The Lost Art of Intensity…I’ve been saying this for years… “Fat people finish marathons all the time!” It’s not about the distance covered it’s about how FAST or INTENSE the distance was covered. I wish people would get this through there heads when January comes and they embark on the magic “run for weight-loss” kick. People see the Kenyan crossing the Boston Marathon finish line and actually believe that running made him/her skinny… The fact of the matter is that Kenyan’s body type had more to do with the selection of that runner’s mother and father than running 26.2 miles ever did. Some people are “built” for running long distances and some people are not… On average most people are not! You may ask why?

The large majority of our population is just too structurally unsound to run over long distances. Imbalances at the ankle and hip can cause havoc on the knees and low back… Just ask any local Physical Therapist who there number one patient is and more often than not they will say the long distance runner. Professional long distance runners are plagued with over-use injuries such as Plantar Fasciitis, Shin Splints, Anterior Knee pain, IT Band/Lateral Knee pain and hip and low back dysfunctions. I won’t even get into the subject concerning Free Radical damage and the actual “oxidizing” that occurs in the body from not only Pollutants in the atmosphere but just from running for prolonged periods of time. The Free Radical damage mentioned has been shown to increase the likelihood of many types of cancers especially that of the brain. Excessive running also increases a stress hormone called Cortisol. The hormone Cortisol is great in fight or flight situations like running from a tiger or getting out of a tight jam but elevated Cortisol levels for too long of period can flat out ruin health much less your fat loss program.

In all honesty human beings just were not built to run slow in a straight line for prolonged periods of time… On the contrary we as human beings are best suited for using our energy for short bursts of energy and than recovering like throwing a spear at an elk or deer, chasing it down and dragging it home to feast. Our body’s number one goal is Survival! Running for long stretches from a cave man perspective wouldn’t have been very smart… Think about it; would you want to fatigue yourself by running a 5k or 10k and than get chased by a potential predator? Could you actually manage to flee from danger with runner’s knee or a case of shin splints? How much sense would it make to go on a hunting marathon, SLOWEY running after dinner making all types of commotion, scaring off potential food while simultaneously making you more vulnerable to being eaten? If you really look at it more closely the only way to catch food is if you could actually sneak up on it. You know actually hunt for it. Don’t forget! Animals, yeah, they kind of sense things like danger, oh and they hear pretty well too. In order for you to catch dinner for your family you would have to be berry, berry QUIET like Elmer Fudd looking for that widdle wabbit… You would have to be cunning and keen, patiently (what do Americans know about patience) waiting for the right time to pounce… At the right moment you throw a rock or a sharpened stick, SPRINT and try to catch the prey before it darts off into the deep forest or open plain.

I know it sounds crazy because we no longer have to hunt for food; Burger King and your local supermarket actually do that for us. But before technology and processed food and refrigerators it really was SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST! No drive through windows, delivery options Nutri-System, Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers. In fact the act of dieting from a survival standpoint makes no sense at all, ironic that the first 3 letters of the word diet are DIE! We Americans no all about dieting were the fattest people and the planet.

What’s the Secret?

I’m going to tell you a little secret… Would you like to know why there are so many fat and unhealthy individuals in our country? Aside from the fact that people live off of box foods, skip breakfast, work too much, don’t sleep enough and obviously just don’t move enough. People want results and don’t want to work for them. It just doesn’t work that way! So what’s the SECRET? The secret is INTENSITY. We have to work harder, not longer. If longer worked than you wouldn’t see fat marathon runners, but you do. If easy worked than riding on that bike while talking to your girlfriend would work but it doesn’t. The fact of the matter is that simple and easy is not the same. Easy implies no effort. Simple means not complicated. Achieving total health and lower body fat levels is simple, but it’s far from easy.

Stay tuned for Part 2! I’ll discuss the phenomenon of Chunky Aerobic Teacher Syndrome and how to combat it…

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There is almost no injury that won’t be improved with exercise.  What exercise and how much depends on the injury.  Running a marathon on a broken leg is unwise, but doing stretches and other activities to keep the surrounding muscles supple and supportive is an excellent idea.  The right weight loss plans will help the injury heal and make you feel better all over.

Low-Fat Isn’t The Same As Healthy

Being healthy isn’t just a matter of being thin.  In fact, simply being skinny can mean that you’re almost as unhealthy as someone who is significantly overweight.  It may also mean that you’re on the road to gaining back all the weight you lost, if something like diet dissatisfaction or a slip on the stairs derails your process and undoes your progress. 

Diet dissatisfaction can come in range of guises.  Far too many weight loss plans involve foods that have had the appetite satisfying fat removed and replaced with sugar and salt.  While unhealthy fats are certainly to be avoided, processes that remove them don’t distinguish between healthy and unhealthy, meaning that any advantages the food had are gone. 

