Exercise Your Body And Your Mind

Exercise your body and your mind!

Exercise obviously helps with weight loss and improves your health.  It boosts your immune system, improves sleep, and boosts mood, energy and self esteem.  Weekends are when we tend to fall off the wagon with nutrition, so exercising on weekends will keep you in the swing of things, making it so you don’t fall so far behind on your health and weight loss efforts.  Exercising your mind is also important.  Meditation, crossword puzzles, and reading books outside of the normal genre’s you would normally read are all good ideas, as are reading books on self improvement.  Exercising your mind has been shown to decrease your chances for Alzheimer’s later in life.  It also gives you some “you” time.

Increase your metabolism by…..

Strength training will build your muscle.  The more lean muscle you have the higher your resting metabolism will be and the more calories you will burn.  In other words, muscle burns fat.  Cardio will also boost your metabolism, especially short bursts of it such as sprints or intervals, but cardio can be muscle wasting so make sure you add some weights into your workout routine.  My favorite types of workouts are circuits, or high intensity interval training.  Circuit training is where a series of exercises are performed, one after another, with little rest in between.  You’ll increase strength mainly, but will also increase cardiovascular endurance.  Once you get through with a set, do it another 2-3 times for a full workout session.  Exercises in circuits can include squats, squat press, burpees, tuck jumps, lunges, bicep curls, tricep extensions, chest presses, planks with variations, and my personal favorite - the pushup.  You really can incorporate any exercise you can think of.  High intensity interval training is similar. Tabata is also a really fun type of workout to do, and has been shown to really increase endurance.  You can download a tabata app on your phone.  See a sample tabata workout below.

You CANNOT SPOT REDUCE FAT.

Sorry people, doing sit ups aren’t going to get rid of your belly fat.  If you want to decrease the body fat, focus on circuits and intervals, using weights to build muscle and doing exercises like box jumps, tuck jumps and burpees (everyone’s favorite!).  Strengthen your core with exercises like planks, side planks, supermans, inchworms and any type of plank modification.  Squeeze your abs and glutes while doing these exercises.  Pushups will also help with core strength.  

Sample Tabata Workout
Tabata training lasts four minutes and has eight intervals, 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off.  I usually do the same exercise for the entire four minutes, but you could also do one exercise for intervals 1,3,5,7 and a different one for 2,4,6,8.  So instead of lounging around during your lunch hour and surfing the net, do 4 minutes of squats, or 4 minutes of pushups, because every little bit helps make you stronger!

1. Push ups
2. Burpees
3. Squat press
4. Plank Row
5. High Knees
6. Bicycles
7. Pulse Lunges
8. Jump Squats

With a minute rest in between each four minutes you end up at about a 40 minute workout with 8 different exercises.  You should be very, very tired when you are done.