Smart for Life Cookie Diet

Well that’s a interesting question, maybe we can get you thinking “out of the box”, and trying a different approach.

I really dislike cardio, well, cardio in the traditional sense e.g. 2 hours on an elliptical training machine.

Most fitness people, you know, the beginner to intermediate, or anyone trying to control their weight and tone up, assume its a “must have” they need “cardio exercise” to reach their goals. Most people never even consider an alternative.

However, there is alternative way of reducing excess abdominal by exercising, in fact a much better way to get the body you want. You may be surprised to know that most of the worlds top fitness professionals (men and women), WILL NOT do any type of normal or traditional cardio.

If you are extremely overweight and have mobility problems because of that, then low intensive cardio sessions could be a good place to start. However there may be more effective options.

So what is the definition of “cardio”?

To the majority cardio is hours on a treadmill, all the time watching the TV screen at their local gym complex. This is “traditional cardio”. OK so it’s not surprising most people get demotivated and eventually quit after a couple of months of no results.

Now, a “cardio” workout can be described as any type of work or activity that strengthens the cardiovascular system. It’s beyond the scope of this article to go into the technicalities but, to keep things straightforward, if it gets your heart rate up, and you are sweating, it’s cardio. It doesn’t matter if you’re working out with dumbbells or a barbell and everyone calls it weight training…it’s still working your heart.

To illustrate lets take a dumbell clean & press, an exercise that involves lifting a weight from the floor to the shoulders, then pressing it overhead. Even though this is usually viewed as a powerlifting exercise, the amount of weight doesn’t make a massive difference in real terms so if 25 lbs is challenging to you, then you will still benefit just as much. These exercises are just as relevant for the girls out there.

So most people will still see this as a total weight training or strength exercise. However, next time you are in the gym grab a couple of dumbells and do 15-20 reps of clean and press, assuming you have used a good challenging weight, I’m certain your heart will achieve about 80-90% of your recommended max rate for your age, and you feel like you just did a 100-meter sprint which incidentally, sprinting is far superior to jogging any day, it’s probably one of the most effective fat burners.

Now lets try 20 reps of one-arm snatches with each arm with a dumbbell, has that got your heart racing, and you’re out of breath. Try 5 minutes straight of bodyweight squats, lunges, and push ups hardly with any rest in between. Again, notice your heart beating, sweat pouring off of you, and chest heaving away!

This regime of training is brilliant at conditioning your heart! Conventional thinking says that these are weight or strength training exercises. However, they are also duplicating your cardio time as well, and who doesn’t want to save valuable time. You also build and tone virtually every muscle that you have with these great full body exercises that is assuming, you put in the maximum effort. Now sitting on a bike watching TV is just not going to get the same results in the same time (later we will talk about the relationship between muscle growth and your metabolism and why you should do these types of exercises). This is how to burn belly fat.

But to close the whole conventional cardio thing, If you can watch a TV program during a training session you just can’t be concentrating on the job in hand, and you will never get the results you desire, you are just not working hard enough…. food for thought?

Thank you for visiting our Cookie Diet website today. We hope you join the program and start losing weight.