Fil’s ‘I’m gonna win and you’re not’ workout
A friend of mine, Fil, is competing in a weight loss challenge and asked me for some advise on a ‘just starting back’ workout, here are my words of wisdom. Keep in mind this is an otherwise athletic person. He plays basketball and dodge ball on a fairly regular basis. The weight loss challenge will produce a winner based on actual body fat lost.
Each week do 3-4 days of a resistance training circuit workout. Use moderate weight for 3-sets of 10-12 reps. Take time to recover between sets, but not enough to ‘cool’ down. For 1-2 of the days, pick two exercises for chest, back and one for shoulders. The other 1-2 days pick three exercises for legs, and one exercise for biceps, triceps and abs.
This will give you 5-6 exercises each day. AFTER weights, do 35-45 min of cardio at a moderate pace. You want to be able to talk but not sing. Alternately you can do 20min of moderate cardio and then play 30min of basket ball. But you don’t want to do and hour of cardio, an hour of weights and 30 min of basket ball…keep it under two hours!!
Then for two days, do HIIT cardio (high intensity interval training) only. This is 30 sec (or so…anywhere from 20-90sec) of super high intensity, the intensity will increase as your fitness does, so if ‘intense’ right now is a jog it doesn’t matter. Just do about 80% of what you can, then bring it down to a recovery walk for 60-120 seconds and repeat for 30-40 min. This schedule will give you 1-2 days of rest. You need to take at least one day a week of rest and let your body recoup.
Fil: What does circuit mean!
LeslieRae: In this case, that you are doing more than one body part. You can also do a circuit by doing one round of each exercise and then going back around and doing a second and third round.
Fil: This high intensity cardio sounds no fun.
LeslieRae: HIIT actually helps the time go by…because you are only focusing on 1 minute at a time.
Fil: Do I stay on one exercise or move around while doing it.
LeslieRae: I would recommend, for you, to just do the exercise. Your heart rate will elevate during lifting and the point of lifting is to work the muscle, so don’t worry about constantly moving like some people do. By working each muscle, you will burn more calories through out the day…the same is true with HIIT…it is proven that the body will burn more calories following a HIIT session than a ‘fat burning’ cardio session. You get hours of fat burning following the HIIT, but you don’t want to do it every day…you need to have buffer days so your body can recover and you don’t end up burning muscle…which is another reason why you HAVE TO keep your training under 2hrs.