Weight Loss Program - Weight Loss? Why Bother With a Diet Plan? Does Weight Loss Matter?

Weight Loss Program - Weight Loss? Why Bother With a Diet Plan? Does Weight Loss Matter?

We all know that weight loss is important. We know we need a weight loss plan or to start a weight loss program - but ... honestly ... why bother? Will a weight loss program really make any difference in the long run?

Many of us comfort ourselves with thoughts like the ones above as we yo-yo between diets and see the scales swing their readings upwards and down. But there is new evidence to give you a fresh push towards better long term health - particularly if you have high blood pressure in addition to being overweight.

Body weight and blood pressure interact in a number of important ways. There is a direct link between how overweight you are and how high your blood pressure will be. Not all overweight people have high blood pressure but a large number of them do - particularly in men.

Brace yourself and think hard about this: 

If you are twenty percent overweight (body weight more than 160lb for an average woman or more than 205lb for an average man) then you are eight times more likely to have high blood pressure than someone of a normal weight.

Excellent recent research has shown that - no matter what your starting weight - a weight loss of one kilogram will result in a drop in both systolic and diastolic blood pressure of one mmHg. Just think of it like this: if you are overweight, have high blood pressure and are fed up taking large numbers of tablets each day - then try taking some weight off. Losing ten kilograms will see your blood pressure drop by a significant amount. Weight loss of twenty kilograms could see you being able to stop taking many, or all, of your tablets. What a prize that could be!

Being overweight is also strongly linked to high blood cholesterol levels and to diabetes. These three things - diabetes, high blood pressure and high blood cholesterol levels - are often called the deadly triad. Having one makes you more at risk of early death, two out of three and you could be in real trouble and all three leaves you a sitting duck waiting for a stroke or heart attack to strike. All three are directly linked to being overweight and all three can be avoided or improved by weight loss.

But that's not all. If you have high blood pressure then weight loss can also reduce your risk of dying from all causes.

Most overweight people carry their extra fat around their middle - this is particularly true in men. 

There is now overwhelming evidence that measuring abdominal girth can predict life expectancy. If you want to see those around you who are likely to die young then open your eyes and look at their waistband - it really is that accurate!

Some specialists say that measuring your waist circumference is a better way to determine your risk of stroke, diabetes or heart attack than measuring your weight on the scales. For good health, men should not go above a waist circumference of 35 inches and women should stay below 33 inches. Any man with a waist circumference above 39 inches is in real and imminent danger and should act to achieve weight loss immediately.

Ab Workouts and Core Exercises

Ab Workouts and Core Exercises

There are plenty of myths in the fitness industry that ab workouts will not generate fat loss. If you are just training abdominals with hundreds of crunches and other core exercises, chances are you won't generate any significant fat loss during your ab workouts. If done correctly, however, training your whole core with targeted ab workouts will maximize your fat burning ability. This can be accomplished by taking the basic principles of cardiovascular and circuit training and combining it with challenging core exercises, movements, and ab workouts that will require the use of major muscle groups.

Any time your body moves, there are muscles working to keep you stabilized and other muscles working to actually move you. Your circuit should feature challenging core exercises and ab workouts to target both the stabilizers and the movers, because they are both an extremely important part of everyday functions as well as during strength and fitness training.

What is the Core?

The major muscles of the core reside in the area of the belly, the mid back, the lower back and the hip flexers. Most movements originate with the core, so a strong core is important for preventing and eliminating most lower back problems.

Static Core Function

Static core functionality is the ability of one's core to align the skeleton to resist a force that does not change. The bridge exercise is an example of a static core function that uses your whole core to keep you stabilized in position. Your body weight will rest on your forearms and toes, but without your core staying tight, your butt will shoot up in the air to get your calves involved to keep you in position, or your hips will drop to the floor.

Starting and ending each round with static core exercises will target and improve the strength and endurance of your core. As you begin working on your core exercises while in the circuit, you'll notice a huge difference in how you feel during the first static exercise and the last. You can use this comparison as a way to gauge where you're at with your strength and endurance.

