Burning up calories

I am never sure how many calories I am really burning when I do exercise. Quite often you will have a great workout and according to the numbers you only burned a couple of hundred calories. There is a lot more to calorie burning than what the numbers may say. Some question you should ask yourself are:

How long did you exercise?

How hard was the workout to you?

Did you gain any muscle in the workout?

How long where you tired for after your workout?

You have to remember when you workout that the exercise you did this morning will temporarily raise your metabolism for 12 hours after that workout. Also there is some muscle gain if you didweights or pushed yourself hard.

If you would like to see how much calorie buring you did during your actual workout you can consult a page that I found for this. Just remember to take these numbers with a grain of salt in the larger picture.

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Creating a fitness mindset

I could not have put this better. I found an article that really digs into what kind of mindset you need to improve your fitness. This will make the difference between doing and not doing, between eating well or eating bad. I have to warn you that some of the things in this article go against what I have said in the past, especially as far as goal setting goes but Paul definitely has an opinion so it is good to listen to anyway. Here it is:

I met her at a networking group early one morning. Lacy (name changed for privacy reasons) was in her 40s and had a lot going for her. She was intelligent, well spoken, and confident in her ability to run her own Law Firm as an attorney. Lacy was able to enjoy many things in life that others whom believed themselves to ‘less fortunate’ did not think they could enjoy. However, there was one big issue Lacy struggles with. It is an issue that you may recognize in another person, or even in yourself. Body image and fitness.

It was no secret that Lacy was a woman of large bone structure; something genetic that she has absolutely no control over whatsoever. It was also no secret that Lacy tried just about every trick and diet in the book to lose and get into shape. In fact, Lacy was bold enough to announce to the entire networking group of over 30 people her ambitions to fit into a sexy lingerie outfit for her husband and feel like a word I better not mention in this article (but I’m sure you have a good imagination).

Being a fitness professional myself, Lacy and myself were bound to be a magical match made in fitness and diet bliss, or one may have thought. After all, my track record is very good, and over the years I have been able to guide many people into discovering how to stay fit, so helping Lacy make this discovery would come naturally right?

Actually not. I worked with Lacy for a couple of months and after that Lacy decided the low carb diet she was insistent on sticking to was not working, and she was going to go off on her own program again. Think this is uncommon? Think again, Lacy was doing what many people do when it comes to health and fitness.
As previously mentioned I have helped many people discover how they can live the fitness lifestyle. However, there is another side to the story. There have been more people that I have crossed paths with in a professional manor that have not been able to maintain the fitness lifestyle. For years I wondered how and why this happens. What causes a person to invest so much time, thought, and effort into the idea of getting into shape only to succumb to disappointment and end up exactly opposite of where they wanted to be?

I eventually discovered it’s all in the mind. Lacy was the way she was because of the way she thought about fitness and nutrition in relation to herself. In her career Lacy obviously demonstrated the characteristics of successful thinking. In her idea of diet and fitness Lacy demonstrated the opposite.

You may be wondering how does one swing the thinking pendulum from fitness failure to fitness success and make it stay to fitness success?

If ‘one’ is willing to change some basic fundamentals in thought the process can be happen with great ease and simplicity. Outlined below are five things you can do to adopt the fitness mindset and easily be as fit as you decide to be;

1. Do NOT set goals for yourself. When you set a goal you create an expectation that is formulated from a desire. Very often people will set a goal that they do not believe in their hearts they can achieve, but it would be nice. There are many small things that must be done in order for a big ‘goal’ to materialize. Additionally, not accomplishing a goal often leads to feelings of disappointment, failure; resentments and the end of the New Year’s resolution to be in shape. Instead of definitive goal setting you can:

2. Decide to move the direction of fitness and wellness:

There are many ways to exercise, with none being ‘the ultimate workout’ or supreme to the rest. Selecting an activity that you can decide to enjoy is a key element to lasting exercise success. Make the decision to eat foods than help you feel well, not frenzied. If something is called a die-t you may be better off passing and selecting a different way of eating. It is relatively common knowledge at this point that low carb is not the most effective choice in weight loss. Do you homework about nutrition and:

3. Let go of the habits that are not working, including thinking!

If you have decided to want to change something you are going to have to do something different than what you have been doing to get you to this point. Assess the way you think about yourself. If you think of yourself as not being able to stick to a fitness program, or someone who is constantly struggling to get in shape decide to think different thoughts. You can do this by:

4. Asking yourself a series of questions:

If being in shape is what you want; hold that question in mind and ask yourself what would it take to do that? By going inside and looking to your own higher consciousness for answers there is no limit as to what you can discover. This process works best when you make the decision to take time for yourself on a daily basis to inquire inward. When you make a regular practice of inquiring inward you will discover many things. To materialize and experience them you must:

5. Take Action!

What you discover by looking inward you can materialize through your actions. Through a series of small actions repeated on a regular basis you can materialize and experience a big change.

