How A Cardio Heart Rate Monitor Helps You

By Debralynn Shaffer

Why Have a Cardio Heart Rate Monitor?

I recently finished a 12-week team fitness and weight loss program at my local gym, where I learned many valuable things about fitness training and how it relates to heart health and efficient workouts. I experienced first-hand the necessity of being able to watch your heart rate with an exercise heart rate monitor, while doing various speed and incline intervals on the treadmill to have a more effective workout. A cardio heart rate monitor can tell you your heart rate, cardio training zone, calories burned and give you valuable heart smart knowledge about your body’s fitness.

Know Your Cardio Zones

After completing this fitness program, I learned that it is absolutely necessary to know what heart rate training zone you are working in to improve your workout efficiency — to get the most benefit in the least amount of time. A heart rate monitor helps you know what cardio zone (Zones 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5) you are working in. In class, we spent most of our time working between Zone 2: the “temperate zone,” Zone 3: the “aerobic zone,” and some time in Zone 4: the “threshold zone.” Zone 2 is commonly known as the fat burning zone, where you are exercising comfortably and body fat begins moving out of your cells. Zone 3, typically referred to as the sweat zone, involves exercising at 70%-80% of your mazimum heart rate, burning a combination of fat and carbohydrates and increasing your aerobic capacity.

Beginning to intermediate workouts include work in Zone 2 & 3 for people training to improve their aerobic fitness. Zone 4 is a tougher place to work out, where you go above your “Anaerobic Threshold (AT).” (Your AT is the level of exercise your body can sustain utilizing both fat and carbohydrates as fuel). Finally, Zone 5: the “high zone,” uses the highest pecentage of heart beats and calories burned as you become more advanced and get in top physical condition. I could always count on my heart rate monitor to tell me which zone I was in and for how long, including my heart rates and recovery times. After a period of time, I got to know how my body’s heart rate responded while working between these zones, and up to AT and back down.

Know Your Heart Rate - Hands Free

In addition, a heart rate monitor can tell you your heart rate while your hands remain free of the treadmill. While we walked or ran the treadmill, the trainer called out something like “OK, now three minutes to the top of Zone 3,” or “Two minutes recovery time to the bottom of Zone 2,” as we lifted 5 to 8 pound weights, or stretched rubber bands in various routines. It’s convenient and easy to look at your heart rate monitor while you are in the middle of these routines using your arms and hands for upper body fitness. Our trainer continually stressed to a few in the class that did not yet have heart rate monitors, that the treadmill heart monitor could not be counted on to be accurate. This is especially so while a person is lifting weights at various inclines and speeds while walking or running.

Watch Your Calories Burn!

I enjoyed watching my cardio heart rate monitor tell me the number of calories I was burning while working out, as well as up to about three hours afterward. At the beginning of each treadmill workout, I’d punch my heart rate monitor to the calorie display and hit “Start.” By watching this display continually during my workout, it helped me to know how my body’s heart rate coincided with the number of calories burned. (The calories will naturally burn more slowly in the beginning of your workout). As we warmed up and worked into Zone 3, then up to AT — it was interesting to watch the number of calories burn so much faster! What was even more fun — was seeing the number of calories burned at the end of the workout session.

More Efficient Workouts = More Benefits

No matter where you are on your road to lifetime fitness, by working out efficiently you will increase your benefits in a shorter period of time. You can expect to have more energy, feel stronger, and have less stress while learning to use a program tailored to your exercise fitness goals and heart health needs. If you are more fit but looking for improvements, you can still expect to enjoy working out, burn fat more efficiently and train smarter, not harder. Even if you’re a serious athlete or marathon runner, you will continually increase your heart monitoring knowledge, and be able to create a precision fitness training program. In my own experience, I decreased my body fat percentage by 5% and decreased my resting pulse rate and recovery times. I learned how my body’s heart rate responded while working between the zones, up to AT and back down. I gained valuable knowledge so I am continually able to increase my fat burning and aerobic capacities, and go to the next level of improvement.

Summary – Work Out Smarter!

