Rev Up Your Workout Routine

I'm a runner, because I love to compete against myself to see how fast I can finish a 5k, 10K, half marathon and even a marathon. I'm not a runner to keep the fat off my body. In fact by running long distances the body will actually gain body fat, and lose muscle. A person will need to put more energy into their body with more complex carbohydrates than the norm bacause that's where the energy comes from in order to have a sufficient amount of energy to do distance running (anything that takes more than 45 minutes).


You'll see this a lot in gyms where people will takes spinning classes everyday in order to lose weight, or get on the stair climber for 2 hours, five days per week...and gain weight. The people that do this will end up either eating more because they need the energy to do these long drawn out cardio routines, or burn muscle instead of fat because they have run out of all energy from a lack of food. Once energy is gone from the food you ate, the body starts drawing energy from your muscle. This increases the body's fat.


So how do we incorporate cardio into our workout routines without gaining fat?


Simple, it's called Interval Training. This can be done with a cardio based exercise like running, or biking, where there is a hard part, and a recovery part. An example of this would be running fast for 2 minutes, then doing a slow jog to recover for 1 minute, then repeating this for a total of 20-40 minutes.


Another way of doing Interval Training is incorporating it into your resistance training sessions. I personally love this way because it certainly saves time, as well as increases the body's metabolism with the addition of adding muscle at the same time. An example of this would be 20-30 body weight squats (which is cardio based) into 20-30 push-ups, then run for 90 seconds. Repeat this 5-7 times and your body will have burned more calories, gained more muscle, and lost more body fat than it would have with an hour of just running.

So if you are one that really wants to burn more fat calories, and not just push yourself, then try these Interval type workouts. You won't regret it as the fat will start dripping off of you!

Chad Cannon is the owner of Shaping Concepts in Bluffton, SC.