Five Fatal Fitness Mistakes and What You Can Do About Them

Here are the first 3 of the five fatal fitness mistakes and what to do about them. Next week I will have the other 2!

1- Not getting stronger and increasing muscle mass. If your goal is to lose fat, increasing your muscle mass will increase your metabolism (burn more calories/fat throughout the day). You’ll be stronger, toned, leaner and get rid of cellulite. Establish a consistent routine, ideally 3 times a week.
A) Lift heavier than you did the last time, even if it is for one repetition, and build on that.
B) Slow down. Unless you are doing power-lifting moves or kettlebell swings (both are great), you should not be using momentum.
C) Change up the workout program, the amount of repetitions, the rest periods between sets, the lifting tempo, or the amount of sets you do. Changing the demand on your muscles keeps them from adapting to the same routine.

2- Spending too much time doing ab exercises in hopes of losing belly fat. Your abs may be strong and developed even if you can’t see definition because a layer of belly fat is covering them up. Seeing that amazing coveted 6-pack, takes amazing work. Most of the fat around your belly is a result of your nutrition. Your exercise to reduce belly fat should include interval cardio training and super-sets using high intensity, full body combinations  like squats, pulling and pushing exercises.

3- Thinking that you have to spend a long time doing cardio -Long slow cardio is not the way to burn fat, in fact, it might help you store fat, slow your metabolism, and burn more muscle, not fat.

Let’s suppose you start out at 20 minutes walking on the treadmill. Next you increase it to 30 minutes and so on… until you are walking an hour or more, but you can’t understand why nothing has changed in all that time. Your body has efficiently learned to adapt to the demand you are placing on it… so now it doesn’t need to burn as many calories in order to walk longer. In fact, it becomes very efficient at storing fat and burning off muscle!

Ever watched someone reading a book or talking on the cell phone while on cardio equipment… sometimes for over an hour? Who will burn more calories? The steady walker or the person who is totally focused, breathing hard, sweating and giving it their all-out, either with more resistance or speed?

Just like increasing the weight load with strength training, when it comes to cardio, you need to increase both intensity (how hard) and duration (how long)… and vary the type of exercise. Check out this earlier post on how to do a fat-blasting cardio workout.

If you need help designing a program for your workouts, I can build a 4-week program for you when you sign up for the custom program or you can get a copy of my “Women’s In Home Workout!” E-book that you to the right of this page. These are extremely affordable alternatives to personal training. With the custom program you’ll have access to me personally, and with the self-serve program, you can get effective workouts daily, that are designed based on the information you enter in.