Once you get a heart rate monitor, you’ll be hooked! You’ll no longer be content to not be able to know your heart rate, training zones or calories burned. You’ll realize that by knowing your heart rate, you’ll get the very most from your body’s fitness capacities and your time spent pursuing your lifetime fitness goals. Today, it’s all about working smarter, not harder! A heart rate monitor will help you to work out the smart way! You’ll gain valuable knowledge about your personal fitness, which helps you reach your fitness goals easier, and faster. Just remember – be consistent, and don’t give up!

Debra Shaffer is the owner of www.BestCardioMonitors.com She has several online businesses where she enjoys using the written word to give people access to valuable information through online resources. Debra has also worked in the public relations, journalism and educational fields, and lives in Gilbert, AZ with her family. Please feel free to email any questions or comments to her at sales@bestcardiomonitors.com.

Article Source: EzineArticles.com/?expert=Debralynn_Shaffer

               

How Every Gym Teacher Can Combat Childhood Obesity With Almost No Money

By Rick Osbourne

Thinking back over the seventeen years I spent teaching Physical Education and coaching various sports, one thing stands out to me as I read more and more about the obesity epidemic that’s stalking our nation’s kids today. During those years I noticed that kids who could perform pull ups were never overweight. And kids who were overweight could never perform pull ups. Now I know you don’t have to be a gym teacher in order to see that. It’s common knowledge. It’s so common in fact that I think we’ve overlooked it as an incredibly simple solution to childhood obesity. Let me explain.

Every Gym Teacher Knows What I’m Talking About

From this simple observation that at least every other gym teacher in the nation will recognize, I drew the following conclusion. Start young (i.e. grades k, 1, and 2) before they’ve had a chance to gain much excess weight, and teach them to be able to perform at least one pull up. Then teach them that as long as they maintain the ability to perform at least one pull up, they can never be much overweight. Furthermore, the more pull ups they can do, the leaner and stronger they’ll be, naturally.

Now Hold Your Horses…

“But hold your horses here,” you say. I can hear it all now. “How am I going to teach my students to do pull ups when 90% of them completely despise the exercise, and whenever possible, they avoid the pull up bar like the plague? This not the military or a police academy where you can force the participants to do pull ups. This is a school. How can I teach kids to do something that they’d never practice? And even if they wanted to practice (which they don’t), most of my students can’t do pull ups, so they couldn’t practice even if they wanted to.”

So How Do You Teach Kids To Love Doing Pull Ups

These are of course good questions and I wouldn’t be writing this article if I wasn’t pretty sure that I had a good, quick, and practical answer in hand. So here goes. The solution to the problem is to use a height adjustable pull up bar which you can create inexpensively by hanging a chain (one inch links) solidly from a height of ten feet (picture it attached to a basketball backboard), so it reaches down to approximately three feet from the floor. This will accommodate the required height adjustment for all kids.

Now using a snap hook and a center mounted pull up bar, you can attach the bar to the chain at any height you choose. You can raise and lower the bar at one inch increments, which will allow every student in your class to find a level where they can perform at least eight LEG ASSISTED PULL UPS. That is to say you can find a level where every student succeeds in front of their peers. Failure is not part of this program.

Student’s Inch Their Way To Success

The strategy is to allow students to work out two to three times per week and increase their repetitions from eight to nine, ten, eleven, and twelve reps. When they can do twelve repetitions at a particular height, you move the bar up one inch and begin the whole eight to twelve rep routine all over again. What you’ll witness is kids “inching” their way up the chain over time, until eventually they run out of leg assistance. At that point they’ll have learned to do real live pull ups, a feat that most of ‘em could never do before you took the time to teach them how.

Emphasizing Self Competition

It’s important to emphasize self competition over competition with other students. Every student is different, and they will start at various starting points and finish at various times. But the key ingredient is that each student makes visible progress regularly. It’s important they see that they are better this week than last week, better this month than last month, which means that if they persist, they will reach the goal of being able to physically pull their own weight.

