Make Healthy Changes in Your Food and Exercise Lifestyle

I joined an eight course fitness education and weight loss program at my local gym here in Wisconsin. Now, I want to share with you my experiences and you can decide for yourself if you feel this is something that would benefit you. Why join a training group? Well, it keeps the cost down because the classes consist of 2 to 4 people. This same instructor also runs a personal training business. She charges $25 for a consultation and depending on how many sessions you purchase determines your rate. The more sessions you purchase the bigger discount per session applies. If you only want 1 to 4 sessions it will run you $60 per hour and if you purchase twenty than your cost goes down to $45 per hour. With that said, I have 8 sessions with 2 to 4 people for $180. What a deal!

The first session consisted of going through the group and telling your name and why you joined the group. Then the trainer handed out a 8 course outline.

Week 1 five minute fit test, heart rate monitoring, bmi testing, Cardiovascular training: treadmill, bike, elliptical
Week 2 discussion about nutritional guidance, supplement information, muscle & cardio endurance training
Week 3 leg extension and leg curl machines
Week 4 chest press and lat pull downs
Week 5 core training
Week 6 leg press, calf raises
Week 7 chest flies and cable row
WeeK 8 discussion and review

After we introduced ourselves we did the bmi testing. Bmi stands for body mass index . We talked about target heart rates and that depends on your age. You can learn more about heart rates by visiting the American Heart Association web site . The five minute fit test is a program located on the treadmill that the gym owns. If you have a gym membership than be sure to check if your machine offers this test. It lets you know if you are slow, average or good as far as intensity goes. Why is that important? If you want to lose weight than you need to increase your intensity. This will get your heart rate up faster and it will give you a better work out in less time.

Be sure to stay in your target heart rate zone per your age. We than went over that in order to make changes in your nutritional lifestyle that you need to know what the heck you are doing right now. How do you do that....you guessed it.....journaling. It may sound tedious and time consuming but its not. All you need is a notebook or you can use food & exercise journals that are already published like: "Food & Exercise Journal", by Neta that can be found on their web site or visit amazon.com and look up "The calorie King", by Allan Borshek. They are packed with excellent information and all you have to do is write down your foods, calories, and protein consumption. Those are the most important pieces of information that will help you with your transformation into a leaner you. We went over hydration. We need to drink water every day at least 8 glasses of 8 ounces of water or more depending on your activity level.

Tea, crystal light, vitamin waters etc. are great but pure water is better. Now, to reduce your weight you need to journal what you are currently doing for one week. Once you know where you are starting from than you know what you need to do to get where you want to go. Make sense? I thought so. So, after the first week is over all you need to do is minus your daily caloric intake by 250 to 500 calories. There is a great resource for calorie consumption found on the Web Md web site . Cardiovascular training is as important as strength training, flexibility and endurance. You need to work on all of them and in doing so it creates a lot of variety. You should engage in at least 30 minutes of physical activity per day.

What the trainer told us is to do 7to 8 minutes of warm up. If you are strength training that would mean that your first set is at a lower weight and if you are, for example, on a stationary bike than you peddle at your target heart rate for 7 to 8 minutes. Than after your warm up it is recommended that you stretch the muscles and then do 20 to 30 minutes of strength training at least 3 days a week. After you are done with your weight training you will want to stretch again and you are done or you can add a 20 minute blast of cardiovascular training ( this should be done at least 3 times a week ). Remember what we talked about before,you want to spend those 20 minutes at a higher intensity and if that is too difficult on one machine, no problem, switch it up and do 3 to 4 minutes of high intensity per machine.

I have covered a ton of information and I hope you can find something in it that can help. I will cover nutrition and some exercises that you can do in my next article. Thanks for visiting. The article was written by me and I did use other sources to help me with content of the article including the 8 week outline, nutritional guidance for a healthier you, fitness on demand brochure, these are all hand-outs from my personal trainer. For more information please visit the web sites I mentioned to learn more about where to find food journals, the american heart association to help you determine your target heart rate, and Web Md to learn more about how many calories you should be consuming to help you reach your goals.