Full Body Crazy – Jan 9 workout

If you’d like to try it on your own, here’s what we did on day 2 of bootcamp – a great one to work EVERY part of your body. Aim for 40 sec of each weight-related move, 1min for cardio moves:

Plie squat chest fly, high knee cardio, single leg squat and row, star tuck cardio, plie squat curl and press, mummy kick cardio, deep single-leg lunge and tricep kickback, plyo jump cardio, skull crushers, cross foot jack cardio, tricep pushups to wide pushups, butt kick cardio, forward jump squats down and back, squat to side kick, decline push ups or holds, lateral squat jumps, balance lunges, sumo push ups, squat scissor jumps, wall squats – 2 level, dive bombers.

WHEW!!!

Get moving!

Hey bootcampers! Way to sign up, show up and try hard – I congratulate you on taking those first steps!:)

Bootcamp, along with CLEAN eating, will get you closer to your goals for sure! But here’s the reality — working out twice a week just isn’t enough if you want to make changes. Heck, it’s not even enough for heart health (The AMA recommends 30min per day of moderate intensity exercise JUST to keep your heart ticking!)

So, what do you really need to do? Come to bootcamp, and commit to 3 other days a week working out as well. What should those days look like? Ideally I’d like to see 45min – 1hr of strength training one day per week, and 45min-1hr of cardio for the other two days. It doesn’t really matter what you do, as long as you are moving, challenging yourself, and pushing yourself to always do just a little bit more.

Here’s an easy schedule: Monday – cardio, Tuesday – class, Wednesday – cardio, Thursday – class, Friday OR Sunday strength train. Saturday – rest! Try a new class, use what you learn in our sessions, or head out on your own for a run or bike ride!!

 

Ab Workout

Here’s another post for the current bootcamp session, but anyone can do it!

This is our ab workout — you need to do it once a week on your own, and twice a week with me. Aim for 25 reps of each move:

Standing sequence:

-High elbow twist

-Knee-ins

-Side lunge, elbow-to-knee

Plank sequence:

-Low plank hip twist

-Low or high plank, alternating knee outs

Crunch sequence:

-Cross body, single leg V ups – switch to same side

-Pike crunch, add pulse, add R & L pulls

-3 level leg raises (your goal is 1.5min here, play with pulses and circles as you can!)

-Side crunch, elbow to knee

-Static crunch w/ elbow rotation

 

Have fun and use good form!!

Bootcamp Nutrition

This post is specifically for my campers in the Tue/Thur session 1 of bootcamp, but if you’re interested in calorie consumption, feel free to read on!

Nutrition is SO complicated! It’s frustrating as a fitness professional to see so many ‘diets’, trends, fads. High protein. Low protein. High fat. All vegetables. All fruit. What???? Throw all of those ideas away. Now.  THIS ISN’T A DIET. THIS IS LIFE. You want to be healthy, like forever, right? Not just for 6 weeks or until your pants fit better. Right? It’s hard a first, but eating well just needs to be a part of your life to be healthy, have energy, and look good. Period.

Sure, let’s call it a diet at first. Because at first there are no cheat days, no just a little here and there of something bad. It’s clean, 100% of the time. You have a goal, somewhere you want to get to physically. When you get closer, then you can modify your program to the point that it matches real life (i.e. a day a week to have drinks with your girls, a night out with hubby, a few slices of pizza during the Sunday game).

So, what’s the program?  First you need to know how many calories to eat. And then you need to track what you eat by writing things down (people using food journals are 30% more likely to eat the right foods!). It will be time consuming at first, and tedious, but it will get much easier and eventually you won’t have to write anything down because you will just have a very good idea of what is going in your body.

