistance) training.

Then add in 30-60 minutes doing the cardio portion and your “cooldown.”  Throw in the 10-20 minutes time spent commuting back and forth and you’ve got anywhere from an hour and a half to two hours or more!

It’s no wonder most people don’t stick with their exercise plan or why so many don’t even bother in the first place.

So what’s the answer?  I’ll give you a hint – it involves getting more work done in the shortest amount of time possible – working hard, but working smart.

Stay tuned as we dive deeper into this important issue and also discuss the pro’s and con’s of  reality TV weight loss shows in a two-part series.

Get moving!

Brian

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