Tag Archive for: stay positive

How Your Body Uses Energy As You Continue to Train

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When you first start working out, your body will go through a number of changes. These changes are designed to provide you with more energy and your ability to recruit that energy as and when you need it, is one of the biggest factors in determining how fit you are and how well you’re able to train. It’s also what controls the amount of fat you’re able to lose in any given amount of time!

Let’s see how this works and what you can do to improve it… body

The ATP-CP System

Essentially, the body finds its energy using three separate systems and it goes through these three systems in order.

When you first start exercising, you will begin using what is known as the ‘ATP-CP’ system. This stands for adenosine triphosphate creatine phosphate system. Catchy!

Adenosine triphosphate is the most fundamental form of energy known to biology. This is what glucose must be broken down into in order to be used by the body and a fair amount of it exists inside your muscles at all times. As soon as you start exercising, you utilize that ATP and this provides up to a couple of seconds of power. CP – creatine phosphate – allows us to recycle ATP and is also stored in the muscles ready to use.

The ATP-CP system is the most energy efficient and provides us with energy without making us gasp or feel unwell.

The Glycogen Lactic Acid System

The glycogen lactic acid system works by using glycogen stored in the muscles. This is the second most energy efficient source but has the unwanted side effect of producing lactate and other metabolites as a by-product. Lactate makes us feel unwell if we keep pushing ourselves and correlates with other metabolites that can make the muscle feel like it’s burning.

We can usually use this system of energy for a couple of minutes before the lactate becomes too much or the burn becomes too much. It is possible to improve your tolerance to this however, with training.

The Aerobic System

Finally, we switch to the aerobic system. This is the energy system most of us are most familiar with and it works by utilizing oxygen in the blood in order to burn fat stores for energy. This is why it makes us start breathing more heavily and increases our heart rate.

The aerobic system is the least energy efficient and it takes time for the energy to be delivered. Thus we are forced to slow down once we reach this state. However, it is also the type of energy system that we are able to sustain the longest. In fact, we can continue with this kind of exercise indefinitely or until we collapse from a complete lack of body fat!

HIIT

HIIT (high intensity interval training) is so effective because it involves switching from the first two types of energy (anaerobic energy) to the last kind. This enables you to deplete both your glycogen and your fat stores and thus does both more effectively.

How to Manage Stressful Situations

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Stress is a common feeling that every human being experiences. As we all know from experience, stress can impact your life negatively and it should, therefore, be dealt with properly. Stress may be unavoidable but how it is handled is our choice. Managing stressful situations is all about taking charge of your thoughts, lifestyle, emotions, and the way you handle problems.

When faced with a stressful situation at work or in your personal life, it is very common to worry, panic and be fearful which can result in poor performance and inaction. To avoid this, here are a few tips that can help you manage stress.stressful

Determine the Sources of Stress in your Life

Identifying the sources of stress should be the first step before you know how you will deal with them. It can be easy to identify the major stressful situations like moving from home, changing jobs, or losing a loved one, but identifying the day to day stress can prove to be hard. In order to recognize your true source of stress you should look into your attitude, habits, and excuses.

Take Care of Yourself

You will be able to handle stress better if you are in good physical and mental shape. Looking after yourself by having fun, building time for relaxation, exercising, eating healthily, and attaining a balance between your personal and work life is important.

Be a Positive Thinker

Positive thinking makes one feel confident and in control. You should envision a positive outcome to a stressful situation and focus on your successes rather than your failures. Focusing on obstacles that you have overcome also helps you feel in control.

Connect with Others

Social engagement is the most efficient and quickest way to reduce stress and to avoid overreacting to both external and internal events that you recognize as threatening. Expressing what you are feeling or going through to a person that you know will understand you can be very helpful. You should, therefore, reach out to friends and family more and connect with them regularly in person.

Accept Things You Cannot Change

Some sources of stress in our lives are unavoidable and can’t be changed. The best way to cope with such stress is to accept things the way they are. Acceptance may prove to be difficult but in the long run, it is a better way than trying to fix a situation that you can’t change.

Practice Forgiveness

Accepting that we all live in an imperfect world where people make mistakes is a good way of perceiving things. Let go of resentments and anger by forgiving and moving on with your life.

Lifestyle Changes First Then Diet for Effective Health Management

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Due to the enormous amount of information about diet ubiquitous on the internet, people who yearn to lead healthy lives end up being confused as to which diet will help them achieve their goals – mostly weight management.

