Tag: TV

Dumbbells – The ‘el-cheapo’ Cardio Workout

Fitness gadgets are freakin’ everywhere. TV, stores, informercials, the interet…jeez. And most are really expensive. And most also really suck. Instead of spending hundreds (or even thousands!) of dollars, spend a few bucks, get a pair of decent dumbbells, and get your cardio workout with those!

You can get super-intense cardio workouts with dumbbells (DBs) by simply doing a few sets of clean & press, snatches, squats, rows, or the like. Do them with one arm at a time, and you’ll effectively double the work you have to do (especially with full-body exercises like the clean & press and snatch). Or, you can really ramp up the workload by doing complexes – series of multiple exercises done back to back without rest.

The best thing about DBs, though, is how cheap they are!

Sure, you could get some real expensive ones, but it’s just not necessary. For just a few bucks, you can have your own DBs, and get an awesome workout virtually anywhere you want.

The first place you could look for DBs would be in the classified ads, garage sales, or craigslist. People are always looking to get rid of old fitness equipment, and you’ll likely to be able to find some for next to nothing – maybe even for free.

Next, you can check out sporting goods stores. You should start of with places like Play It Again Sports! that sell used equipment, but if that doesn’t work, you can check out other places, too. Many of the nice places sell either fixed weight DBs or adjustable ones that you can add/subtract weight plates to and from. Go with the latter option.

The fixed DBs are really nice, but are generally a lot more expensive. And if nothing else, you’ll spend a lot more because you’ll have to buy so much weight overall. If you use adjustable DBs, you could buy 20 ten-pound plates, and a few smaller plates (5s, 2.5s, etc.) and have enough weight to build two 100-pound DBs. This is going to be more weight than 95% of the population will ever need.

The other drawback to buying fixed weight DBs is that it takes up a lot more room. Stick with adjustable DBs – not only are they cheaper, but they’re a lot easier to store, too.

Ought To You Avoid Cardio

The subject I’m going to speak concerning nowadays is cardiovascular exercise. If you’ve got ever tried to lose weight in the past then you recognize this is a must. Or so you were meant to believe.
‘Cardio’ exercise as you most likely recognize is where you get on a treadmill or some other sort of machine or ride a motorbike or go for jog and stay at a sure pace and/or incrementally increase the pace throughout the half of to 1 hour that you usually do it for. Whereas doing this you’re trying to stay within the ‘fat burning zone’. Usually takes about ten-fifteen minutes of this kind of coaching to induce ‘into the zone’.
During this zone, about fifty-sixty five% of your max heart rate (not laborious in the least), you’re supposedly burning and using more calories from fat and burning a lot of fat off your body. And you are! Drawback is though you are burning a larger proportion of fat calories, it’s the total quantity of fat calories burned that matters if you would like to lose weight–and therefore the fat calories being burned stop once you stop the exercise. Another drawback is you’re burning body fat that is stored in your body as the primary fuel source.
However is not that what I want-
You’d think so, but when you stop doing the cardio that’s when the large issues begin to come up. 1st off once more, when you stop doing it, you stop burning calories. 2nd, now your body goes to guard the body fat you have left on your body till the next time you do that same type of exercise–‘cardio’. See your body desires to use fat because it’s primary fuel source when you are at rest–sleeping, watching TV, sitting at work, etc… But after you perform ‘cardio’ on a regular basis, this slow steady work rate is fooling your body into thinking differently about when it actually is at rest. So it holds on to body fat more readily and really will produce a lot of as a result of it desires to prepare for the subsequent session of ‘cardio’, thus what you eat will be converted to fat a heap easier than before.
It affects your metabolism too. Muscle is your metabolism!! The a lot of lean muscle you have got, the higher your metabolism, the more calories and fat you burn off naturally. But ‘cardio’ has the excellence of making your muscles smaller, and decreasing your metabolism and your natural fat burning furnace.
I don’t do ‘cardio’ and haven’t for at least 4 years. I am not knocking the utilization of it, especially if you are a skilled endurance athlete or your career depends on you having long lasting endurance and cardiovascular strength. But if you’re a general person, just making an attempt to be match and keep inside a sensible body image and composition, then I suggest staying off from regular ‘cardio’, as a result of you are simply reducing your body’s natural ability to burn fat. Once in a very while is okay to induce a modification of pace in. But as your primary mode of ‘cardio’ I recommend Interval Training. It’s the second most important type of coaching when it involves fat loss behind weight training.

More Than Moderate Cardio Is Needed To Build Abs Effectively

It is common to hear fitness professionals and physicians when asked how to build abs, prescribe low to moderate intensity aerobic training (cardio) to people who are attempting to prevent heart disease or lose weight. Most often, the recommendations constitute something like “perform 30-60 minutes of steady pace cardio 3-5 times per week preserving your heartbeat at a moderate level”. Before you just surrender for this popular belief and be the “hamster on the wheel” doing endless hours of boring cardio, I’d like you to consider some recent scientific research that indicates that steady pace endurance cardio work may not be all it’s cracked as much as be.

In fact, you may be surprised to understand that some of the leanest and meanest people I know (women and men), NEVER do any type of normal or traditional cardio. And I’ve spent over 15 years exercising in various gyms, and spending time with athletes of all kinds, so I’ve seen it all. I will say that there can be a place for low-moderate level cardio for really overweight or deconditioned people, but even just in those cases, there might be more effective methods.

But what exactly is “cardio”? Most people would consider cardio to become pumping away mindlessly on a treadmill, riding a stationary bike, or coasting with an elliptical machine, while watching the TV screen at hawaii of the art gym. Itrrrs this that I call “traditional cardio”. Hmmm, no surprise the majority of people get bored with their workouts and give up after a couple months without seeing results.