In addition, this process means your body has to work harder to process the calories, meaning that you receive less energy from the food and wind up hungry that much sooner.  This isn’t good for maintaining a diet or health.

Being Lighter Helps You Heal

If, either before, or after you find yourself on this unsatisfying and unhealthy diet, you suffer an injury, or if you are dealing with some sort of chronic condition like arthritis, a plan that helps you lose fat and pounds will make healing easier on a number of levels.  Especially if this diet is nutritionally balanced at the same time.

Just as there is no injury that will not respond positively to the right kind of exercise, there is no healing that won’t be facilitated by a reduction of weight on the relevant joint or body part.  And no fat loss that won’t be accelerated by eating healthy foods that work in conjunction with your metabolism to speed the fat burning.

Healthy Food Is Satisfying Food

The best part about a weight loss plan made up of healthy, nutritious, single ingredient, organic food is that you don’t spend your days hungry.  And, because your body is getting the vital nutrients your muscles, organs and bones need for optimal health, you will actually heal faster while reducing your weight and improving your energy.  All this from tasty, healthy foods that leave you satisfied and with enough energy to get through your day.

The reason this type of weight loss plan works is because we are designed to eat organic foods and derive maximum nutritional value from them.  Chemically processed foods with most of their nutrients were not part of our development. Our bodies burn through the few vitamins they posses and store anything else that’s in them as fat.  This is why so many diets require vitamin supplements.

Which is ridiculous, when almost the first thing you see when you walk into a grocery store is a brilliantly colorful array of fruits and vegetables that have everything a body can ever need to stay healthy and heal up from an injury or improve a chronic condition.  A weight loss plan that optimizes the way these nutritious foods work with our bodies to maximize fat loss and energy is the proverbial icing on the cake – except with less sugar and far more flavor.

 

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If you’ve been trying to lose weight, you know how extremely difficult it can be. Counting calories, strenuous exercises that leave you panting for breath, and spending hundreds of dollars on weight loss plans hoping each time “this” one will work for you. It’s incredibly frustrating.

Of course, for most of us, shedding unwanted pounds does require watching our calories and getting of the sofa. But the good news is if you want to achieve and maintain your ideal body weight, you don’t have to spend another penny on special diets or run a marathon to do so.

What’s the secret? Simple. Learn about yoga breathing. When you apply the simple principles of this doctrine, you will address your weight problems on a whole new level.

Who knew losing weight could be as easy as breathing?

You discover how to develop a level of consciousness that includes the mind, body and spirit. Yoga breathing becomes an excellent tool for finally melting away unwanted pounds.

Learn about yoga breathing to dramatically speed up your metabolism

Consistent application of the exercises – which take 5 minutes a day or less – will allow you to change your body and metabolism without strenuous exercise and dieting to distract you. No two people approach poses and yoga breathing in exactly the same way. That’s because each person works within his or her own level of comfort. Once you become aware of your individual needs, you’ve taken the first step to using yoga as an effective weight loss tool.

During yoga the asanas, or postures, affect certain glands in a manner that causes them to increase the rate of hormone secretion. This is especially true with the thyroid, as it is instrumental in regulating body metabolism. Two asanas specifically designed to stimulate the thyroid are the shoulder stand and the fish posture. These exercises also increase fat metabolism meaning stored fat now contributes to muscle and is also burned away as energy. So not only do you lose weight, you’ll have a sleeker, more defined muscle tone. A sluggish energy level becomes energized.

Certain asanas massage the organs in the abdomen, which in turn release stored fat tissue. Other asanas correct metabolic imbalances by influencing the endocrine and nervous system.

These imbalances are one of the prime causes of obesity. Once you learn about yoga breathing, and practice the exercises regularly, you’ll also be able to breathe in a manner that allows the body cells, including fat cells, to increase the amount of oxygen they receive. Oxidation then burns up the fat cells.

And when you continue to practice yoga, you gradually burn more and more calories. Not only that, yoga calms anxiety, which is often is the culprit for overeating.