The pendulum of which “diet” works keeps swinging back and forth. People try adapting to different diets but only a few are lucky to find one that helps them to successfully manage their health.diet

Diet debate almost dying

The diet debate is almost extinct. Every now and then, people trying to reduce weight through dieting confess “cheating on their diets”. The major reason behind failing to keep up with a diet plan is that the plan is not parallel to the person’s lifestyle. Often, lifestyle is the best ally when it comes to eating and living healthy. A diet that goes well with your lifestyle is easy to maintain.

The realization that lifestyle comes before diet is triggered by the knowledge that the body is not a machine that efficiently produces output according to the input. Body systems are integrated in such a way that improvement of the whole depends on how well all the systems are coordinated. For example, a person desiring to reduce weight may take healthy food always but fail to handle emotional distress. According to research, stress leads to weight gain in some people. Having a lifestyle that supports the well-being of the entire body is the only way to achieve healthy living.

Researchers suggest that lifestyle comes before diet

World renowned researchers like Bradley Appelhans of the Rush University Medical Center and Sherry Pagoto of the University of Massachusetts Medical have suggested an end to the diet debates that are so frequent in weight management circles. In their journals, they write that different diets are equally good as they are bad in helping one lose weight. They support their case that lifestyle changes can collectively handle diet and other aspects of healthy living.

Nutritionists’ case studies

In support of the case of lifestyle over diet, many nutritionists have indicated instances when some of their clients have tried different diets but fallen over the wagon. The result of such failure is discouragement and frustration. Pro-lifestyle nutritionists are more concerned with helping a client develop a plan that they can follow while they make new lifestyles changes. They note that the greatest problem associated with weight and health management is adherence.

Effective lifestyle changes

Lifestyle changes such as exercise, positive thinking, keeping food records and focusing on progress rather than perfection are the ultimate solution to health management. If one is able to make and enhance these lifestyle changes, it becomes very easy to follow diet plans that help them to achieve the overall objective of health management.

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How to Burn Fat Without Losing Muscle

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A lot of bodybuilders still rely on going through bulking and cutting cycles in order to get the incredible muscle physiques that they display on stage.

This makes sense because it is the quickest and most efficient way to add muscle. Adding muscle means being in a calorie surplus. The more calories you consume, the more anabolic your body will be – the more testosterone will be washing around your body and the less likely you will be to burn muscle for fuel. But of course, eating extra calories makes it even harder not to gain any fat – and especially when you’re getting them from sugar ‘weight gainer’ products and the like. muscle

Fortunately, this isn’t a problem for bodybuilders. They simply follow this period up with a period of dieting hard, which causes their body to burn the fat away from the muscle. A tiny bit of muscle is lost but mainly, it’s fat that will disappear. Hence the ‘bulk and cut’.

But you’re not a bodybuilder (probably). You probably don’t want to spend half the year looking overweight. So how can you use cardio to stay lean and add muscle at the same time?

The Problem With Cardio

The reason that most bodybuilders will stay away from intensive cardio when they’re bulking is that it puts the body once again in a catabolic state. When you run using steady state cardio, your body will supply energy by turning to your blood sugar and your fat stores.

Unfortunately, this means your blood sugar drops. And when your blood sugar drops, your body responds by releasing ghrelin, the hunger hormone. Ghrelin release is always followed by cortisol (the stress hormone) and cortisol is followed by myostatin – a molecule that signals the breakdown of muscle. The more myostatin, the more muscle you lose.

Add to the fact that your body will get 15% of its energy from protein and you have a scenario that is not good for building muscle.

The Answer

There are a few solutions.

One such option is to walk. Walking will allow you to burn energy at a much slower rate and avoid completely depleting your energy stores. This means you never get to the point where you have very low blood sugar and you never start cannibalizing that hard-won muscle.

Another option is to use HIIT. This is High Intensity Interval Training, which means alternating between spurts of sprinting and periods of jogging. The good thing about this is that the sprinting portion doesn’t burn blood sugar or muscle and instead relies on energy stored as glycogen. You’ll spend less time in a catabolic state and lose less muscle as a result – and so many bodybuilders will use HIIT ‘finishers’ following a workout.

Finally, you can also use nutrition to protect yourself and reduce your chances of losing muscle. The best way to do this is by consuming BCAAs – branch chained amino acids. These have been shown to have a very positive effect in reducing muscle breakdown during exercise.

