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Are you mentally ready to exercise?

Hi,

It was just this morning and I had finished my exercise and was heading to the locker room. 

At the other end of the gym an exercise class was getting started in a few minutes (it was just before 8am).

As I was heading to the locker room some woman almost knocked me down in such a rush to get to the exercise class. 

I just had to smile.  Type A personality right there in the gym.  So, is that so bad?

Yeah, it is. 

The whole idea of exercising is to help your body (and mind and spirit) become healthier, stronger and fitter.   And you will also feel better and more relaxed. 

However, if you go to the gym and you are super hyped and stressed out because you might be a minute or so late, or because of something that happened at work then your time in the gym will not be as productive. 

Yes, working out can help relieve some of that stress.  But, not all of it.  

You will have a much more productive exercise session if you are prepared for the exercise session before you go there. 

I remember several times when I was teaching martial arts at UC
Berkeley that some of the students would come to the class and just be out of sorts. 

They couldn’t concentrate, they couldn’t pay attention and their attitude affected others around them.  I would always draw them aside and tell them that they have to leave everything outside the room. 

I even made them bow out and go outside the room, do some deep breathing exercises and then come back in when they could leave whatever was bothering them behind. 

This is what you have to do also.  Just lifting weights or doing some kind of aerobic/fitness class is more than just about the physical. 

Can you imagine if an athlete was all stressed out before a competition?  Would their performance be the best?  No way.  Sure a little stress or tension can help, but little is the key word.

If you had to do a lot of reading for a presentation the next day, do you think you would be productive if you were upset or totally hyper when you started reading?

Of course not.   You would be lucky to get through 10 words without losing your focus. 

The same is true of your exercise sessions.  You will be the most productive and get the most health benefits if you are relaxed and focused on what you are going to be doing and what you are going to get out of it. 

So the next time you go to the gym, take a couple of minutes and just relax.  Try some deep breathing exercises or spend a few minutes in the car meditating. 

This will help you get focused on your body and how you are going to improve it in your exercise session. 

Being mentally ready to exercise will improve your exercise session immensely. 

Try it.

Thanks,

Mike Val

woman training

I just saw an article – on another blog – that indicated you could burn fat with 1 exercise. That exercise was the deadlift.

You can see the full article here:
Getting Rid of Fat Through Dead Lift

Before I give my opinion of this article, I want to let you know where I am coming from.

I believe you are smart, that you are interested in the absolute truth and the best nutrition, fitness and health advice you can get.

Your desire to have a great body demands that. So if it seems I am a little harsh on some of the other so called fitness gurus out there, you are right.

Most of them don’t have a clue as to what they are talking about. This article illustrates the exact point.

In fact the whole article is hard to read and doesn’t even use proper grammer. This is typical of article farms. They put out one article and hundreds of gurus spin the article and hope somebody clicks on their links.

The spinning of the article is done automatically so that they don’t even have to touch it.

You will not find that here. I write all the articles, or will let you know if I use a guest article.

All grammer errors are mine, all statements are mine. If you like these posts, just keep reading. If not, then you don’t have to come back.

Okay, with that little rant done, let’s get to the other blog post.

The deadlift is a great exercise. It is right next to squats as far as being one of the best metabolic exercises around.

But, will it – by itself – help you get rid of body fat? The answer is no. There is no one exercise that will help you burn body fat forever.

In order to burn body fat you need to do enough exercise to stress your body. This will affect your hormones and cause a metabolic effect over your whole body.

But, that is only if you stress your body enough to cause the hormonal response.

While deadlifts are tough, they are not enough. And even though the exercise is tough, that becomes the problem.

Almost everyone will do the deadlift, rest, do the next set, rest and so on. This continual resting is the problem. It lowers the stress levels so that you never reach the metabolic threshold that will burn body fat.

Remember you are not trying to burn fat while you are exercising. You are trying to raise the stress levels high enough to get into the after burn effect (EPOC) so that you can burn body fat for up to 48 hours after the exercise session stops.

You won’t do that with just deadlifts. Now if you wanted to do deadlifts, that is great, but you have to do some active rest in between deadlift sets.

This active rest should actually be pretty tough. One thing that has shown to increase fat burning by up to 962% is getting on an exercise bike and pedaling as fast as you can for 30-60 seconds in between sets.

So do one set of deadlifts, pedal on the bike, do the next set of deadlifts, pedal, and so on for however many sets you are going to do. Do not rest between the deadlifts and the pedaling or between the pedaling and the deadlifts.

In this way you can burn fat with 2 exercises. You will just be burning it after the exercise is done.

diet boredom

You probably know there are hundreds of different types of diets. But, which type of diet works best?

That is what some researchers tried to figure out in a study published in 2009 in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Four types of diets were studied to see which one would have the best weight loss.

All the diets were approximately 1200 calories and included 90 minutes of exercise a day. Everyone also had counseling sessions for the duration of the 2 year study.

The four types of diets were low fat/low protein – low fat/medium protein – high fat/medium protein – high fat/high protein.

Now I see one major flaw here right away. What about the carbs? My initial guess was that there wouldn’t be any major difference in any of the diets because there wasn’t any control over the carbs.

And turns out I was pretty accurate. Every group lost the same amount of weight for the first year. This was about 13 pounds or 1 pound a month.

That is not a lot and this was with 90 minutes of exercise a day.

It gets worse. By the end of 2 years the average weight loss for each group was 9 pounds.

This was not 9 pounds more. It was a total loss of 9 pounds over the 24 months. In other words each group gained 4 pounds over the 2nd year.

Again this was with 90 minutes of exercise every day.

Okay, so basically the average person didn’t even lose 1/2 pound a month over the 2 years.

Those are not good results. It does show two things however. Manipulating your fat and protein doesn’t really do much for you. It would have been a much better study if they had manipulated the carbs also.

2nd, it shows that low intensity (what else could it be) exercise for 90 minutes a day does not really help with weight loss.

As you have learned from the previous posts, it is the short duration, high intensity exercise sessions that will have your burning fat after the exercise session is over.

This never happens with low intensity exercise.

So what type of diet works best? You won’t find out from this study.