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Summer comes and with it the last minute marathon race to lose weight and be able to show a slimmer body. Creams and chemical treatments and populate the ads tempt many for alleged miraculous effects, but make no mistake; they are natural methods which show greater effectiveness and longer term.
Being overweight is mainly due to one factor: eat excessively or inappropriately, regardless of the metabolism of each other, obviously. Still, eating more than usual energy intake increases as expected, being a solution to the problem, attacking the sole focus of such excess: hunger.
There are a thousand and a diet with plenty of variations and tricks that can, at any given time, reduce feelings of hunger or anxiety it causes. Recent studies have focused specifically on this fact to establish mechanisms to help quench behave without an excess energy intake. Thus, the diet made by an American scientist, a winner of the evaluation of eight diets and their long-term results by Consumer Reports magazine, has demonstrated an amazing effectiveness.
Look at it this way, going back to basics, eat and move as did our ancestors thinner, the better for us all.
My purpose is that you can get a better understanding of how your body works. How and why you gained weight and what you can do to lose extra pounds, for once and for all, because believe it or not, weight gain in first place goes far beyond overeating.
Most of the programs they put on the market only apply to the same weight, whereas here we see a little deeper to get the basis of weight gain. If you are not properly addressed and does not correct this problem from the beginning always may be wondering why I can not lose weight and stay fit forever.
It basically consists of making a salad, fruit or low calorie vegetables before each meal, so that reduces your appetite and thus get the same degree of satisfaction by eating less food, fewer calories.
Other diets focus more on psychological motivation and emotional level, including group meetings and weigh-ins to get a powerful incentive to support the change in eating habits and physical exercise. In the long term, these diets supported emotional therapy are very effective, and avoid the drop, something common when results are slow in coming or require special proof.
Excess weight can affect your self-esteem. Nobody wants to be obese because it has many negative connotations in our society and our environment.
To believe that we are not appealing or attractive to others can make us think hard about our own self-esteem and the value we have about ourselves. This can lead to social and emotional problems and distort the way we perceive, and how we interact with others.
This can become a vicious circle within you, where we eat because of how we feel (depressed) and to remedy the pain, but often end up feeling worse further aggravated by the fact that gains more weight. And so the cycle continues.
That is why first of all, before deciding on any form of weight loss, should be aware that this is a problem that not only includes the physical, but it is as well known, the problem of overweight includes both their physical and hand and emotional health. Everything is a set to be in harmony needs to be addressed all at par.

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Have you ever watched a marathon race? When you see the runners who cross the finish line first, what do they look like? Then after all of the elite runners cross first, and you wait long enough (almost until traffic has been allowed again, and it’s been at least 7 or 8 hours) what kind of runners do you see cross the finish line?

They seem to get heavier, and certainly most of them don’t even look like they could have been mistaken for a runner or even in shape for that matter. They aren’t lean, they don’t look fit. So, what’s my point? It certainly isn’t to make fun of people who run marathons, quite the contrary. I’ve run a marathon and a half-marathon, and I certainly admire, the strength, dedication and focus it takes to conquer such a feat–which is why I’ve only done one of each.

I certainly also realize that it may not be the goal of everyone who takes on such a challenge to become fat-burning machines (although it couldn’t hurt), but to enjoy the challenge and the ride that comes with it.

My point is this: once your body has adapted to a certain exercise, especially at a certain mode (same speed, same route etc) your body adapts to it quickly. After this has happened, you’ve virtually eliminated it as a fat loss tool. This is why running at a steady state becomes useless as a fat loss tool. You burn fewer and fewer calories every time you go out to do something your body has become a sufficient “expert” at.

The key here is sufficiency. You don’t want your body to become sufficient at anything. Here is a week’s worth of ideas that I’ve taken from a week’s worth of my own cardiovascular exercise program:

Monday: Stair exercises:Running up 6 flights hitting every step, walking up 6 flights hitting every other step, jumping rope in between flight, step wide onto each step, walking up steps with a 12lb medicine ball overhead, turn to the side and walk up (laterally), double feet hops up the step, every other step doing double-foot hops with medicine ball.
Tuesday: Treadmill 15% incline @ 3.5mph for 40 meters, and alternate with sprints @ 5 – 7.5mph
Wednesday: Sprints outside on a neighborhood track: alternate between sprinting 100 meters and skipping 100 meters- alternate each for 1 mile, alternate backward running lunges with buttkickers 100 meters each for one mile
Thursday: Rowing machine as fast as your body will allow for 1 minute, then slow your row, for 30 seconds, and speed it up again. (this was fun, but hard as hell, I don’t know how those olympic rowers do it!)
Friday: I just go for a brisk 40 minute walk (this is a challenge for me because I hate walking, I’d prefer to run, but my body has become too accustomed to it, so I look for variations in my running such as on Wednesday’s workout).

So do you get the gist of it? You are only limited by your imagination. You can change the intensity of anything by speeding it up, adding resistance, or weight (just don’t add ankle weights for running or walking-it can mess up your knees, it is okay for leg lifts when you are lying down). For instance, I could go back to Wednesday’s workout and put on a weighted vest and do, not the same workout, but some variation.

Do I look like an idiot doing some of these things? Absolutely! However it gets me where I want to go.

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Running: Run Yourself Skinny – The Beginner’s Training Guide for Weight Loss

Learn how to Run Successfully and Lose Weight

Are you looking to lose weight? Then you’re in the right place, because running is one of the most simple and effective forms of exercise. When you start your running program and stick to it, you will lose weight, have more energy, and feel much fitter and healthier.

No matter, what your current fitness level is, this guidebook will teach you everything you need to know to succesfully lose weight running. It includes an 8-Week Training Pl

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