The Benefits of Eating Six Small Meals Each Day

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Starving yourself is not a healthy way to restrict how many calories you consume. Research now shows that eating 6 smaller meals a day can help you achieve your summer weight loss goals, as opposed to the traditional thinking that 3 complete meals a day is best. You can seriously put your health at risk if you limit your calorie consumption too drastically.

More and more people are victims of a “roller coaster diet” while trying to lose weight. Diet plans that restrict your calories decrease your body’s metabolism, and as a result your body will experience starvation. When this occurs, your body doesn’t use a lot of calories, and that leads to extreme hunger.eating

To increase your body’s metabolic rate, you should eat 5 or 6 smaller meals each day. Your metabolism will increase, and thus burn more calories all day long. You can further increase your metabolism by eating foods high in protein during your 6 meals.

Eating regularly will boost your metabolism due to the thermic effect of food.

You need a lot of calories to digest and absorb food, creating the thermic effect.

Different foods have different percentages of thermic effect, ranging from 3 to 30 percent. High protein foods have a 30 percent thermic effect. Some examples are turkey, salmon, and tuna. By simply digesting, 30 percent of the calories in these foods are burned. 20 percent of the calories found in fibrous and complex carbohydrates are burned during digestion. Some examples of these foods are corn, broccoli, green beans, and spinach. Foods with a very low thermic effect include refined carbohydrates and fats. This is the reason why dietary fat is stored so easily.

Your level of hunger will diminish while your energy level rises when you eat 5-6 smaller meals each day. You will also be able to maintain balanced blood sugar levels, which will help prevent hunger.

You can develop muscle to increase your metabolism. By eating regularly, you can maintain insulin levels which produce amino acids into your muscle’s cells, thus promoting muscle growth. Eating every 3 hours will yield a steady output of insulin. This is good for muscle growth and storing glycogen. As a result of eating healthy foods regularly, your summer weight loss goals will be easier to accomplish, and your body will be able to process vitamins and minerals more effectively.

The trick is to make sure you have a constant eating schedule. It might be difficult at first, but planning your meals will be well worth it. To prevent cravings and hunger, it’s good habit to feed your body foods that are rich in nutrients. A summer weight loss plan including a diet of healthy fats, vegetables, fruit, and lean protein is the best way to go. Eating such a diet with 5-6 meals each day can accelerate your muscle growth. It can increase your energy level, increase your metabolism, and you’ll burn half of the calories by eating regularly, and store very little fat.

Combine your diet with strength training and cardiovascular exercise to make it even more effective! Using these three methods, you’ll be on the fast track to burning fat and accomplishing your summer weight loss goals.

How to Get Six Pack Abs

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Most guys say that they want to lose their belly fat and would like to get a flat stomach. While this is an understandable aim however, it is also a rather unambitious one. Because surely what most guys would really like is to have a ripped set of six pack abs!

A six pack is one of the best indicators of overall health and fitness. It’s a look that the opposite sex finds highly attractive and that is most often sported by Hollywood actors, cover models and top actors.abs

It also happens to be functionally very useful and able to improve your performance in just about every movement and sport.

So how do you go about getting the look?

Diet

The first thing of course is to diet. That means you need to try to maintain a rough caloric deficit, as well as concentrating on precisely how and when you are eating your food in order to try and ensure that you don’t encourage your body to store any more fat than necessary.

Doing this will allow you to lower your body fat percentage and this is important because it is what will allow you to get your abs to show through your stomach.

Often you will hear that you will have visible abs as long as your body fat is sub 10%.

This is true, as at this low level of fat, even underdeveloped abs will protrude and be visible. However, if you combine exercise as well (see the next section), then you won’t need to get your percentage that low.

Someone like Chris Evans (Captain America) is a great example of how good your abs can look at around 12-15%.

Exercise

With that in mind then, you also need to focus on training your abs to increase their strength and make them thicker and thus more visible. To see how this can look, try contracting your abs right now.

You’ll find they instantly become more visible, which shows just what a difference the size of these muscles makes.

Your abs are actually made up from multiple muscle groups, but the part that creates the six-pack look is called the rectus abdominis. This is the sheet of muscle on the front of the stomach that is used in order to prevent the body from bending backwards and to help us lean forward.

