Personal Fitness Training: Cut These 5 Beliefs And Sculpt Your Abs
1. There Are No Upper and Lower Abs
1. There Are No Upper and Lower Abs
1. It Is Almost As Energy Dense As Fat
Negative thinking, have you heard about that before? It is the kind of thinking that will do us in, as the band Chevelle would say. It is all about the internal dialogue we have with ourselves on a regular basis and it’s often what we use to interpret situations to either our advantage or disadvantage. For example, if two people walked past you laughing, you could interpret this in two ways; they are two bubbly characters that are having a great time or they are two vicious sons of a “female dog” laughing AT you. You see the facts didn’t change, but your internal state turned the facts into either a positive or a negative event.
We spend the most parts of our lives at the workplace, well; just about everyone does. So it’s not a stretch to think that our habits at work can clearly affect or at the very least influence our weight management. We have all got 168 h in our weeks and if you spend 8 h at work five days per week and get 8 hours of sleep every night – a jaw-dropping third of our life is work-related. So it’s definitely important to have your work habits work to your advantage rather than the opposite:
You can do ab-exercises until the cows come home, but your midsection will never look any better as long as it’s covered in cheeseburgers and soft drinks. Don’t believe what the TV infomercials tell you because the reason people slim up with the equipment they sell is the low calorie eating plan that comes with it. Diet is easily about 50-75% of your weight loss success, but there are some really effective things we can do in the gym to help those kilos fly right off. It is called high intensity training and today we’ll go through a variation called 20-Second Turnarounds.
You undoubtedly know at least a few fellow trainees who have hit a wall in their training (be it weight loss, weight gain or performance) and if you at least semi-regularly read fitness magazines you must have come across the term at least a dozen times. It seems as if body transformations weren’t taxing and frustrating enough, we also have to fight these built-in biological mechanisms eventually stagnating our progress. And did you know it happens more often the leaner you get? And did you also know that we NEED this mechanism to survive?
When you have finally accepted the fact that changing yourself is going to be physically, psychologically and emotionally uncomfortable – the real battle can begin. You are now in the mindset that to accomplish permanent weight loss success you know that you need to look past quick fixes and short cuts. Congratulations. Too many people don’t make it this far. Even people who lack this mindset can attempt to journey through the three phases, but they usually don’t get that far.
Perhaps you are a stay at home mom taking care of six kids and a husband, perhaps there’s only one kid but still each day come with this endless To-Do list. Perhaps you are an executive, always on the move, always on the road and the only time you really get to yourself is the time spent on airports, in hotel rooms and going between meetings. Perhaps you are both. Not only that, age is creeping up on you too, and even though it felt like you were 25 just yesterday, you are not today. Somehow the universe is conspiring against you and your attempts to keep fit and healthy for yourself, your family and your career. But it is not all doom and gloom; there are in fact many, many things you can put in place today to combat that lifestyle induced weight gain and put your life back on track.
If losing weight was easy, pleasant and comfortable – people wouldn’t be fat. I struggle to imagine a couch potato saying NO to anything that’s easy, pleasant and comfortable. There are certainly easier ways of doing it, or should I say more time-efficient ways. You could either go out for snail-paced stroll for a few hours or you could exercise some high intensity (relative to you, of course) work for 20 minutes. Option one is easier, but option two takes less time. More often than not it’s a combination of the two; a 20-minute snail-paced stroll. No wonder you get frustrated a few weeks in when your results are insignificant (at best).