There are a few threads about losing weight and getting fitter and healthier at the moment. I would like to offer a thread for those without much experience in planning physical training to follow. Sort of like a personal trainer but you have to bring your own motivation. To qualify this information… I spent the last 2 years of my Army career training for the toughest course the British Army has to offer. I had a resting heart rate of 40BMP, a body fat percentage of 5% and was training 2 times a day, for between 2 and 4 hours each session with no injuries. Whilst I ended up leaving the army, in that time I learned a hell of a lot about the body, nutrition, physically exercise and the limits of endurance - whether you are a beginner or an experienced athlete, I will do my best not to break you! I will post a weekly schedule, with a work out each day for weight loss and general fitness. To begin with…. some advice. How to know you are making progress: 1) Weigh yourself. If losing weight is your target then follow the weight loss work outs and watch the pounds drop off. 2) Distance over time. You will work out for a time duration, not a distance. If you are running / biking further in the same amount of time then you are getting fitter! 3) Your clothing!!! You will either need smaller clothes! How to know your target zone You will work to a target MaxHR, depending on your goal. You will calculate your MaxHR then work as a percentage of that number. You can calculate your maximum heart rate by taking your age away from 220. So if you were 18 your max HR would be 202 beats per minute. A heart rate monitor costs about £20. What is your goal? WEIGHT LOSS: To lose weight and not gain aerobic capacity you should train steadily at 60% of your max HR for long duration. This will keep you well with in the aerobic zone, and allow your body to burn the fat under your skin rather than the glycogen stored in your muscles. You should try to work out in the morning, after breakfast, as your circadian rhythm best suits cardio-vascular work at 10am and strength work at 6pm, although this is just being as efficient as possible and you should work out when you can. Nutrition All of this is pointless if you don't give your body what it needs. You should be eating healthily. That means sensible portions of sensible foods. I'm not going to tell you what you can and cannot eat, you will know if some thing is good of bad. Try to get a healthy balance. If you want to lose weight aim for lower calorie foods. Lots of carbs will make you fat, so try and balance your plate with more veg and less potatoes and rice. BREAKFAST If you skip meals, in particular your breakfast, your body will try and store as much as possible from the rest of the food you eat through the day to cover the gap between dinner and lunch.(18 hours if you eat dinner at 1800 and lunch at 1200!!!) You would do better to eat regularly - every 3 hours in the day time, but small amounts of healthy food. Don't eat large heavy meals. Eat something within 30 minutes of finishing your work out for quicker recovery. Always drink plenty of water, before, during and after exercise. Try to make it a habit to take a bottle of water with you every where you go. INJURIES The most important thing in all of your training is to remember to stretch after every workout and warm up before every work out. Injuries will come quickly if your body isn't used to what you're putting it through and take a long time to go away. I will say it again… STRETCH AFTER EVERY WORK OUT!!!! Trust me, it'll make you fitter, stronger and less injury prone. We will begin with a 3 week program. This will prepare your body for further exercise and help prevent injuries by taking on too much too soon. Then things will begin proper. You will need either a place to run and ride a bike or a treadmill and an exercise bike. Week 1 Monday - RUN Warm up 5 minutes light jogging, very slow. Exercise: Run / Walk 20 minutes (60% MaxHR) Try to run as much as you can but walk if you need to. STRETCH - 30 seconds per stretch, 3 sets per stretch Glutes Hamstrings Quads Groin ITB Tuesday - BIKE Warm up 5 minutes light pedalling, very slow. Exercise: 30 minutes steady ride (60% MaxHR) Try to maintain the pace and the heart rate. STRETCH - 30 seconds per stretch, 3 sets per stretch Glutes Hamstrings Quads Groin ITB Wednesday - REST Thursday - Warm up 5 minutes light jogging, very slow. Exercise: Run / Walk 30 minutes (60% MaxHR) Try to run as much as you can but walk if you need to. STRETCH - 30 seconds per stretch, 3 sets per stretch Glutes Hamstrings Quads Groin ITB Friday - BIKE Warm up 5 minutes light pedalling, very slow. Exercise: 35 minutes steady ride (60% MaxHR) Try to maintain the pace and the heart rate. STRETCH - 30 seconds per stretch, 3 sets per stretch Glutes Hamstrings Quads Groin ITB Saturday - REST Sunday - REST Congratulations - You have made it to the end of week 1.
If there is any interest in this I can carry it on until you're all running marathons. If not, then just ignore it. I will do the program with the other participants, so I won't ask you to do anything that I am not doing myself.
Nice post Tom Remember people, all this takes time, don't get despondent if you don't have a beach body in a few weeks/months...I remember training with my Platoon for a 50 mile event, physically and mentally challenging. Remember people, your mind will tell you to stop but your body will keep going it you want it to. You just have to want it! :smile:
Humm interesting - I should cycle to my Pilates class tonight I would just like to loose the stone I put on after stopping smoking I need to cut out eating biscuits at work
Biscuits always look so innocuous. It's when you're making them that you realise the full horror. My gingerbread men the other day required me to heat together treacle, golden syrup, brown sugar and butter together in a pan. Then you add as much flour as needed to make a dough. It's a complete calorie bomb. But once they are baked they look completely harmless. Then you decorate them with sugar.
