Lose Your Belly Fat

If You Are Serious About Losing Your Tummy Fat and Developing a Six-Pack, There Are Five Truths You HAVE to Know

Body

  1. A lot of the “healthy foods” that are sold today are skillfully marketed junk foods that may lead to additional fat around your middle; however, the food industry knows the right buttons to push to get people to spend their money.
  2. For a flat stomach and a six pack abs, focusing on sit-ups, crunches, and abdominal machines is the worst approach. We will discuss exercises that really ARE effective after a moment.
  3. Tedious and repetitive aerobic exercise isn’t an effective approach for getting rid of fat and revealing the six-pack underneath the flab. To improve your results by a factor of ten, I’ll demonstrate the kinds of workouts you should do.
  4. No more throwing your money away on worthless “fat-burning” pills or other supplements that are supposed to “melt” the fat off your body. There is a specific classification of natural nutrients that will give you much better results. We’ll discuss this class of natural foods and what they can do for you.
  5. All of the infomercials that exclaim the benefits of ab-loungers, ab-rockers, and the like, are trying to rip you off. Ignore the infomercials. The chiseled physiques in those ads were NOT created by using the contraption that was being advertised; their bodies were sculpted through hard work that consisted of GENUINE workouts and sound nutrition. You will discover how they do this and the approach that is really effective.
  6. Let’s first talk about the foods, especially a couple of the worst, that will put fat on your body.

    You may be surprised when you hear what these two foods are, because the majority of people are under the impression that they are “healthy”.

    I won’t cover the high fructose corn syrup or trans fats, because you’ve been there and done that already, and I won’t waste your time on things you already know. We will, instead, move onto those foods that you may not realize will add rolls of fat to your mid-section.

    Wheat products are the first on the list and include muffins, bagels, crackers, cereals, a lot of breads, etc. “Whole wheat” foods are included on this list of foods that will make you fat.

    In the first place, wheat gluten intolerance is move prevalent than you may have previously realized, and the gluten in other grains can cause issues, as well. People with celiac disease are most prone to gluten intolerance, but the fact that the majority of people aren’t anatomically equipped to consume wheat in large amounts may come as a surprise to many. The digestive organs in human beings have never become accustomed to the consumption of large quantities of wheat.

    It is just in the last two millennia that wheat has become a part of human diets, and much more so in the past eighty to one hundred years. In the hundreds of thousands of years preceding the introduction of grains, human diets consisted mainly of vegetables, fruits, meats, seeds, and nuts, and the digestive systems of these hunters and gatherers evolved accordingly.

    Nutritional research studies have indicated that after cutting wheat from the diet for 14 to 21 days, people will begin to feel better and lose weight, and the results have been consistent. Often, as well as shedding fat at a faster pace, their digestive systems calm down, and the bouts of indigestion and the headaches they have experienced for years go away. Skin problems have been known to disappear after wheat is gone from the diet.

    The second food on the list of most fattening foods is fruit juice, which will come as a surprise to many.

    Don’t get the wrong idea here; I do not promote eliminating carbs from the diet. In fact, the majority of fruits are HEALTHY. BUT, isolating the juice from the fiber and other nutrients in fruits and consuming just the liquid, which is calorie-intensive and full of sugar, is not the way fruit was meant to be eaten.

    Drinking the fruit juice alone (orange juice and apple juice are the most common in western diets) means that you are missing out on the fiber, which will satisfy your hunger, and consuming only the sugary juice will leave you craving even more sweets. In addition, the fruit fiber slows the rate at which the sugar in fruit is released into the blood stream when you eat it, unlike the juice.

    The result…large quantities of fruit juice will put fat on you. Conversely, the consumption of whole fruits with the fiber intact will promote a well balanced, highly-nutritious diet, assuming the remainder of your diet consists entirely of whole foods that have not been processed.

Follow these easy steps and you’ll be well on your way to six pack abs!

Physical Variability in Cardio Exercise

The Importance of Physical Variability in Cardio Exercise

Your Cardio Workouts may not be helping you unless you incorporate a high range of heart rate shifts in your training

Are you a cardio junkie? Everyone seems to think that “cardio” is the best way to get in shape and lose body fat. I’m going to show you with this article why I disagree!

It is quite common to hear fitness pros, doctors, and other health professionals prescribe low to moderate intensity aerobic training (cardio) to people who are trying to prevent heart disease or lose weight. Most often, the recommendations go something like this:

“Perform 30-60 minutes of steady pace cardio 3-5 times/week maintaining your heart rate at a moderate level”

Before you just give in to this popular belief and become the “hamster on the wheel” doing endless hours of boring cardio exercise, 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 up to be.

