Top Tips
Top Tip # 1
You cannot lose weight to improve your health; you must improve your health in order to lose weight.
Any unhealthy approaches to weight loss such as starvation, crazy diets, weird supplements and over- exercising to name but a few, whilst sometimes providing some short-term results, ultimately tend to be unsuccessful.
For long-term results, instead of focussing on weight loss, focus on getting healthy. When you are healthy, your body will naturally lose fat and you won't crave junk food.
Some health tips:
- Eat real food. Eat whole, natural foods.
- Eat less sugar and refined, processed, man-made food products.
- Stay hydrated. Drink plenty of clean water.
- Move. Get some sort of daily physical activity – even if it's just a walk or some stretching.
- Rest. Get sufficient rest and recuperation - for your mind and your body.
Top Tip # 2
More of the same + more of the same = more of the same
Want to change your body? In the following order, you must address:
- Mindset
- Nutrition
- Exercise
Mindset
Unless you change your mindset, it is likely that your attempt to change will end up like all other attempts. More of the same + more of the same = more of the same! If you want to experience different results, you must try something different.
Change your mindset:
- Consider what you want
- Visualise & feel with emotion what it is like to achieve it
- Write it down
- Write down a big list of reasons why you must achieve it
- Get excited
- Make a plan – seek advice if necessary
- Consider any obstacles to reaching your goal in advance so you are ready for them and have strategies to overcome them
- Review your goal & reason list daily
- Make a commitment to never give up!
- Take action!
Nutrition
Food is fuel. It has profound effects on your brain and body. It will influence your mood, focus, concentration, alertness, sleep, stress, physical energy, growth & repair, hormone activity & fat storage, to name but a few! If you don't fuel yourself appropriately, you may not have the energy or motivation to exercise and your body may not have what it need to grow and adapt to your exercise.
Your body is made of millions and millions of cells. Your cells carry out every activity your body needs to do. They are constantly renewing and changing and are comprised from, and fuelled by, the food you eat. If you make poor quality food choices, your body will ultimately be built from poor quality materials & you will be more susceptible to injury and illness. It's an old saying but you literally are what you eat!
- Endeavour to eat high quality foods from nature
- Check the ingredients – the fewer the better
- Reduce intake of sugar & sugar substitutes
- Reduce your intake of refined carbohydrates
- Reduce your intake of chemical preservatives and additives
- Remember - if you can't pronounce it, it's probably not food!
Exercise
Your body is designed to MOVE! The benefits of exercise for mind and body are well documented.
- Walk
- Stretch
- Do some resistance training
- Try some interval training (short bursts or sprint work)
Top Tip # 3
Quality vs Quantity
Recent studies have shown high-intensity interval training to be more effective than steady-state training for fat loss even when the interval training only lasts half the time (see our 'Fitness Facts').
What does this mean?
It means that quality is more important than quantity. Get the intensity right and you need not spend hours in the gym; a session lasting 45-60 minutes is enough.
This also applies to training frequency. A few short, high-quality sessions each week is going to be more effective than going to the gym everyday but not having enough energy to do a decent session.
Aside from your training intensity, how is your technique? Again, quality is more important than quantity. Are you using great technique or forcing out loads of reps/sets/exercises to hit some target in your head?
Nutrition is another area where quality rules. While most people focus on the nutritional table on food packets to see how many calories are in their food (quantity), you'd be better to look at the list of ingredients to see what is in your food (quality). Not calories are equal. Where do yours come from? In general, the fewer ingredients, the better. Food products with long ingredient lists tend to be more heavily processed & refined, and contain lots of chemicals, additives and preservatives which are not good for you – even those that are marketed as healthy. Remember: if you don't know what it is, or cannot pronounce it, it's probably not food!
Think quality!
Top Tip # 4
Burning Stomach Fat
Every day in the gym we hear the same thing: "I need to lose the fat on my stomach, can you show me some ab exercises?", "which machines work your stomach?"
The 'stomach machines' are amongst the most popular in the gym. One problem… focussing on stomach exercises is not the most effective way to reduce stomach fat! Research has shown that 'spot reduction' – decreasing fat from a specific part of the body (e.g. stomach) – does not work.
We have to decrease fat in general. You can do this by using a whole-body resistance training programme combined with some interval training. The more muscle we have, the more fat we burn all the time. Following resistance training, you also continue to burn more calories for a short period after you leave the gym. If you exercise the big muscles (chest, back, legs) with big movements (squat, lunge, etc), you add much more muscle and burn many more calories than if you use relatively smaller muscles and movements (think of an ab crunch).
Interval training - working in sprints or bursts for very short period of time before recovering and repeating - has also been found to be an effective way to burn fat. Check out our 'Fit Facts' for more on this.
When trying to decrease body fat there are a host of other diet and lifestyle factors to consider so check out our other 'Top Tips' and 'Fit Facts' or speak to the Fitness Consultants in the gym for more.
Top Tip # 5
The Price of the Prize
Nothing is free. Whatever it that you want to achieve, a price must be paid. The good news is that the prize is always worth the price! In order to boost your health & fitness, look younger, feel more energetic, have more concentration, etc, etc, what are you willing to give up?
It takes time to exercise. It takes time to plan and prepare your meals so that you can eat more healthily. We're all busy people. To make this time you may have to give up some other things. Maybe you could get up an hour earlier tomorrow morning? Maybe you could watch an hour less of TV tonight?
Making time for 2-3 high-quality training sessions of just 45-60mins per week is enough to see improvements. You don't need to hit the gym for 2 hours every day. And by planning your meals you can avoid getting hungry and just grabbing what ever is available to eat at the time.
Aside from time, how is your diet? How is your sleep? Who is influencing your health and fitness? Maybe you need to give up some of your comfort foods like the the daily sweet, muffin, or can of fizzy juice? Maybe you need to make sure you go to bed on time so that you can get appropriate rest and recovery? Maybe you need to spend less time with those people who are a bad influence on your health?
What price are you willing to pay to enhance your health, fitness and wellbeing or improve your physique for your holidays?
More importantly, what price will you pay in the long run if you don't make some changes now?
