Body And Fitness Blog

It always amazes me the number of people I see in the gym day in day out that never seem to improve their shape. There’s one lady in my gym that is in there every morning around the same time as me, she spends about 30 – 40 minutes doing cardio exercises, like x-trainer, treadmill or stationary bike, even works up a bit of a sweat. However, in the last few months that I have seen her down the gym, I haven’t noticed any difference in her physique at all, not one bit!

It’s this that has inspired me to write this article, in the hope that out there someone will read this and think “god dammit, why didn’t I start training like that ages ago!”.

You see, most gym inductions are conducted by whichever gym instructor happens to be in the gym at the time, most of them are jobs-worths who just want to do the bare minimum and show the new customer how all the machines work. In most instances, they will ask the new customer what their goals are, to which most ladies will answer, I just want to lose a bit of weight or tone up.

Now, the best way to do this, and I can vouch from my own experiences, but also from the many different books and articles I’ve read about exercise, is to employ a combination of cardio work and weight training, harnessed to a calorie controlled diet.

The problem is though, that (as in all areas of life) most people don’t want to take their gym time seriously, and certainly don’t want to do things that may be out of their (existing) comfort zone, so they immediately refuse to do any weights (because they don’t know how to or are afraid of looking silly) and certainly won’t consider radically altering their diet.

This means that for the average person, their gym membership and the time they spend working out is a complete waste of time. I know this sounds harsh, but it’s true – it’s no surprise that only a small minority of gym users ever get into shape – it’s the minority that take their training and their diet seriously that will benefit from a gym membership, the rest may as well just flush the money down the toilet for the good it will do them.

So what can you do about it?

Well, if you really want to get a toned body, you will need to commit to a serious amount of training in the gym, and you will also need to commit to a change in your lifestyle, and by that I mean a significant change to your diet. Most people don’t know this, but the diet is actually far more important than the exercise, most people think it’s the other way around.

But what exercises are best?

To get a toned body, you need to do an equal amount of cardio work, this will help to burn off fat and generally improve the tone of your muscles. I recommend the best way to do this is to have a couple of high intensity interval training sessions each week, and a couple of normal cardio sessions. Interval training can be difficult to last for more than twenty minutes, but if you can manage longer then by all means do so. For non-interval training, I would aim to go for 20-30 minutes.

As well as the cardio, you will need to do some weight training. For this, if your aims are purely to tone up and lose some weight, then I would opt for a two day split, done twice a week. Here’s a simple plan to follow:

If you followed this routine, doing three sets of 12-15 reps for each exercise you would soon see improvements in your strength and muscle tone, however, to really see the weight fall off, you would need to look into your diet, and make sure you are getting less calories in than you are expending.

To do this is really simple, take a look at my post what is my resting metabolic rate and calculate what your’s is. Then add on the amount of extra calories you need for your activity level. Now to make sure that you actually lose weight, I’m going to suggest a bit of a shortcut here – don’t add on any extra calories for the exercise you will be doing down the gym.

So for instance, if your resting metabolic rate is 1,800 and you work in an office (therefore your activity level is 1.4) you would need a daily calorie intake of 2,520. Now what we need to do is reduce this by 10% to give you a definite energy deficit each day, brining your total calorie needs per day to 2,268, which I would either round up to 2,300 or round down to 2,250 depending on how eager you are.

If you ate this and did the cardio and weight training program suggested in this article, I will guarantee that you will see weight fall off, leaving underneath a well toned body to die for!

Other useful posts:

• Dymatize Elite Whey Protein Isolate Review
• Bicep And Tricep Workout Friday 1st May 2009
• How Much Protein Should I Eat To Gain Muscle
• Training Journal: Monday 9th February 2009
• Full Body Workouts – Are They A Good Idea?