Ok, Here we are in week three. You’re getting to bed earlier most nights and you’re stepping up the vegetable intake so that it’s at least 25% of your daily food volume and more than half of what you eat at dinner.
What? Not so yet? Reaffirm your commitment to this process by fine tuning these two measures. They are fundamental to your future success.
Assuming you have the first two under control or close enough that you can take on another challenge, here it is:
Engage in short duration, high-intensity, low-impact, full-body exercise two to four hours per week.
Strength training applies but should be complemented by work that’s intended to get your heart rate close to it’s maximum for no more than 10 minutes at a time. I usually train my clients with between two and six minute circuits.
The reasons are that with this format you can:
- Hit unprecedented performance peaks (increasing not just your calorie burn, but also your future capacity to burn more calories).
- Reduce the load on your spine and major joints by dispersing the stress as compared to a single upper or lower-body, higher impact exercise with narrow-range repetitive movements.
- Constantly challenge yourself and avoid training plateaus associated with other types of less varied training programs
A simple circuit that illustrates this would be three or four rounds (with a minute rest in between each) of one minute of each of these exercises:
- X-Touch (also called cross-body touch)
- Mountain Climbers
- Stance Jack (step one foot out a a time for a lower impact version)
Four rounds is 12 minutes of accumulated cardio; better by far than a half hour on the treadmill.
Next week we’ll explore clean eating in more detail.
Learn more about how to get and stay in great shape? Contact Dan at Tri Valley Trainer
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