Fitness Hacks
Fitness Hacks ,These ideas and methods will help you live a healthier, more active life and reach all of your fitness hacks objectives, whether you want to gain muscle, lose weight, or simply become in better shape so you can play with your kids.
10 Fitness Secrets You Need To Know
1. Find Your WHY (Burning Desire) – Fitness Hacks
Do you know your reason why? It’s your reason why that spurs you to action and keeps you from quitting. If your reason why isn’t big enough, you’ll stay on the couch, or at least go back to it after a few weeks. Find a big enough reason why and you’ll push through to success. Do you know your reason why? Well figure it out!
2. Forgive Yourself
Life is about mistakes. We all make them. All the freaking time! It’s not whether or not you make a mistake, it’s how you react to it that counts.
Don’t let a mistake like missing a few workouts, or binging in front of the television one night completely throw you off your game and cause you to quit.E-book
Acknowledge you slipped, and start fresh in the morning. Don’t let it fester and become a big thing so that before you know it, you’ve been eating Krispy Kreme for three months and haven’t worked out, either!
You can’t change yesterday. Focus on now!
3. Eliminate Negativity (Yeah, People, Too!)
Sadly, some of the biggest obstacles to overcome when trying to make positive changes in your life are your friends and family. They have many reasons, I’m sure, from trying to “protect” you or your self–esteem to trying to sabotage you out of fear because if you make all these positive changes you might just leave them behind as they still go to happy hour (for hours), party late into the morning and sleep half the day, and while away the hours in front of the television.
You need to make very clear what your goals are and that you need their support. If they can’t support you, they can’t be around you. Sure, that sounds harsh but sometimes necessary.
4. Fitness Hacks Turn Off The Freaking TV!
You heard me! Don’t look at me like that! Everybody is too freaking busy for this and that and the other thing, yet they
spend 10 plus hours a week watching television.
Here’s a shocking news alert for you. 99.99% of what is on TV is complete crap! Turn it off!
5. (Re) Cycle – Fitness Hacks
Fitness Hacks, I’m as big a believer in hard, intense workouts as anyone. But there’s a difference between training hard (and smart) and just beating up and wearing down your body.
You need recovery days and periods of lower intensity as well so your body can recover, repair, adapt and improve.
This means easing off the gas pedal every once in a while. This can be done a few different ways.
You could take a full week off out of the gym every 8 to 12 weeks or so (and if you must do something, take easy bike rides or walks). If you think that will mess you up and get you out of the habit of exercising, then just dial things back for a week.
Go to a full body weight training workout using regular old straight sets (no metabolic resistance training, circuit training, supersets or any intensity techniques) and don’t go near failure.
If you can bench 150 for 3 sets of 10, try 150 for 3 sets of 5 or lower the weight to 120 for sets of 8 or 10.
Another version of cycling is to improve your lifts, especially when you get stuck and can’t seem to move up your numbers.
Once this is accomplished, you back off and then perform another training cycle, working up to a poundage that is slightly higher than your previous best.
You don’t want to peak with a 1 rep max lift. You want to increase your training poundage that you use for 6 to 20 reps.
Here’s an example of a 12 week cycle using the squat.
Let’s say you can squat 260 pounds for six reps. Start the program with 75 percent of this amount (roughly 200 pounds) and do two sets of 10 reps each.
Yes, you could most likely do more but we are building momentum.
Remember, cycling is to help you avoid burnout and sort of trick your body into new territory.
Your Fitness Hacks 12 week intensity cycling routine might look like this:
Week 1 Monday – 200 x 2 x 10 Friday – 205 x 2 x 10
Week 2 Monday – 210 x 2 x 10 Friday – 215 x 2 x 10
Week 3 Monday – 220 x 2 x 10 Friday – 225 x 2 x 10
Week 4 Monday – 230 x 2 x 10 Friday – 235 x 2 x 10
The intensity is ramping up. Time to drop the second set.
Week 5 Monday – 240 x 10 Friday – 245 x 10
Week 6 Monday – 250 x 10 Friday – 255 x 10
Week 7 Wednesday – 260 x 10
Week 8 Monday – 265 x 9 Friday – 270 x 9
Week 9 Wednesday – 275 x 9 Friday – 285 x 8
Week 11 Wednesday – 290 x 7
Reduce the training frequency to once per week.
Week 12 Wednesday – 295 x 6
Week 13 Wednesday – 300 x 6
Week 14 Wednesday – 305 x 5
End of cycle! Great work!
At this point, you can take a week to ten days off from the gym to rest and recover and then start another training program or a different type of cycle.
Keep in mind, there are endless variations of this idea and you may want to experiment with different one’s.