To train this area then, you need to perform exercise that involve bending forward such as sit ups and crunches. What’s important is to make sure you feel the rectus abdominis doing the work and that you are folding at the stomach.

In other words, do not allow yourself to bend at the hips, in which case you won’t really be working the abs at all.

Another tip is to train the transverse abdominis too. This is the band of muscle that wraps around the core and that holds the stomach in while supporting the back.

This is what will help to keep your stomach flat, while the rectus abdominis gives it the detail.

How HIIT Challenges the Body and Improves Fat Loss

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If you’ve read just about any fitness blog, magazine or website in recent years, then you’ll likely have come across HIIT. HIIT: high intensity interval training. Sprinting at maximum heart rate for a short period of time and then switching to a slower form of exercise for a couple of minutes to recover before starting the whole cycle again.

This type of training is all the rage because it is known to burn more calories in less time when compared with steady state cardio. And it’s great for our VO2 max, mitochondrial function and more.hiit

But why? How does it work? What makes it so special?

What Happens When You Push it Hard

When you engage in HIIT, you start out by pushing hard and going at or near to your maximum heart rate. This is what makes all the difference, as now you are depleting your body of all of its readily available energy in order to drive those fast twitch muscle fibers. This is anaerobic training and it relies on ATP stored in the muscles, as well as glycogen.

After this, you then switch to your regular exercise at around 70% of your maximum heart rate. This is a steady pace that you can maintain, that burns fat using the aerobic system and that allows you to recover and reduce the lactate and other metabolites that build up in your blood during intensive exercise.

Welcome to After Burn

Steady state cardio is normally something you can maintain for a long time before you start to tire out and this is why a lot of people will exercise by running at a steady pace for 40-60 minutes.

If you do this after having done high intensity training however, you will be running at a point when you have very little available energy in your muscles and in your blood. All the glycogen has been used up and thus you have to rely even more on fat in order to keep going. Your body becomes more efficient at burning fat and you see greater benefits from the short amount of training that comes after.

But this isn’t even the best bit. What’s so good about HIIT is that this after burn effect continues for hours after you finish training. You’re now going about your usual activities with less glycogen, which means you’ll burn more fat even to do regular things like picking up a fork, or walking across the room!

Athletic Benefits

HIIT is also great for numerous other reasons. For starters, the explosive nature of the training means that you’re involving your fast twitch muscle fibers. This means that you’ll release more anabolic hormones like growth hormone and like testosterone, leading to more growth. And because you’re not completely relying on your blood sugar, you’re not going to go into as catabolic a state and risk burning fat.

Another benefit of HIIT is that it improves your energy efficiency. Because you’re pushing your cells to make energy more quickly, they become better at doing just that – improving your health, fitness and athletic performance across the board!

The Importance of Good Eating Habits and How to Inculcate Them

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Eating right is the key to healthy living and good eating habits go a long way in improving our health and nourishing the body. A fit and active lifestyle demand right nutrition for the body to function. A good eating habit reduces our daily burden as it becomes a part of our routine and no extra efforts are needed to follow the habit.

The first step to developing good eating habits is to make sure that all meals are in sync with your body needs. An athletic lifestyle needs extra nutrition to support the muscles while a sedentary lifestyle can function with less calorie intake.eating

There are many ways to develop good eating habits which give the body adequate nutrition and energy. One way is to balance the meals in terms of nutrients. A good diet must include 45% carbohydrates, 30% protein, and 35% fats. All these nutrients are necessary for the body and the lack of any one of them can harm the body in the long run.

The next way to develop good eating habits is to maintain a food diary. Recording our meals gives us an insight about how and what we are eating every day. It helps to reduce calories from the diet easily by cutting down on processed sugars and artificial foods.

Another easy way to make sure that the body gets complete nutrition is to include more greens in your diet. Vegetables and fruits are rich in vitamins and minerals and keep you full for longer. This reduces your cravings for sugar and fatty foods. One more approach towards healthy eating is to set a limit for yourself. Setting a calorie intake limit as per your body weight keeps us in control and reminds us of our goals. Choosing a smaller plate for eating your meals is proven to reduce the food intake drastically.

The last and the most important step towards good eating is to hydrate your body. Make it a habit of drinking at least 8 glasses of water every day. Set a reminder on your phone at intervals to remind you about water intake. Water aids in digestion and improves metabolism.

So these are the 5 ways to develop good eating habits for your body and health. Eating right and exercising regularly increase the immunity and endurance of the body. They also help to maintain your overall health and reduce the chances of many lifestyle-related diseases like stress and cardiac problems.