First, realize that our bodies are made to perform exercise in bursts of exertion then recovery, or stop-and-go movement rather than steady state movement. Recent research is suggesting that physical variability is among the most important aspects to think about inside your training. This tendency can be seen throughout nature as all animals demonstrate stop-and-go motion instead of steady state motion. In fact, humans would be the only creatures anyway that make an effort to do “endurance” type activities. Best sports (except for endurance running or cycling) will also be based on stop-and-go movement or short bursts of exertion followed by recovery. To examine a good example of the various effects of endurance or steady state training versus stop-and-go training, think about the physiques of marathoners versus sprinters. Most sprinters carry a physique that’s very lean, muscular, and powerful looking, as the typical dedicated marathoner is much more often emaciated and sickly looking. Now which may you rather resemble?

Another factor to bear in mind regarding the benefits of physical variability is the internal effect of various forms of exercise on the body. Scientists have known that excessive steady state endurance exercise (different for everyone, but sometimes defined as more than An hour per session most times of the week) increases toxin production in your body, can degenerate joints, reduces immune function, causes muscle wasting, and may result in a pro-inflammatory response in your body that can potentially result in chronic diseases. However, highly variable cyclic training has been linked to increased anti-oxidant production in the body and an anti-inflammatory response, a far more efficient nitric oxide response (which can encourage a proper heart), as well as an increased metabolic rate response (which could help with weight loss).

Furthermore, steady state endurance training only trains the heart at one specific heartbeat range and doesn’t train it to reply to numerous every single day stressors. On the other hand, highly variable cyclic training teaches the heart to respond to and get over a number of demands which makes it not as likely to fail when it’s needed. Think about it by doing this — Exercise that trains your heart to rapidly increase and rapidly decrease can make your heart more capable of handling everyday stress. Stress can cause your blood pressure and heartbeat to increase rapidly. Steady state jogging and other endurance training does not train your heart in order to handle rapid alterations in heartbeat or blood pressure level.

The key aspect of variable cyclic training that makes it superior over steady state cardio may be the recovery period between bursts of exertion. That recovery period is crucially essential for your body to elicit a healthy reaction to an exercise stimulus. Another advantage of variable cyclic training is the fact that it’s a lot more interesting and has lower drop-out rates than long boring steady state cardio programs.

To summarize, some of the potential advantages of variable cyclic training compared to steady state endurance training are as follows: improved cardiovascular health, increased anti-oxidant protection, improved immune function, reduced risk for joint deterioration, reduced muscle wasting, increased residual metabolism following exercise, and an increased convenience of one’s heart to take care of life’s every day stressors. There are lots of methods for you to reap the benefits of stop-and-go or variable intensity physical training. One of the absolute best types of variable intensity training to really reduce body fat and enhance serious muscular definition is performing wind sprints.

Most competitive sports such as football, basketball, racquetball, tennis, hockey, etc. are naturally comprised of highly variable stop-and-go motion. In addition, weight training naturally incorporates short bursts of exertion followed by recovery periods. High intensity interval training (varying between everywhere intensity intervals on a piece of content of fitness cardio equipment) is an additional training method that employs exertion and recovery periods. This can help to build abs effectively.

Cardio For Weight Loss Is Overrated

Each day on my manner to my training studio, I drive by a pair industrial gyms. They’re pretty typical of most gyms in that they’ve got all the cardio machines lining their front windows.
There are countless rows of treadmills, elliptical machines, stationary bikes, etc. and most of them have very little flat screen tv hooked up to them so the folks will do cardio for hours and not miss any of their favorite shows.
I shake my head in awe each time I drive by those gyms.
Why-
As a result of cardio is the foremost overrated facet of weight loss.
Don’t get me wrong; cardio has some benefit, especially when talking concerning general fitness and heart health. However as a suggests that of weight loss it is terribly, terribly overrated.
I lost track at the amount of folks I’ve trained or consulted with who have been therefore frustrated as a result of they pay upwards of an hour doing cardio each day and they are stuck. They do not lose any weight, and a few even gain weight.
Do not feel unhealthy if you are one among them as a result of you are not alone. You’ve had the “cardio for weight loss” mantra shoved into your skull for years and it’s largely a lie.
Let’s go over a number of the explanations cardio for weight loss is overrated.
You know that “fat burning zone” that a heap of cardio machines have stuck to them- It’s that magical zone where your body starts to burn nothing however fat. A minimum of that is what you’ve got been told over the years.
There’s no such thing as a magical “fat burning zone”. Your body does not magically flip a switch in this heart rate zone and start burning nothing but fat.
Progressing from the “fat burning zone” is the recent mantra of “Do it for twenty minutes before you start burning fat.” That’s just ridiculous because you’re invariably burning fat irrespective of if you are sitting on your intrude front of the TV or running a marathon.
Another previous lie regarding cardio for weight loss is that a lot of has to be better.
No it doesn’t. I don’t know why people have it in their heads that they need to workout for hours on finish and punish themselves in order to lose fat. It’s simply not the case. I do not recognize if individuals have some kind of torture mindset or punishment mindset that if they screw up with their diet, or have weight to lose that they have to punish themselves with an hour on the treadmill, but it’s simply not true.
Where’d this idea return from- I don’t recognize for sure, however it most likely came out of the aerobics craze of the 80’s and fortunately it’s beginning to die out.
The truth of the matter is that cardio is terribly overrated. You’ll be able to, and will, get superb results by decreasing your cardio, increasing the intensity and spending more time with resistance coaching (the way I teach it in my ten-minute workouts).
You’ll lose a lot of fat; have additional energy and free time. You may be stronger and leaner and simply feel a hell of a lot higher than if you pay all of your exercise time doing cardio.