Dynamic Core Function

Dynamic core functionality is the ability to use the core as a stabilizer but also deal with the force of external resistance and incorporate a vastly different complex of muscles and joints versus a static position. For example, if you get into position to do a push-up, your core has to keep you stabilized and aligned in that position. Your chest, shoulders, and triceps are sharing the load as you lower down towards the floor and again as you come back up to starting position, all while your core continues to work keeping your back flat and your hips from dropping to the floor. 

Performing challenging dynamic core exercises, movements, and ab workouts will exhaust your energy stores extremely quickly, causing your body to start dipping into your fat stores to help complete your exercise. This is why it's important to keep the repetitions high with clean mechanics for whichever core exercises, movements, or ab workouts you choose.

The Key to Effective Workouts and Lose Weight Programs

The Key to Effective Workouts and Lose Weight Programs

The most important factor that you absolutely must come to understand when it comes to effective workouts and lose weight programs is that fad plans simply do not work. The bottom line is this: If you encounter an ad or "information" pertaining to a workouts lose weight program that sounds too good to be true ... understand that it is too good to be true. The fact is that an effective weight loss workout is not one that will provide to you instant results. Instead, it is going to require work on your part.

The next factor that you must keep in mind when it comes to lose weight programs is that an effective regimen that will help you lose weight and that will ensure that you keep the weight off into the future, is a weight loss system that will consist of three essential elements:

-stretching

-aerobics

-strength training

In order to get your body in the best possible condition (which includes losing unwanted and unhealthy weight and then keeping it off) you need to make sure that you embark on a program that incorporates these three vital elements. Your weight loss and healthy weight maintenance objectives can not be met without a system that utilizes each of these three elements appropriately.

Another factor that you need to keep in mind is that your workout and your exercise must be done regularly. You can not approach losing weight through exercise in a hit and miss manner. If you do approach weight loss (and healthy weight maintenance) in a random and undisciplined manner, you will never meet your goals and objectives.

Finally, yet another factor that you need to understand to lose weight is that exercising is only half of the equation. Along with exercise, you need to initiate and then maintain a healthy diet. The reality is that if you exercise but do not eat right, you will not meet your goals. And if you eat right but do not exercise, you will not meet your goals either. You must do both.

5 Killer Benefits Of Fitness Bootcamp Workouts

5 Killer Benefits Of Fitness Bootcamp Workouts

The fitness bootcamp is as popular now as when it first started, but is a very different animal. The professional set up, combined with qualified trainers and a framework of advice and support is the shape of the future of this business. But as a customer, what do you have to gain from putting yourself through a fitness bootcamp workout?

1. The Value Of Exercise

A bootcamp fitness session will push your body, test you aerobic capacity and fitness. in fact a simple intense athletic workout will burn 600 calories comfortably, which is certainly more than most of us do or are prepared to do during a gym session. The increased heart rate and blood flow has great benefits for your health, weight and confidence.

2. Reducing Body fat

By intensely burning calories in this way regularly fat is shed from the body at a much greater rate. No 1 pound a week usually, but several at a time, especially when followed up with a sensible and healthy eating routine. In an intense outdoor fitness bootcamp, over a week it is not unusual for participants to lose 10 pounds or more by the end

3. Learning To Push Your Boundaries

There is no place to hide and no excuse to slack off in a fitness bootcamp. The group is counting on your as you are on them. It is all about mutual pride, your own pride, the thrill of success and being able to push yourself harder and further than ever before with this sort of support from both group and trainers. You don't have to make up the exercises as in the gym, you only have to think about doing them again and again and better each time.

4. Mental Serenity

Physical exercise and fitness frequently leads to mental fitness and health as has been frequently shown in studies. It helps relax and relieve stress, elevates mood and can help in the treatment of depression and hypertension.

5. The Group Motivator

Motivation to excel, push yourself and exceed your expectation comes a lot easier in a group than as an individual for most of us. Members will encourage and help others to succeed which is a great motivator in itself

This is really a brief tip of the iceberg where the benefits of a fitness bootcamp are concerned. They are so effective at what they do that you would be mad to choose anything else.

