Rate your Heart

Every piece of workout equipment I've ever been on has this to say before you begin your workout:

Please consult with your doctor before beginning a workout routine.

I'm not promoting that we kick our doctors to the curb, but I am promoting that we do a little less talking and a little more doing when it comes to our workouts.  It's all about your heart rate.  And if your heart wants to tell you something, it will.  Like, "You're KILLING ME!  Slow down already!" or "Hey, you've been running for 20 minutes and have barely broken a sweat".  Our hearts are an amazing indicator of how good or bad of a job we are doing with our workouts.

For those who are not in sync with your body to know when to do more or when to do less, here is a tool that will help put things into perspective.  It is called a heart rate calculator.  Just enter your AGE and FITNESS LEVEL and voila...instant target heart rates!  (Just a note when selecting your fitness level, most people will fall into the "average fitness" category.  If you use the heart rates for "novice" or "beginner" you will want to quickly advance yourself to the "average" or "above average" category in order to notice any substantial results.)

Now that we have our targets in mind, let's look at mine as an example.  I'm 30 and would consider myself pretty serious when it comes to my workouts.  That puts my range between 133-171 beats per minute.  There are several schools of thought when it comes to where you maintain your heart rate.  The most basic is to go all out at the high end of your range.  The second is more in line with interval training where you build your heart rate to the maximum several times in a row to create a "stair step" approach.  Either method will lead to excellent results as long as **this is important** you stay toward to middle-to-top end of your target range through your entire workout!  Anything above is clearly too much, and anything below will provide less than stellar results.  This process can be carried across to any of your favorite cardio workouts.  Just be sure to rate your heart first, then get to it.  It's all about the level of intensity that you put into your workouts, so don't be afraid to dive in head first and see what your body tells you.  It may ask you to slow down....but don't be surprised when it screams for more!

Calories 101

Everyone works out, right? We have all been at a point in our lives when we face the music and realize that our normal everyday activity just isn't going to cut it for maintaining a healthy body weight. So, for most people the solution is the same; go to the gym and workout. And not just workout, but a cardiovascular workout. This means that your heart rate is elevated for 20 minutes or more and you are working not only your legs and arm, but also your heart. These are all good things. However, we often exert all of this effort with little results. So the questions becomes, "What should I do if this isn't working?"

For starters, you must realize that a healthy body weight requires more than just 20 minutes of cardio work every other day. Doing situps won't melt away your stomach fat. We have to attack the problem at the root...and for most red blooded Americans, that would mean we need to look at our diet. At the end of the day you can burn 1000 calories at the gym, but if you are consuming 5000 calories each day you aren't going to get the results you want. So the first thing is our diet.

I did some research on what the USDA recommends for someone my size (6'2" - 205lbs). Here is what I found So, the USDA recommends I consume 2800 calories a day. The only problem is that the average American today consumes somewhere around 3800 calories. We know that 1 pound of body weight = approximately 3500 calories, you can see how it's so easy to put on an extra pound here and there from our extra calories.

Here is what the math looks like:

Average American: 3800 calories/day

What I should eat: 2800 calories/day

extra per day: 1000 calories

That's 7000 extra calories per week which is equal to 2 pounds of additional body weight per week!

So, how do we tackle an extra 7000 calories per week?! For starters, start with this list of small items:

Choose one main course or desert each day where you can substitute:
Choose the grilled vs. fried chicken or skip the cheesecake for fresh fruit salad. You can save anywhere between 150-300 calories per meal by substituting.

Eat your favorite fruits and veggies without the dip:
this is the best way to ruin a healthy between meal snack.

Eliminate sodas and soft drinks from your diet:

Sodas contain more empty calories than almost any other "food" item. Example: a 20oz. Coca-Cola contains almost the same amount of calories as a Chick-fil-A Chargrilled Chicken Sandwich! If you cannot completely eliminate these drinks, try reducing to only ONE per day.

What other ways can we make small steps towards reducing our overall calorie intake? What ideas have worked for you?

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