6. Warm Up Don’t Burn Out (Exercise Specific) – Fitness Hacks
A warm up is to keep you from getting injured while also priming your body to perform at its best.
A warm muscle contracts better than a cold muscle. But you don’t want to wear yourself out on your exercise specific warm up and hurt your true work sets.
So keep the reps on your warm up sets low (say 5 or less). If you need to, do an extra set or two with slightly more weight, as opposed to doing harder sets and higher reps.
7. Sleep More
We look at a lot of things when it comes to fat loss. We try and put together the best workout program for boosting our metabolism. We change our nutrition and even try and eat specific foods and food combinations that are supposed to help burn fat. And these are obviously crucial to your body transformation. If you want to shed fat and build some lean muscle, while feeling better, too, you need to eat right and exercise.
But one of the most important things we can do, and you almost never see it recommended, is just getting more sleep each night! Most of us don’t get nearly enough sleep. This can not only affect your fat loss or muscle building efforts but your overall health as well. Stop staying up late to watch crappy television!
A lack of sleep raises cortisol levels. Cortisol is a hormone that increases when stress levels increase, one of the causes being a lack of sleep. Cortisol causes a break down of body tissue (think muscle). Combine this with dieting, which also raises cortisol levels and you have a problem with the potential loss of muscle mass.
Losing muscle mass is the opposite of what you want to happen when training for fat loss. Losing muscle makes everything worse – how you look, how you feel; it slows down your metabolism which makes it harder to lose fat. On top of that, it brings about a loss of strength which makes your training as well as everyday activities more difficult.
A study that appeared in the journal Laboratory of Physiology in Belgium, showed that those who were not getting enough sleep, had higher cortisol levels in the afternoon and early evening, when compared to those that were getting enough sleep.
Ever crave carbohydrates after a night of tossing and turning? It seems a lack of sleep has an impact on hormone release and evels as well as on the metabolism, one of which is an increase in appetite, according to a Chicago study.
Two hormonal issues with sleep restriction that can become a big problem are insulin sensitivity and a decrease in glucose sensitivity as well. These are extremely important factors when it come to diabetes as well as how full you feel after a meal.
You might want to reconsider how much damage that extra hour of television each night is doing to your health and your fitness.
8. Perform Interval Training – Fitness Hacks
In its simplest definition, interval training is alternating bouts of high intensity with bouts of lower intensity. One example would be hill sprints. Sprint up the hill, walk down, and repeat. There are many ways to incorporate interval training into your program.
What is probably the most well known interval, thanks to a study done by Dr. Tabata is the 20/10 interval where you do an all out bout of exercise for 20 seconds followed by 10 seconds of rest before repeating.
But there are many, many effective interval ranges you can perform, with an almost endless variety of exercises. You can do intervals while running, or on a stationary bike or treadmill, which is what most people do. But you can also perform intervals using resistance training, such as with barbells, kettlebells, dumbbells, sandbags or even body weight exercises.
You don’t have to complicate things. If you’re doing some sort of cardio training with your intervals, you can use longer intervals, like 60 seconds hard, followed by 30 seconds or 60 seconds easy and go for 20 to 30 minutes.
With resistance training, you’ll most likely want to keep the intense portion of the interval between 10 and 40 seconds.
A great interval training workout could be as simple as 8 rounds of body weight squats in 20/10 style, followed by 8 rounds of push ups in 20/10 style, which makes an 8 minute workout.
Or you could alternate by doing one round of the body weight squats followed by one round of the push ups and repeat for 8 rounds.
However you do it, DO IT!
9. Eat More Protein – Fitness Hacks
Eating more protein will help you twofold. It will help boost your metabolism and aid your fat loss efforts. Protein is also crucial for adding sexy, calorie burning muscle mass to your body.
Eating more protein to burn fat was confirmed in a study published in the American Journal of Physiology. One group was fed a high protein diet (just over one gram per pound of bodyweight per day) while the second group consumed a protein diet near equal to that of the RDA.
The group eating the high protein diet burned more fat than the group consuming protein near equal to the RDA.
10. Use A Green Drink – Fitness Hacks
We don’t get nearly enough nutrition from our nutrition these days. Be absolutely sure you’re feeding your body what it needs. And don’t get some “green” drink that has a lot of filler in it or tastes so absolutely horrible that you stop taking it after a day or two. Check out something like Macro Greens on Amazon, which doesn’t have that nasty taste associated with most green drinks.
Another option is making your own green drinks, if you have the time and the inclination. You’ll definitely need a high quality juicer like the Breville BJE200XL Compact Juice Fountain 700 Watt Juice Extractor.