How to Keep Up with Your Workout and Look Summer Sexy

The weather is suddenly starting to improve, the shops are getting in more pastel colours and most of us are thinking about summer. With that season comes a myriad of reasons to take care of your wellbeing, with everything from sunbathing to all those summer weddings meaning you need to look your best. But it is only March after all, so how do you keep yourself motivated to go the distance, and make sure you look summer sexy? We spoke to Fitness Director Susi May for her advice on helping you maintain your fitness routine for months to come.

 

1. Fuel Up: ‘Timing is everything when it comes to eating and working out,’ May asserts. ‘If you’re too full, you get cramps, and if you’re too hungry, you can’t work your hardest. Keep pre-workout snacks, eaten 30 to 90 minutes prior to exercise, mostly in the carb family. These foods should be easily digestible and should contain about 40 to 100 grams of carbs with a low amount of fat. It’s also a good idea to keep the fibre content to a minimum since high-fibre foods can be difficult to digest.’

 

2. Avoid Peak Times: May recommends, ‘To ensure a good workout, avoid peak times like right before work, lunchtime, and immediately after office hours. Mid-morning and mid-afternoon are great times to hit the gym. If you can hold off until after 7pm, the crowd will have diminished – just be sure to have a healthy, fuelling snack around 5.30pm.’

 

3. Don’t Trust the Calorie Counts: ‘Cardio machines are a great way to get your heart rate up, but they are notorious for overestimating calories burned,’ warns May. ‘The most accurate way to measure your caloric output is to wear a heart rate monitor, which calculates based on your heart rate rather than averages based on the speed of the machine. While we’re on the subject of cardio machines, don’t hold on to the handles of the treadmill, since it truly undermines your workout and compromises your posture.’

 

4. Ask the Staff: May instructs, ‘When confronted with a weight machine that confuses you, don’t skip it or plow ahead and hope for the best – many injuries begin with this attitude. Instead, ask for help. The gym staff is there to help you and should be happy to show you how to work the equipment.’

 

5. Breathe: May outlines different breathing techniques for different activities:

• Cardio: ‘Avoid shallow breaths since they are often an indicator that you are working too hard,’ May cautions. ‘Shallow breathing also indicates that you haven’t established a suitable breath pattern for your activity. You want to take stronger and deeper breaths when doing cardio, so take the time to find your rhythm.’


• Strength training: May points out, ‘Generally, you want to breathe out on the difficult part of the lift or move to help stabilise your body during exertion. Exhale when you are lifting a hand weight to your shoulder during a bicep curl. This helps you engage your core to prevent you from swaying into your heels, which is cheating and could set you up for a lower-back injury. Think: “Inhale to prepare.”’


• Stretching: ‘Slow, steady breathing is preferable when stretching and will help you relax,’ says May. ‘Try to focus on breathing from your diaphragm, which will make your belly move out on the inhale and not your chest and shoulders.’

 

6. Don’t Fear Free Weights: May comments, ‘Working out with weights is essential to achieve toned, strong muscles. Lifting weights can also decrease overall body fat by three percent in 10 weeks if you lift twice a week. Weight machines are fine, but they tend to work just one muscle at a time. You get more bang for your buck working with free weights since you can work multiple body parts in one exercise.’

Categories: avoid peak, cardio machines, Free Weights, gym, Heart Rate, nbsp, peak times, summer sexy, work, working

How to Keep Your Weight Loss Workouts from Becoming Stale

You get on your weight loss plan with gusto in the beginning, but soon you hit a plateau and your motivation wavers. One reason for this is that you don’t have a workout to challenge you enough, so how do you keep your exercise routine from becoming stale?

 

1. Watch the clock: The gym is a social place, which means you can end up spending all your time chatting away and taking trips to the water fountain, instead of actually doing anything. Studies have shown that the best results come from short and intense workouts. Dave Smith, owner of GreenFit Health & Fitness, recommends, ‘For a killer workout pace, try allowing just 60 seconds of rest between each set to add a cardiovascular element to the workout. This increases fat-burning while packing on lean muscle.’

 

2. Get it together: While you may think of strength training and cardio exercise as two separate beasts, it’s high-time that you get those elements to get along, as both are essential to weight loss, as well as your wellness. If you add a cardio interval to your strength training, such as using a skipping rope or doing 20-second sprints, this can rev your metabolism while still allowing for added strength.

 

3. Be a poser: According to Smith, ‘Contracting a muscle and holding it in a flexed position (aka isometric exercise or static holds) provide strength and endurance benefits that can’t be achieved through traditional isotonic exercises (i.e. lifts that are in constant motion).’ Try doing stability ball wall squats to engage your thighs and glutes, starting with a 30-second goal and moving towards holding this static position for longer periods of time.

 

4. Skip the Machines: Smith explains, ‘While exercise machines do make resistance training user-friendly, they simply do not get the job done like free-weight exercises. Lifting with free weights will incorporate more stabilizing muscles and therefore burn more calories than their weight machine counterparts. The same can be said for bodyweight exercises, which can be more effective for core strengthening and calorie-burning than workouts done on machines.’

 

5. Be a little more instable: While it’s not great advice for your mental wellbeing, challenging your balance in terms of your fitness routine can help give you the boost you need. ‘Exercises that require balance stimulate more muscle recruitment, specifically core muscles, than the same exercise done in a stable position,’ says Smith. ‘This is rather intuitive: Is a squat standing on the floor as challenging as one standing on a wobble board? Of course not. The good news is most stable exercises can easily be geared up by adding a BOSU or stability ball.’ Just make sure you don’t compromise your form, as this can lead to nasty injuries.

 

6. Explode: It used to be that bodybuilders used slow, heavy lifts to build bulk and strength, but not research shows that explosive movements are the way to go. Smith comments, ‘Box jumps, kettlebell swings, and plyometric push-ups can achieve a greater response from something called fast-twitch muscles (the ones used during quick, powerful movements).’ Plus, as an added bonus, your fast-twitch fibres have a greater potential for growth compared to your slow-twitch fibres.

 

7. Join the resistance: In the words of Marty Mcfly, this is getting heavy. According to a recent study, if you lift a heavy weight for just eight reps, you will burn double the calories than if you had lifted lighter weights for 15 reps. Smith advises, ‘Keep adding weight (in small 2- to 5-pound increments) to an exercise until achieving three sets of 10 reps becomes very challenging (as in almost impossible to squeeze out the final rep!). Practice with that weight until 10 reps becomes too doable and then add a few more pounds of resistance.’

Categories: exercise, Free Weights, Instability, nbsp, Resistance, smith, stability ball, strength, Strength Training, twitch fibres, weight, Weight Loss