First, realize that our bodies are designed to perform physical activity in bursts of exertion followed by recovery, or stop-and-go movement instead of steady state movement. Recent research is suggesting that physical variability is one of the most important aspects to consider in your training.

This tendency can be seen throughout nature as most animals demonstrate stop-and-go motion instead of steady state motion. In fact, humans are the only creatures in nature that attempt to do “endurance” type physical activities. Most competitive sports (with the exception of endurance running or cycling) are also based on stop-and-go movement or short bursts of exertion followed by recovery.

To examine an example of the different effects of endurance or steady state training versus stop-and-go training, consider the physiques of marathoners versus sprinters. Most sprinters carry a physique that is very lean, muscular, and powerful looking, while the typical dedicated marathoner is more often emaciated and sickly looking. Now which would you rather resemble?

Another factor to keep in mind regarding the benefits of physical variability is the internal effect of various forms of exercise on our body. Scientists have known that excessive steady state endurance exercise (different for everyone, but sometimes defined as greater than 60 minutes per session most days of the week) increases free radical production in the body, can degenerate joints, reduces immune function, causes muscle wasting, and can cause a pro-inflammatory response in the body that can potentially lead to chronic diseases.

Highly variable cyclic training

On the other hand, highly variable cyclic training has been linked to increased anti-oxidant production in the body and an anti-inflammatory response, a more efficient nitric oxide response (which can encourage a healthy cardiovascular system), and an increased metabolic rate response (which can assist with weight loss). Furthermore, steady state endurance training only trains the heart at one specific heart rate range and doesn’t train it to respond to various every day stressors.

On the other hand, highly variable cyclic training teaches the heart to respond to and recover from a variety of demands making it less likely to fail when you need it. Think about it this way… Exercise that trains your heart to rapidly increase and rapidly decrease will make your heart more capable of handling everyday stress. Stress can cause your blood pressure and heart rate to increase rapidly. Steady state jogging and other endurance training does not train your heart to be able to handle rapid changes in heart rate or blood pressure.

The important aspect of variable cyclic training that makes it superior over steady state cardio exercise is the recovery period in between bursts of exertion. That recovery period is crucially important for the body to elicit a healthy response to an exercise stimulus. Another benefit of variable cyclic training is that it is much more interesting and has lower drop-out rates than long boring steady state cardio programs.

To summarize, some of the potential benefits 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 wear and tear, increased muscularity (versus decreased muscularity with endurance training), increased residual metabolic rate following exercise, and an increased capacity for the heart to handle life’s every day stressors.

Sports Workouts and Sprinting

There are many ways you can reap the benefits of stop-and-go or variable intensity physical training. Most competitive sports such as football, basketball, volleyball, racquetball, tennis, hockey, etc. are naturally comprised of highly variable stop-and-go motion which trains the heart through a higher range than just steady walking or jogging.

Doing swimming workouts in a variable intensity fashion may also be more beneficial than just swimming for a long duration at the same speed. Same goes for bicycling — that is why mountain biking, which involves extreme ups and downs at various intensity levels may also be more beneficial than just a long flat steady pace bike ride.

One of the absolute most effective forms of variable intensity training to really reduce body fat and bring out serious muscular definition is performing wind sprints. Wind sprints can be done by sprinting at near max speed for 10-30 seconds, and then taking 60 seconds to walk for recovery before your next sprint. 6-12 total sprint intervals is usually a very challenging workout for most people.

In addition, weight training naturally incorporates short bursts of exertion followed by recovery periods. High intensity interval training (varying between high and low intensity intervals on any piece of cardio equipment) is yet another training method that utilizes exertion and recovery periods. For example, an interval training session on the treadmill could look something like this:

Warm-up for 3-4 minutes at a fast walk or light jog

Interval 1 – run at 8.0 mi/hr for 1 minute
Interval 2 – walk at 4.0 mi/hr for 1.5 minutes
Interval 3 – run at 10.0 mi/hr for 1 minute
Interval 4 – walk at 4.0 mi/hr for 1.5 minutes

Repeat those 4 intervals 4 times for a very intense 20-minute workout.

Also, don’t overlook other great ways to incorporate variable intensity cardio training by using a jump rope, a rowing machine, or even outdoor hill running.

The take-away message from this article is to try to train your body at highly variable intensity rates for the majority of your workouts to get the most beneficial response in terms of heart health, fat loss, and muscle maintenance to build six pack abs.