Some Will Need To Make Adjustments

Now in order to reach this end goal, some kids will have to adjust their nutritional intake and lose a little weight. Others may want to add some calorie burning aerobic work to accomplish a similar goal. And still others may want to experiment with the time of day they when work out, or the amount of sleep they get at night. Regardless, encourage them to do whatever they need to do (short of anabolic steroids) to get their chin up to the bar without needing of leg assistance. Interestingly enough, you will find that the kids will make those adjustments naturally, on their own because when it’s presented right, public success is built into the program right from the get go. And as successes are piled on top of successes in very thin slices, they add up to big successes, and the feeling that they can try something a little bit harder in front of the other kids and still expect to succeed will become more and more prevalent and resilient with each new workout.

Self Confidence Will Win The Day

Before you know it, the self esteem and self confidence that comes from succeeding in public will be visible in the way the student approaches all kinds of new tasks, from the pull up bar to memorizing their multiplication tables. When that “yes I can” attitude is firmly in place and has permeated every pore, you the gym teacher will have done much more than giving them a functional tool with which to avoid obesity for the rest of their life…which in itself is no small feat today. You will also have given those students an inner strength that will carry them through school, through the workplace, through the ups and downs of modern day family life. You will effectively give them the green light that will help them battle their way through the challenges that life inevitably offers, and the persistence to come out the other side with a smile on their face and a cup half full instead of half empty. And if you do, you will be the best teacher these kids will ever know. Not too bad for teaching kids to do pull ups, wouldn’t you agree?

Beginning of Side Bar

What Should The Gym Teacher’s Goal Be?

I suggest that you find a starting place for every member of your class at the beginning of the school year. You’ll discover right off the bat that some will be able to do regular pull ups, while others will need to use the leg assisted technique to learn how. With this thought in mind, the gym teacher’s goal in my view should be to monitor the percentage of kids who can do regular pull ups, and to make sure that percentage is always going up. For example if ten percent of your class can do real live pull ups at the beginning of the year, it would be great if fifteen could do it by semester time, and twenty percent by the end of the school year…although you may do much better than that. In short, the closer we get to having all students vaccinated against obesity by maintaining the ability to physically pull their own weight, the closer we will be to winning the war on obesity.

End of Side Bar

Rick Osbourne is a Chicago based freelance writer who currently serves as Executive Director for Operation Pull Your Own Weight, an informational web site dedicated to showing parents and educators how to naturally immunize kids against obesity for a lifetime without shots, pills, or fancy diets to get the job done. If you’re interested in knowing more about www.childhood-obesity-prevention.comchildhood and obesity or www.childhood-obesity-prevention.comobesity in America check out the web site at www.pullyourownweight.net. Rick can be reached via email at Osbourne.rick@gmail.com or by phone during business hours.

Article Source: EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rick_Osbourne

               

Your Ideal Muscle Building & Fat Burning Workout

By Gregg Gillies

Fitness training is not just a physical pursuit of lean muscle, fat loss and a new, sexy body. It’s an intellectual pursuit as well. In order to get the results you want, you have to develop an ideal plan that’s right for you.

Most people never take this step. They copy some routine or diet they’ve read about and if it helps them make progress, great, and if not, they quit out of frustration without taking the time to think things through and develop a training program that will give them real progress. Don’t let this happen to you.

You don’t need to blindly follow the weight training routines, dietary regimens and overall programs of the people you read about in the magazines. Don’t get me wrong, they can be great programs, but they may not work for you exactly as written. You may need to make some changes to make the programs be effective muscle building and fat burning programs.

For example, the barbell squat is the cornerstone of many of the most effective weight training programs in existence and I highly recommend it. However, there really are some people that either can’t squat, or do not have a body type that makes the squat nearly as effective for them and they may be better off substituting another leg exercise like the leg press or lunges. If you don’t think about what you are doing, you’ll never make this step and you’ll short circuit your ability to build muscle and lose fat.

A personal example for me is the bench press. I have found, through experience, that the decline bench press is a much more effective exercise. First, the flat bench press can wreak havoc on your shoulders and rotator cuff. In addition, I have longer arms, making the bench press more of a tricep exercise for me than a chest builder. The decline bench press puts me in a position that elminates both of these negatives.