THIS IS HOW MANY CALORIES YOU NEED:

Step 1. Calculate your resting metabolic rate (RMR)  — Body weight x 10 = RMR

Step 2. Calculate daily activity burn– RMR x 20% = Daily Activity Burn

Step 3. Add calories required for exercise — 300 on days we workout together and you give it your all. Same goes for hour long workouts on all other days, if you are working HARD

Step 4. Add all of these numbers up to equal your daily calories needed

**The only caveat here is if you are starting well overweight, in that case for step 1 use your desired weight instead of your current weight to create the calorie deficit you need.

Remember, 3500 calories is 1 pound of fat, so that’s a 500 calorie a day change you need to make to lose 1 pound a week — through burning 500 calories with exercise or eating 500 calories less than you currently are. OR BOTH! AND THEN YOU CAN LOSE 2LB OF FAT PER WEEK!

How about food?

I don’t think you really need me to tell you what not to eat. We all know what’s good and what’s not. Don’t eat junk. No processed foods. No white anything. RIGHT NOW, go to your pantry and throw all that crap away! No one in your house needs that, not even your kids! Eat green things, colorful things, lots of lean protein, only a little dairy if any (and it MUST be low/non-fat), and try to keep your grains between 200 and 300 calories a day (that’s 1 -1.5 cups). But they need to be good grains – brown or black rice, quinoa, lentils, beans, amaranth, bulgar, whole wheat bread if you need bread.  Make sure every meal has protein in it.

And here’s the other important part, eat 5 times a day! Take that caloric number you found you need and figure out about how many you want during each part of your day.  Sometimes I eat a ton in the morning. Sometimes I have a huge lunch and don’t do much for dinner. But I always make sure I have snacks and hit my caloric number for the day because ONCE YOU ARE HUNGRY IT IS TOO LATE. Like, really hungry. Don’t let yourself ever get really hungry, that’s a bad thing for your metabolism. Keep it moving fast by always fueling it. Don’t under-eat. Bad move. Being hungry makes you crave all sorts of bad things for all sorts of scientific reasons. Not important for you to understand, unless you want to, but point is, don’t get crazy hungry. Eat if you want to, but eat GOOD things!

 

Questions? Let me know!

 

BMI and Body Fat % – What the numbers really mean….

I know a lot of people who weigh themselves, a lot. And while it’s good to keep a general eye on the scale (maybe once a week if you’re in a ‘making changes’ mode), watching that number on the scale fluctuate can be maddening – and it isn’t even a good indication of your fitness or ‘skinniness’. So, what is then?

A lot of fancy scales show BMI, or body mass index, which you can also find online using a handy BMI calculator (try this – http://www.bmi-calculator.net). And, while it’s useful to know your BMI, tracking your body fat percentage tells a much more accurate story. Here’s why…..

BMI is based on a height and weight chart that some governmental health organization put together. People who fall within a prescribed height/weight classification are deemed underweight, normal weight, overweight or obese.  But BMI isn’t very accurate because muscle weighs more than fat, so a very fit person could weigh the same as a very unfit person, and they both would show the same BMI. That’s a problem. Same goes for people that aren’t ‘normal’ height, BMI just doesn’t show an accurate picture.

The best method? Get your body fat tested (I have the machine! – or most gyms and rec. centers can do this for you). As you get more fit, your BMI may go up or down, and your weight may go up or down as you add muscle, but your body fat should always be going down.  It’s really the only number worth tracking.

If you’ve had your body fat tested, here’s what the numbers mean:

Fitness isn’t about your body

Sure, you can workout, lose weight, gain muscle, feel better naked, whatever. But what then? If that’s your only goal, what  happens when you get there?  It has to mean more. 

More than anything, for me, fitness is about mental fortitude.  It’s about remaining positive in the face of adversity, whether that adversity is running through five more minutes of pain, or smiling through a really crappy day.  Fitness is about telling yourself, ‘yes, I can’, and then proving it to yourself. It’s about moving past what you thought was possible, constantly growing, learning, being inspired, moving forward in life. Creating goals, achieving goals. Staying focused. Fitness can get you where you want, in both your body and mind, helping you remain positive and present in every moment of your life.