Ab Workout and Fat Loss Mistakes You Must Avoid

Ab Workout and Fat Loss Mistakes You Must Avoid

If you want to discover some areas where you may be going wrong in your ab workouts and your attempts at losing stomach fat, I have an interview for you here that you'll want to read.

In the interview, we discuss the topic of abs training and the biggest myths and mistakes we see in this field.

Here's a copy of the training portion of the interview below. We'll discuss the nutrition aspects necessary for losing enough body fat to carve out those six pack abs in another article.

CB: Okay Mike, so where does the average man or woman go wrong when it comes to training abs?

MG: Most people are probably going to be surprised with this answer. In their quest for 'six pack abs', the biggest mistake I see people making is wasting WAY too much of their time training their abs directly... pumping away with all kinds of different abs-specific exercises.

I'm sure you know what I'm referring to. The person is trying so hard to get those abs to show, that they're spending almost all of their time in the gym with hundreds of reps of various crunches, leg raises, twisting exercises, etc. Meanwhile, all of that wasted time directly training the abs could have been better spent on a properly designed full body workout program that would elicit a much better metabolic response and increase the fat-burning hormone levels in their body as well.

After all, losing the stomach fat that is covering the abs is the MOST important aspect for most people to finally be able to make their abdominals visible. Unfortunately, pumping away with hundreds of crunches and leg raises does NOT cause much of a metabolic or fat burning hormonal response.

This is the main focus of my Truth about Six Pack Abs book... full body workout programs and proper nutrition to strip off that stubborn belly fat and reveal the six pack that's hiding underneath!

Of course it wouldn't be an abs book if I didn't focus on ab development too, but I make sure firstly that the most important concepts for lasting body fat reduction are understood.

CB: Do you see any gender differences in mistakes they make? And more importantly, do you see any gender differences in the response to various types of ab training?

MG: To be honest, I don't really see any need for men or women to train differently. Bottom line... the best exercises are the best exercises regardless of gender.

Stomach Workout and Weight Loss

Stomach Workout and Weight Loss

When most individuals begin on the weight-loss regime the very first point they want to assault is their waistline. They begin away with visions of turning a beer gut into an stomach six-pack. Following several days of strenuous workout absolutely nothing seems to occur and quickly they get rid of assurance and quit.

This article is developed to clarify, in laymen's conditions, why this occurs and why you might be utilizing the incorrect workouts, or probably the correct workouts on the incorrect time. Either way you're performing your self no favors. In no way quit simply because only losers quit. We've all heard the old saying: "The height of stupidity would be to repeat the similar point and anticipate a various outcome." If it isn't operating you attempt a various routine and also you maintain performing that till you discover the routine that does function, that's the way of winners.

The very first point you should accept is that all stomach workouts only strengthen stomach muscle tissue, if these muscle tissue are included by a layer of body fat whenever you begin they'll nevertheless be included through the similar layer of body fat whenever you finish. You'll have more powerful stomach muscle tissue but you'll not appear any various. Consequently your attempt to produce figure from body fat may have failed. The secret to generating these stomach workouts function would be to get rid of body fat very first. You get rid of body fat by eating habits and cardio workout, by burning up much more energy than you get in with meals. When you've lowered your waistline to some much more normal size you are able to then get up stomach workouts and begin operating on that ideal six-pack.

In the nutshell you have to decrease your calorie consumption and burn some energy away by utilizing light workout. Dropping weight can only be accomplished by consuming much less and shifting much more. Overlook the complex scientific formula, all of it boils lower to consuming much less and shifting much more.

Traditional wisdom claims that you simply have to workout for 30-minutes every time and that this demand could be broken lower to 6 5 moment periods or 3 10 moment periods, whichever fits you greatest. You are able to carry out cardio workout utilizing easy techniques like parking your vehicle as far from the shop as feasible and forcing your self to stroll additionally. Perhaps jogging up the stairs rather than utilizing the escalator, any little act of this dynamics that adds for your typical workout output is cardio workout and burns energy.