There are a number of highly effective basic weight training routines, many of which I’ve shared on www.buildleanmuscle.com. And a lot of people will make great progress on these routines, as is. But the real key to these programs is that you can adapt them to suit you, like in the examples I gave above.

Here are 5 key tips to an effective weight training and nutrition program for you.

Train Hard

This one seems so simple, yet so few people really put forth the necessary effort to see the results they want. If you are going to try training, you might as well give yourself the best chance for success and that means training hard. Everyone must work hard. That’s just the cold, hard truth. This doesn’t mean that you have to train for hours every day. But it does mean that the time you spend working out must challenge you. You gotta put in the work.

Being persistent is a key component of working hard. Too many people get overenthusiastic about starting a new fitness program or nutrition program and they go nuts the first couple of weeks. This leads to soreness and burn out and they end up back on the couch before they see any real progress.

Even if your training program is perfect, you still have to work it. You won’t see results, otherwise. Forget all the gimmicks and fads. Use the proven, basic exercises that work and work them.

Don’t Overtrain

This is crucial to your long term fitness success. If you overtrain, you won’t make any gains. You’ll also feel like crap and want to quit, either because you’re exhausted or because you are discouraged at your lack of progress from so much effort. Some people love the easy way out so let me make clear that avoiding overtraining is not an excuse to take it easy and only workout once a month!

When it comes to bulding muscle (and even losing fat) more is not always better. Quality counts big time (see training hard above). If you’re making great progress on your current routine, it does not mean you’ll make even more progress if you triple the amount of work you are doing. Your body needs time to recover from your training. With weight training, work hard doing a few sets of the basic exercises. With cardio, consider doing more high intensity interval training as opposed to long time periods of slow-go cardio.

Eat Right and Rest

You don’t need to follow some new diet fad in order to lose fat or build muscle. Stick to the basics and you’ll be fine. This means mostly raw foods, fruits and vegetables, lean meats, etc. Stay away from simple sugars, processed foods, and foods with trans fats. Get good fats in your diet and supplement with a good essential fat acid supplement like Udo’s Choice Oil Blend.

Attitude Determines Your Altitude

Maintaining a positive attitude is very important when it comes to being successful with your health and fitness program. No, this isn’t easy. And, unfortunately, a lot of the negative pressure will come from those closest to you. If you’re always around people who are constantly negative and try to bring you down, get rid of them. I know that sounds harsh, but if you want to be successful you need to be around other people like you, not people who do nothing but complain. No bs, no excuses.

The Best Routine For You

Once you have all these things in place, you can start experimenting with changes in the basic routines that suit you best. Maybe dips are the best chest exercise for you, instead of the bench press. If so, do dips! Maybe you do better on three hard sets of 6 reps each, instead of one all out set of 12 reps. Then do three sets. Maybe you get better results when you train with 3 minutes of rest between sets (or 30 seconds) instead of a minute and a half. Then make the change!

Little changes like this can go a long way toward building muscle and losing fat, while keeping you from quitting. While you have to work hard, you may find that it’s easier to work hard when you workout in a way that suits your mental makeup. Your exercise program needs to relfect that. While I believe squats are the best exercise around hands down, and you should learn to like them, if you hate them to the point that you quit training, what good are they? Maybe you’ve found that you can workout much harder and more consistently with leg presses then do leg presses. You’ll make better progress on a slightly inferior exercise if you work it hard, then you will if you don’t workout at all because you hate the exercise you are supposed to do.

Train hard, don’t train too much, eat right, get quality rest, stay positive, and experiment to find what works for you. This will take you a long way toward building muscle, burning fat and making health and fitness a permanent part of your life.

Gregg Gillies is the founder of http://www.buildleanmuscle.com. Interested in gaining 21 pounds of muscle in only 9 weeks? Grab his free report at http://www.fastmasstips.com. Want to boost your metabolism, burn more fat with less effort and lose all the weight you want…fast? Grab his free report at http://www.fatlosssecretsrevealed.com.

Article Source: EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gregg_Gillies