Can a Fitness Tracker Help You to Lose Weight?

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Fitness Trackers are all the rage right now, with devices from companies like Fitbit selling in huge numbers and being pretty ubiquitous. Wearing a Fitbit is as much a fashion statement as anything else though. This is a way of communicating to the world that you ‘do fitness’ and that you are up to scratch with modern technology.

What’s less clear, is just whether or not a device like this can really help you to lose weight and get into better shape. Read on and we’ll take a look at how something like a Fitbit stacks up in real-world testing and how you can use it to your advantage.Fitness Trackers

The Good

First, let’s take a look at what fitness trackers do well. The first and most important thing that you will get from your fitness tracker is motivation and awareness. At their most basic, fitness trackers are devices that can count steps (pedometers) and tell you roughly how many calories you might have burned on that basis.

This can then bring home the reality of your current activity levels. Many of us will be shocked for instance at just how little we move during the weekends. Those who work in offices and drive in in the mornings like equally find that they actually don’t move much Monday-Friday.

Seeing this reality written in plain English can make it hard to deny and can encourage you to move a little more and to increase your general activity levels.

This gets even more powerful when you consider the social elements that many fitness trackers come with. A lot of fitness trackers will also let you see how your friends, family and partner are doing in terms of their fitness goals – or to challenge them to see who can move the most in a set amount of time.

This too can be an excellent tool for encouraging more activity and getting you to head outside and move more.

Then there are the additional tools and features – things like being able to follow guided workouts and HIIT routines for instance.

The Bad

There are downsides to fitness trackers too however. The first is that they are not usually particularly accurate. Heart rate monitoring is only possible to a degree if you aren’t wearing a chest strap and even then, it is only somewhat correlated with calorie burn.

Many activities can’t be picked up by a fitness tracker at all and while the notion of making sure you burn more calories than you consume (tracked through a fitness tracker and diet app like MyFitnessPal), this can also be an overly simplistic way to monitor your diet that doesn’t take into account such things as your micronutrients or your hormonal balance.

In short, a fitness tracker is a fantastic tool for helping with your weight loss and it can be very useful. However, it is also important not to rely on them or to perceive them as any kind of ‘silver bullet’ that will help you to magically lose all your weight.

Hate Cardio? Here’s How to Make it a Part of Your Routine

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Some people love running for fun or as a cardio activity, and are absolutely addicted to it. Everyone else struggles to understand how they possibly got to this point. After all, running is slow, painful, boring and makes you feel sick. What’s to like?

A lot of us want to love running because we know it’s good for us. We want to be fitter, we want to lose weight and we want to spend more time outside. But when we try it, it’s just too unbearable to stick with. cardio

So what can you do to solve the problem and actually get into running properly?

How to Learn to Love Running

The first thing to do, is assess what you’re doing wrong.

In many cases, the problem is that we try too hard to start losing lots of weight right away and to get into shape. We are under the illusion that in order to ‘burn fat’ or improve our fitness, we need to be training at a level that is very uncomfortable.

However, this is very much the wrong way to look at it. After all, when you start running, if it is something you’ve not done regularly before, then you’re immediately adding to your routine and doing more than you did before. You are immediately improving your health and burning more calories than you would otherwise. That alone is enough!

What’s more, is that this is enough to improve your ability to run, which means you can do a little bit more more comfortably in future.

If you head out right now to go for a run and you try to run as fast and as far as you can, then you’ll come back feeling like you achieved something but also feeling completely beaten up by your training and completely in pain.

Instead then, try to go for a run just to enjoy the run. Jog at a pace that feels comfortable and set out to explore the area. Wear comfortable shoes and when you’re ready to come home, turn around and come back.

This is something you’ll now actually want to do again.

Make it Simple

The other thing to do, is to make sure that the type of workouts you’re using are ones that you can easily fit into your routine.

This is the other problem with going for a 40 minute run: 40 minutes is a long time. And it’s especially a long time when you add the extra washing you have to do, the fact you might get lost and the fact that you need to shower and get changed.

Instead, how about looking into a relatively beginner-friendly form of HIIT? HIIT has the advantage of being something you can use anywhere and of being something that lets you burn a lot more calories and improve your health much more in a shorter space of time. This is something you can now conveniently fit into your routine and thus actually stick with.

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