Hot Body Training

I guess I owe everybody a belated merry Christmas and a happy new year. As you may have been able to tell, I took a well deserved two week break over the holidays. I put a couple of posts on auto-post, but otherwise I’ve been blog free for a while and never got the chance to write a ‘what to do over the holidays’ type article. In truth, I didn’t really want to write a ‘how to survive the holidays article’. Firstly, because everybody else was doing it and secondly, because the holidays are a time to relax and let your hair down and any good exercise or dietary intentions, in my experience, soon go out of the window.

Living in the southern hemisphere, Christmas time over here falls over our hottest months and so for my holiday I headed into the Cederberg mountains for some sunshine, swimming and general outdoor activity.

The Cederberg Mountains. Photo credit: © Richard Commin 2008

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Eggs have been given a bad rap and I feel it’s time for them to get an image overhaul. They have been demonised, primarily because of their high cholesterol content and to a smaller degree, because of their high fat content.

Cholesterol and lecithin
Because of the threat of cholesterol, if has been common for doctors and dieticians to recommend no more than four eggs per week. An egg contains 211mg of cholesterol and it is recommended that you do not exceed 300mg per day.
Fried eggs: Good hangover cure

What researchers have now discovered though, is that the compound found in eggs, lecithin, inhibits cholesterol and makes it unavailable for absorption. This would explain why many studies found no association between egg intake and cholesterol levels.

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How many times have you been told that if you want to lose weight, you need to perform cardio at a low intensity in order to stay in your fat burning zone? This disinformation regarding fat loss has got to stop. What I am about to explain is not difficult to grasp nor is it cutting edge exercise science either. This information and these methods have been broadly accepted and used by top trainers for a while now, but for some reason have not percolated down to the average Joe who just wants to get in shape. Nowhere is this more evident than in commercial gyms, where you’ll see the same people day in day out aimlessly trudging along on the cardio equipment, as fat as ever.

Serious about fat loss

To understand how to melt fat off your bones as fast as possible, you need to understand the basic physiology of our energy systems. Once you grasp this, you will realise why the best fat loss strategy is NOT low intensity cardio, but rather higher intensity interval training methods.

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Soy is regularly touted as the poster child of a healthy diet and healthy living, especially amongst vegans and vegetarians looking for a protein substitute, but is it as healthy as it is claimed to be? Both soy and flax contain something called phytoestrogens, which are a type of phytochemical that have estrogen-like effects on the body. The two major types of phytoestrogens are isoflavones and lignans. Phytoestrogens are weak estrogens that mimic estradiol, the main estrogen found in the human body, and bind to our estrogen receptors.

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Today, I Stumbled Upon a post by Jonathan Fields entitled How To Make Exercise More Fun Than Sex. Well, that definitely got my attention! Full marks for the post title. In the article, Jonathan talks about how to overcome the challenges of getting people to exercise by taking out the boredom factor. I see this problem all the time; people stop exercising because they become bored.

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Part 1 of this series looked at some of the basics of what you should be doing to drop fat quickly. Today, we’re going to be looking at a little known method called The Tabata Method. This method is named after a Japanese researcher by the same name, who stumbled on a way to effectively work both the aerobic and anaerobic systems at the same time. The beauty of this system is its ability to blitz body fat fast and it only takes 4 minutes to complete. What the catch? Well, it might quite possibly be the most hellish 4 minutes of training, ever!

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Reducing body fat is something that the majority of people struggle with at some stage in life and if you’re like most people, you’d be a lot happier a few pounds lighter, even if you are in pretty decent shape. Low body fat levels are what truly separate those who only look average to those who possess the hot bodies that all of us desire. It’s always amazes me how a relatively small shift of, say, 13% to 9% body fat can transform an average physique into a ripped and seemingly more muscular body. Just a small bit of body fat over a muscular frame will ruin a physique. I see this with a lot of the guys in the gym I go to. Most of them just look like tubby guys who lift weights, even though they’re technically not overweight. Sadly, it’s often the skinny ripped guys who look better, even if they can’t lift much more than the pink dumbbells.

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If it’s a nice day outside, do you ever get the feeling that you should be training in the fresh air instead of breathing the chlorinated stale air of your local gym? If you do, then maybe you should give sprint training a try.

The Cheetah: This guy does his sprint training.

It’s summer here in South Africa and this Saturday it was a beautiful day, so I ditched the gym for the outdoors and went to the beach for some sprint training. Because my gym doesn’t have a track, I only do my sprint training outdoors. For this reason, I never really have much of a plan and tend to turn it into more of a fun, ad hoc training session rather than one with set parameters. If you have a track in your gym, sprinting would be a great inclusion into your regular programming, otherwise, maybe you should consider canning the gym once in a while and head out to your nearest field or open area and do some sprints.

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When last did you make any real progress in the gym? If you’re just starting out, chances are you’re progressing in leaps and bounds, but anybody who’s stuck with an exercise program for a good length of time will tell you, that progress inevitably comes to a screeching halt. How many people do you see in the gym who never seem to make any headway? You know who I talking about, those same people who always seem to be in the gym training no matter what time you go.

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Yesterday, I posted the first half of this article and gave you 5 of my top 10 super foods. Here are the remaining 5.

Broccoli
I know, we all hated eating broccoli when we were kids, but your mother was right when she insisted that you eat the stuff. A study led by scientists at Johns Hopkins University found that broccoli can prevent 60 percent of cancer related tumours and reduced the size of existing ones by 75 percent. A high intake of broccoli has been shown to be very effective at reducing the risk of prostate cancer. Broccoli is the king of nutrients and packs more than any other vegetable. These include as much vitamin C as an orange, almost as much calcium as a glass of milk, a healthy dose of fibre and is also one of the richest sources of Vitamin A.

Romanesco Broccoli

Broccoli also contains a large dose of indoles, which are naturally occurring oestrogen blockers. This is especially important for you guys out there as we are exposed to too many environmental estrogens from things like plastics.

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