I received this email today, a little dose of positive thinking that got me stoked to seize this day: You can do whatever is needed to the best of your ability with a positive attitude and make it enjoyable, or you can choose another path. The paths that we choose each day are what give us happiness or stress. It is not the people around us or the things that need to be done. It is the attitude we have and the reason we do what we do. We are all blessed with tremendous opportunity. What we do with it is completely up to us. Yes, there will be challenges. There always are. Yes, there may be disappointments. There sometimes are. Yes, there will be tremendous happiness. There will be if you decide that is what you want. Let us have fun in all we do and let us make the very most of each and every opportunity that comes our way.

Now go do something that makes you sweat!

The secret to working 15% harder without knowing it…..

It’s all about the music peeps, that’s it!

Hundreds of studies have been conducted, all confirming one thing — your rate of perceived exhaustion (how hard you think you’re working) on a 1-20 scale drops 4-7 levels while listening to music with elevated BPM (beats per minute).  That drop in exhaustion level effectively means you can work up to 15% harder than without music, and not even know it!!

There are a lot of reasons for this. Music is distracting for one, simply giving you something else to focus on. Beyond that though, it provides a pacing advantage with the body’s natural inclination to move to a beat. It also allows for additional endurance, and effects Serotonin and Dopamine levels, both of which raise confidence and tell your brain you can do more. How cool is that?!

I notice the difference in my effort level immediately with vs. without tunes.  My complete workout playlist is 400+ songs long, but here’s my most recent faves — try it, I know you’ll feel the difference.

Low or high-intensity training for fat loss??

If you’ve ever worked out with me, you know I LOVE high-intensity training.  Not only is it fun and challenging, but it’s the most effective way to workout!…….

If you’re looking to shed stubborn pounds, the rule of the game is to increase the intensity of your workouts (I recommend 85-90% of max heart rate, at least 2x per week). However, there is a widely-held belief (which is an outdated assumption at best) that low-intensity exercising, say 50-60% of your max heart rate, is the best way to lose fat. This is just plain wrong!!

During physical training, your body has three possible sources of energy: carbs, fat, and protein. Protein is a last resort — of the three energy sources, your body is the most reluctant to draw on your protein stores.

Whether your body takes energy from glucose, which it gets from the breakdown of carbs, or fat depends on the intensity of your workout. Training at a high level of intensity forces your body to draw on carb calories for energy — they are a more efficient source of energy, and your body goes for its premium fuel when you’re working hard. If you are training at a low level of intensity, your body doesn’t need to be as efficient, so it will draw on a higher percentage of fat calories for fuel.

Sounds like low-intensity training would be more effective when it comes to losing fat, right? Wrong. These physiological facts are the ones that spawned the mistaken belief that low-intensity activity is better than high-intensity activity when it comes to burning fat and losing weight. These days we know that even though the ratio of fat-to-carb calories might be higher during low-intensity exercise, fewer calories are used up overall. High-intensity exercise burns the biggest number of calories.

Yes, at 50% effort you are burning fat stores first, but weight-loss is ONLY really about calories in vs. calories out.  An hour workout at 90% max heart rate burns way more calories than an hour at 50% MHR, no matter how you look at it!

 

My photos – before and now

Can’t believe I’m putting this out there, but I’ve been asked for my personal ‘before and after’ pictures (before I really took this fitness stuff seriously vs. now). So, if it helps someone out there, then I’ll close my eyes and click ‘publish’.

I hope this is motivating and reveals that I’m human too:) At first it wasn’t easy, at all. But the effort was worth it, and transformation is 200% possible for anyone who wants it BAD enough to make short-term SACRIFICES for long-term rewards!! Work with me and I’ll show you how to do just that.

First day I took a picture and decided to make exercise a daily event. Nov 2010

I don’t have an ‘after’, since I’m always working towards more! May 2013

High Intensity Interval Cycling

This playlist left my 5:30am indoor cycle class in puddles of sweat today!