Set Realistic Fitness Goals!!!

By Herb Duncan

Every venture begins with a goal and your health is no different. It’s much better if you set a realistic goal. Many people set fitness goals but many set unrealistic ones. You might say to yourself, “I’m going to lose 30 pounds in two weeks and lose 3 belt sizes!” That’s a pretty ambitious goal. As a matter of fact if you watch enough television all those infomercial companies are hoping you make this type of goal. But unless you know what is physiologically possible, you’ll be setting yourself up for failure every time. Don’t set a goal that is next to impossible to achieve, or achieved in an unhealthy way.  This will eventually bring you right back to square one, only twice as bad. The fact is, if you lose more than two or three pounds per week, you will end up burning precious muscle tissue which is needed to burn off body fat. You will end up slowing your metabolism to a snail’s pace, which will make it very hard and you will most likely binge.

So what is a realistic goal amount? You can safely lose about two to three pounds of fat per week without hitting starvation mode or losing muscle or yanking all of you hair out in the process. So let’s add that up. You can reasonably expect 15 to 35 pounds of fat to drop off in 12 weeks. How much depends on you:  how well you eat, exercise and give the body what it needs. Basically stick to that very obtainable planned goal. Don’t be surprised that over the time period that marvelous body of yours gains 10 pounds of lean tissue while dropping 20 pounds of body fat.

Lean muscle is a great thing! It gives your body those shapes and curves in all the right places and lean muscle is a body fat scavenger to boot. This is why most people fail. They are more concerned with just losing weight rather then the type of weight they are losing. And all the fad weight loss companies are banking on this. By the time next year rolls around they will have introduced a new fad that works twice as fast and you will have put back on your weight with a little extra and more jiggle. Most people that have tried a new fad diet in their lifetime have, on average, tried four or five fad diets all with the eventual same results - failure!

As I stated earlier, set a realistic goal write it down and put a realistic timeline on it. Goal setting gives you a clearly defined objective to build a good routine around.  Writing you goal down makes it real. Stay away from fads. Find out how your body truly works from an educated professional and get on a realistic program you can do for the rest of your life and enjoy. My mother is 68 years of age and she runs circles around me - really. Its not genetics or luck she set a realistic goal some 30 years ago and hasn’t looked back

Give the body what it needs and it will work miracles for you, just give it a chance.

Until next time happy training.

Exercise for Life and your Family

When you sleep your body was designed to be almost continually active. It tosses and turns throughout the night while you sleep for very good reasons. Immobilize a limb for just a mere three hours and it starts to degenerate.  Even during sleep your body will automatically stretch and flex and turn more then a hundred or so times a night. It’s amazing to me that people in America become more and more sedentary trying to figure out the simplest way to answer the phone without moving a muscle and wondering why it hurts so much to do basic things such as walking or playing with the kids.  I could lie and say none of it is your fault but, of course, that would be a lie. So I will stick with the truth. Disuse is deadly. The fact is, the more you lead a sedentary life style the more damage you cause to your body! How do I know this? In a paper published way back in 1982, Dr. Walter Bortz from the Department of Medicine Clinic in the Journal of the American Medical Association reviewed 100 studies showing that sedentary lifestyles cause widespread bodily damage.¹ This damage occurred independently of other health risk factors such as smoking, alcohol, fat, age and family history of diseases. This study included some very amazing finding about individuals leading an inactive life style.

So what does a sedentary life style help cause? First, it reduces vital capacity.² In laymen’s terms this means sitting like a slug reduces your body’s ability to take up and use oxygen. So muscles, organs, and the brain become partially oxygen deprived. Secondly, inactivity reduces cardiac output, that is, the ability of your heart to pump blood around the body. So the tissues of couch potatoes become doubly deprived. They get less oxygen and less blood and the essential nutrients blood contains.

The fascinating thing is the body, in an effort to make up these deficits, constricts arteries, thereby raising blood pressure. This arterial constriction on top of a weakened heart not only increases things like blood clots and stroke, but it also makes your cardiovascular system less capable to respond to sudden movements or changes of position. Consequently that’s why sedentary people often get dizzy when standing up.  The restricted system of blood flow cannot respond efficiently.

Inactivity also helps increase levels of cholesterol and triglycerides. Triglycerides are fats you store. Inactivity continually shrinks the amount of muscle on your body which is the very thing you need to keep the fat off or get rid of those ever developing love handles. As muscles disappear and fat replaces it, over the years simple things like chasing the kids or walking up a flight of stairs is impossible without feeling like you need to call 911.

Bones become weak and thin because your skeleton requires resistance exercise to grow new bone matrix. A combination of inactivity and proper nutrition is a major cause of the current epidemic of osteoporosis today. Sex hormone levels also decline with inactivity which is now linked to the current increase in impotence in America. This number has tripled since the 1940s. Don’t take my word for it.  The studies exist for everybody to see.

I could go on and on with study after study showing how inactivity is responsible for most major problems people are encountering today, but that would be a book in itself.

The plain truth is exercise can save your life! A good exercise program helps strengthen heart and lungs by increasing vital capacity, protects blood pressure, aids in lower cholesterol, strengthens bones, helps protect glucose tolerance against the degenerative changes in insulin metabolism that leads to diabetes, and best of all for most, keeps the FAT off.   Exercise to the body is like an oil change to an automobile. If you change your oil every 3000 mile that car has a very good chance of clearing 200,000 miles easy. But take that car for granted and don’t change your oil and there’s a good chance that car will seize within 2 years.  The body is the same way with one difference:  You can’t go buy replacement parts at your local store. Well, you can to some degree, but be prepared to be bedridden or confined to a motorized chair for your remaining years.

Most people say they “Don’t have time to exercise” or “My family is more important”. I respond “if you are not around then who is going to take care of the family?!”  Give yourself and your family one of the biggest gift you can ever give…exercise. It won’t prevent everything but it will sure give you a good chance to have a long and fruitful life. Until next time happy training.