You have the ability to make the coming year your personal best starting with the moment or right now. When your right now is good, things that you enjoy can naturally happen without even having to make a whole lot of effort. It all starts in your mind!

Paul Bunting offers life, fitness, and spiritual coaching / guidance. To learn more or to contact the author visit http://www.paulbunting.net

The post Creating a fitness mindset appeared first on Fitness Tips for Life.

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Fast Twitch and Slow Twitch Muscle Fibers

I have had a question that is interesting about the difference between different muscle fibers and tried to get a good answer. Here is the differences between fast twitch and slow twitch muscle fibers and the difference that they make to your workouts and fitness level.

One slightly confusing area of exercise is the idea that a muscle can do both push a lot of once or move many times. Look at the difference between doing a set of squats compared to running or the difference in the leg muscles of a bodybuilder compared to a triathlete.

All types of skeletal muscle are constructed from densely knit fibers. These muscle fibers can be looked at as Fast Twitch and Slow Twitch muscle fibers. Which kind are you looking for when you are doing s? Which ones do you want to have when you are running distance?

Slow Twitch Muscle Fibers (Type 1 Muscle fibers)

The slow muscles are more efficient at using oxygen to generate more fuel (known as ATP) for continuous, extended muscle contractions over a long time. They fire more slowly than fast twitch fibers and can go for a long time before they fatigue. Therefore, slow twitch fibers are great at helping athletes run marathons and bicycle for hours.

Slow Twitch Muscle Fibers Are:

• Smaller in diameter
• Red in color
• Depend on oxidative phosphorylation for their ATP supply
• Are highly vascularized (better blood supply)
• Have more mitochondria
• More myoglobin

Fast Twitch Muscle Fibers (Type 2 Muscle fibers)

Fast twitch fibers are responsible for the speed of muscular contraction, and a fast twitch response is the ability of a muscle to rapidly contract to a specific distance over a short period of time.

Muscle Fibers

Therefore, any training program that conditions your muscles to go from a state of complete relaxation to an immediate state of contraction is a speed training program.

Because fast twitch fibers use anaerobic metabolism to create fuel, they are much better at generating short bursts of strength or speed than slow muscles. However, they fatigue more quickly.

Fast twitch fibers generally produce the same amount of force per contraction as slow muscles, but they get their name because they are able to fire more rapidly. Having more fast twitch fibers can be an asset to a sprinter since she needs to quickly generate a lot of force.

Fast Twitch Muscle Fibers Are:

• Larger
• White
• Glycolysis is the source of ATP
• Less vascularized
• Less mitochondria
• Less myoglobin

Say you were to help someone lift a heavy couch up a flight of ten stairs. You would use your hands as grips and let your legs do all the work. On the first step your legs will start to recruit type IIa fibers. By the 2nd or 3rd step your nervous system does not recruit more motor units.

This being the case the first set of fibers rest and more type IIa fibers are recruited. Along with these, a number of type IIb fibers are called into play (to maintain fluent motion up the stairs).

As your journey continues more type IIa and type IIb fibers are recruited until by the last step they have all come into play. Your muscle fibers weren’t twitching at maximum speed until the end of the stairs when they neared failure.

Force and Types of Muscle Fibers Needed

The faster a muscle fiber twitches the greater the force is. At the beginning, the fibers weren’t forced to twitch at maximum frequency to overcome the weight, but at the end they had to produce as much force as possible to overcome the . This is how recruitment is designed to maintain a certain amount of force.

Fast-twitch fibers are activated by their neurons at a rate ten times faster than the rate of activation for slow-twitch fibers. The distribution of fast- versus slow-twitch fibers in the muscles is primarily an inherited characteristic, determined by the genetic coding of each person.

While it is common for a person to have muscles with a relatively even distribution of fast-and slow-twitch fibers, some persons inherit a tendency to a significantly greater number of one type of fiber over the other. These people tend to excel in the sports best suited to their muscular composition.

I have to thank a couple of sites for some of this info. Especially bodybuilding.com and Sports Medicine about.com as well Wiki Answers.

The post Fast Twitch and Slow Twitch Muscle Fibers appeared first on Fitness Tips for Life.

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