Not Your Average Fitness Tips

Archive for the ‘Best Fitness Tips’ Category

It’s a pretty simple question: should I do cardio before or after weights?  The answer isn’t so simple though.  In fact, there are a few different variables that effect whether it makes more sense to do cardio before weights or cardio after weight training.  One of the biggest factors is your overall fitness goals.  Whether you are trying to lose weight, gain strength, or are focused on conditioning and overall health determines the intensity of your workout routine which can in turn determine whether it makes sense to do cardio before or after weight training. Continue Reading…

A common question that probably goes through your head is how often to change workout routine.  There are a variety of reasons as to why you might like to change your workout routine, but I’d like to go further and say that you absolutely need to change your workout routine after a certain amount of time.  Even by switching up little things, you can provide your body with a great muscle confusion workout. Continue Reading…

Whether you’re new to exercise or have been working out for years, there’s always the chance that you will have sore muscles after workout.  It happens all the time with me when I change my workout routines.  A lot of questions surround this phenomenon with one of the most common being what to do for sore muscles.  Additionally, people wonder whether sore muscles after exercise are a sign of a good workout?

Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS)

Before we can answer the above questions, let’s talk about DOMS.  DOMS is the reason your muscles are sore after exercising.  Immediately after a workout, your muscles might feel fine.  However, over the next 8-24 hours, you could feel increasing discomfort that could last as long as a week.  Because of the physical stress you place on your muscles, they get small microscopic tears.  Along with inflammation, these muscle fiber tears cause minor pain known as delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS).  The good news is that these tears aren’t serious.  They are a sign that your muscles are trying to adapt to a new or more challenging workout routine.  The process of rebuilding these muscle fibers leads to increased growth. Continue Reading…

Have you ever tried getting up first thing in the morning and exercising?  Would you be willing to try if you could possibly burn more fat?  I’d like to discuss the potential benefits of performing morning cardio on empty stomach.  In short, some studies have shown that fasted cardio and even fasted workouts lead to increased fat burn.  Others believe that exercise intensity is reduced in a fasted state and therefore fasted workouts aren’t as effective.  Still others argue that things like exercise on empty stomach result in muscle loss.  Who’s right? Continue Reading…

How often to workout is an important question when it comes to creating a balance between fitness and lifestyle.  The answer to how often you should exercise first depends on your goals.  If you want to lose 20lbs+, you’re probably going to need to workout at least 3-4 hours per week.  However, if you’re close to your goal weight, you can go through periods where you don’t exercise as much.  You won’t gain ground, but you won’t lose ground either.  Summer is a perfect time for these maintenance periods.

This is perfectly relevant to my situation over the past month in which my schedule has included a bachelor party, traveling to 2 separate weddings, and a case of bronchitis that I am still recovering from.  These have not only contributed to a lack of blog posts, but a lack of workouts as well.  Because I worked hard for a few months, I didn’t think some reduced time exercising would materially impact my body.  Additionally, it will actually help me prep for my next phase of aggressive exercising. Continue Reading…

Over the years, I’ve had quite a few fitness objectives.  As I’ll discuss below in more detail, I’ve wanted to lose fat, gain muscle, increase my bench press, do more pull ups and pushups, run faster, jump higher, and run farther.  The problem is that many of these objectives conflict with one another and with my long-term goals.

The key to fitness goal setting is to create objectives that are both achievable and reasonable.  I prefer to create goals that can be met in the short-term but that provide some long-term benefit as well.  Fitness goals have to be challenging enough to motivate you to work hard, but not overly challenging where you’ll give up too easily. Continue Reading…

While many of you probably dread re-living high school math, I was always a bit of a math geek.  Formulas always made a lot more sense to me than foreign languages or reading comprehension.  So today I’m going to throw a weight loss formula out there and see if we can’t solve an age old question…how do you lose weight?  Let’s do some math!

Let’s start with a simple equation for weight loss:

Calories Eaten – Calories Expended Exercising < BMR

That doesn’t seem so hard, does it?  The big challenge is that we have to further define these variables. Continue Reading…

This weekend I decided to splurge.  My family attended a birthday party for a one year old that had all my favorite foods.  By the end of the day I had consumed 2 burgers, 2 pieces of “cupcake” cake, 2 home-made cupcakes, 4 Oreos with chocolate covering, 2 home-made cookies, ~200 M&Ms, and some chips and fruit.  It was a fantastic meal.  As you can tell, I’m a sucker for baked goods and sugar.

Near the end of the party, someone asked how I stayed in good shape despite filling up plate after plate of food.  My answer was simple: intermittent fasting two times per week offsets cheat days every once in a while.  I didn’t want to get into all the details so I told them to check out my website.  The next question was about how I could be so dedicated to fitness and allow myself to eat all that food.  Another easy answer: a day like this will allow me to stay in shape for the rest of my life.  That requires some more explanation. Continue Reading…

I found this article on MSN from Runner’s World.  It discusses weight loss myths.  I was shocked at how similar my beliefs were to this article.  For years the mainstream media has been feeding us a lot of nonsense about diet plans and weight loss tips.  Much of this is driven by the embedded conflicts in the health and fitness industry.

Are supplement companies really going to perform studies that show you might not need as much protein as they say?  How many food companies are going to study the effect of eating less?  Heck, a segment of the food industry exploded with the popularity of “low carb” diets…even the beer companies were in on it!  Needless to say, the article shares a lot of tips that I consider unconventional.  With continued media coverage, maybe one day these will be “average fitness tips” instead of “not your average fitness tips.” Continue Reading…

Bulking and cutting is a common bodybuilder approach in which you gain a lot of weight and then lose a lot of weight.  The theory is that you eat aggressively and focus on hypertrophy to allow your body to put on muscle mass.  Then you eat restrictively and ramp up cardio to allow your body to burn fat.  In theory, it makes a lot of sense.  However, after trying this approach for 2 straight years, I always found myself right back where I started.

Bodybuilders have been successfully using this approach for years, and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a bodybuilder.  Therefore I could have been doing something wrong when I tried to bulk and cut.  The bottom line is that I gained too much fat when bulking and lost too much muscle when cutting.  Moreover, I felt fat when I was bulking and felt skinny when I was cutting.  Therefore I was never really happy with my appearance. Continue Reading…