When your body is telling you to give up you have only used around 20% of your reserve. You can train your body to give more. I trained my body to hold its breath for 3 lengths of the swimming pool in a week. My heart ad lungs didn't get any stronger, I just taught my body that no air doesn't always mean immediate death.
Firstly the title is somewhat degrading secondly running is not for everyone, especially if you have carried a lot of weight for a lot of years. And double especially if you are in your 40's plus thirdly, I lost a load of weight doing exactly (almost) what you describe here. And got fitter. But also got loads weaker, at my heaviest i could bench 90kg, now I'm lucky if i can do 70. Having some form of weights work is great as it combines cardio, if you do it hard enough especially supersets, as well as building muscle which takes more energy to maintain than fat. thats the route i'm taking this time...but also because my knees wont take running (and I hate it!!)
I agree Paul, but trying to lose weight through resistance training is working at cross purposes, as I'm sure you are aware. If you want to lose weight as efficiently as possible, then it's time to burn calories. If you want to get bigger and stronger, then it's time to eat as much as you can and hit the weights and do nothing else. You can either get stronger by increasing the fluid in each muscle cell, or you can get get more mitochondria in each cell to work for longer. It's very hard to do both at the same time. Then you're looking at the difference between slow twitch and fast twitch muscles. Also if you don't bench regularly you will lose strength (through fluid loss per cell) but as soon as you start lifting again you will be throwing them up. My training goal at the moment is size gain, so I am not doing any CV. It's a split set every day with the weekends as rest days. I weigh 74kg and last week benched 75kg for the first time. 2 months ago I was on 50Kg, but we add 5lbs each week. ( I know that the numbers are confusing but its an american gym so I have to convert back and forth between lbs and Kg). I've benched 100kg before, and I'll be there again in 12 weeks or so. I can only make these gains in strength by tailoring my workouts and not doing any CV at all. My metabolism is too high to gain easily. So my point is, it's strength OR weight loss if you want to go at it. You could swap running for rowing but that depends on your access to a rowing machine. I chose running as it can be free, if you own some trainers. Also, I'm sorry if you find the title degrading, i only meant it as a little pie in cheek humour. This isn't about making anybody feel bad, it's about a person deciding they want to change their lifestyle and doing something about it but doesn't have the knowledge to do so
Where might swimming fit into this? Can't run anymore owing to crappy cartilage in one knee (sob! I used to like running and playing squash). Though I can still walk OK.
Swimming is great for burning fat, so if you want to go to the pool instead go for it! If you were to swap running for swimming in the first week you would be aiming to keep the same heart rate, although you wouldn't know if you are there or not as you won't be able to wear a monitor. Swim non-stop in a slow stroke but keep up the exercise for the full time. So in 30 minutes if you can do 20 non-stop lengths, thats great. 15 lengths with 3 minutes rest in between 5s is not so great. A good indicator of pace for 60% (fat burning zone) is that you should be able to hold a conversation quite easily. Your breathing will not get in the way of your words, if you get what I mean. Essentially the basis is work rate / time. So your heart rate / time. Swap any exercise for any other, just keep the target HR and the timing.
Swimming is great as it has a thermal affect too. When studies were done on Thorpe, for the food he consumed it would have taken 8 hours of swimming to exercise them off. But because your body constantly has to maintain its temp, the conclusion was it burns twice as much in some, if not more. Same as going to the arctic allegedly. But then the same study also said you should have a 2 min freezing shower every day to spark a thermal reaction
Re MHR I was on a treadmill for an hour with maintained 160 bpm against a theoretical max of 180 (cple years ago) and could dip up to 170 for 5 mins. The fitter you get, the more you seem to be able to cope. Tbf at 150 now I can only manage 15 mins
good post tom, I'm starting running again having left off for a while and I know how quickly the body can actually respond to training and see results.
You would have been working your aerobic capacity, to get oxygen from your lungs to your muscles at that heart rate. So although a very good effort, it's not working towards the same training goal as weight loss. When I was training for the course, it was 70-80% MHR for full sessions of CV training, so that over time I could increase my speed and distance, but my heart rate would stay the same.
I was only going to have one I can resist buying rubbish food but find it very hard when it's there for the taking
I was 100 kgs not too long ago...average height but Im down to 95 kgs now. I was at 93 before xmas - that says it all really. Too much grub ! Joined gym before xmas and enjoying it. Carrying an injury ( from an off - not my fault of course ) and limits types of exercises I can do. Gym has been great. Love the cross trainer. Not too gone on weights so much but doing a few. My biggest problem are crisps. I knocked the cigs on the head 3.5 yrs ago and never looked back, but dont take away my crisps !!
