Comprehensive fitness tips and information
Fitness Tips
As both a fitness trainer and a website owner, I've done a lot of research on what other sites are suggesting in terms of offering their visitors useful fitness tips and information. Needless to say, I've seen a lot of poorly written articles with false information. The few that I did find with sound information were very far back on the search query results. So I've decided to write this page to set the record straight and bring some order and accuracy to the search engine results for the keyword "fitness tips" and other phrases related to it.
Since "fitness" is a broad word, we're going to split this article up into a few sections to keep things organized and structured. Fitness primarily involves dieting, cardiovascular training, and resistance training.
Diet Tips
There are a few key dieting and nutrition tips that you need to know in order to make your dieting goals successful. Follow these and you will be sure to achieve your goals in due time.
- Know your calories
Knowing how many calories your body burns through the day, in relation to how many calories you consume per day is essential to both fat loss and building muscle. Use the BMR method to determine how many calories you burn during the day as illustrated in our diet programs article, and adjust the amount of calories you consume in either a surplus of 300 to 500 calories if you want to build muscle, or a deficiency of 300 to 500 calories if you want to lose fat. It's all a simple matter of reading your food labels and figuring out what you need to eat.
Most of the time though, you really don't have to pay attention too closely to a specific caloric amount when it concerns how much you consume and how much you burn. If you follow all of the other fitness tips for dieting in the following items of interest, chances are you will reach your fitness goal.
- Know your macronutrients
The three macronutrients are protein, carbohydrates and fats. Protein is for building muscle, and should be consumed moderately throughout the day and in an abundance after exercising. Carbohydrates are the body's preferred macronutrient of energy. Generally you should consume an abundance of carbohydrates in the morning to provide your body with fuel throughout the day, and particularly an hour or two before performing any type of strenuous activities like exercise. There are simple carbohydrates (the bad kind found in processed foods like candy) and complex carbohydrates (the good type as found in rice and other natural foods). It's always good to try and reduce your intake of simple carbohydrates, and try to eat more of complex carbohydrates. And finally there is fat. There are also two types of fat, which are saturated and unsaturated. You want to consume the unsaturated form of fat (as found in peanut butter, nuts, grains etc...) and try to reduce the amount of saturated fat.
There are 4 calories per every 1 gram of protein and carbohydrates. While there are 9 calories per 1 gram of fat. With that said, your daily caloric intake should come by way of approximately 20% to 35% protein (more on the higher end if your goal is to build muscle mass), 45% to 65% complex carbohydrates (more if you exercise regularly), and 10% to 15% unsaturated fats. This is one of the most important fitness tips for dieting.
- Consume at least 5 meals per day
The standard three large meals per day doesn't cut it. The meal portions are usually too big, and it's practically impossible to only eat three meals per day and not experience hunger. The ideal way to lose fat is not to encourage hunger, but to avoid it by eating smaller portioned, more frequent meals. If you eat at least 5 meals per day, you're going to raise your metabolism if you are normally used to only eating 3 or less. Eating more frequently raises your metabolism because the more you force your digesting system to work, the more calories it requires (energy) to make them work. This helps you burn more calories.
- Cut out the bad foods
Most people who are considerably "unfit" regularly eat unhealthy foods. These unhealthy foods are high in saturated fat and simple carbohydrates, which are the enemy. Processed foods are known to contain a lot of the enemy, so it's important to remove them from your diet program, and replace them with a more healthier alternative. Also, your effects to reach your fitness goals will be greatly enforced if you replace drinking pop / soda with water. This isn't to say that you can't "cheat" once daily, because you can afford it if the rest of your day was composed of healthy eating.
- Consistency, motivation and patience
If you aren't patient you will inevitably fail when it concerns anything in life. You have to keep consistent by following your diet program. You do this by keeping yourself motivated. There are a lot of different ways to keep yourself motivated, taking benchmark pictures of your progress, having a friend diet with you, and simply reminding yourself that you feel better physically and emotionally when you eat right.
Exercise Tips
There are different rules which you need to follow if you're looking to build muscle mass or lose fat. But although the goals are completely different, the way in which you get there are surprisingly similar. It's simply a matter of give and take, which you will see. If you want to build muscle mass then your focus will primarily be on resistance training with a supplemental focus on cardiovascular training. If your goal is to lose fat, then your focus will be on cardiovascular training with a supplemental focus on resistance training.
- Resistance Training for Building Muscle
Building muscle is all done through resistance training. Walking, running, doing pushups even won't help you build muscle. Simply because there isn't enough resistance, or stress placed upon your muscles that will force them to grow. Your muscles will only get bigger if they experience an amount of resistance that they've never experienced before. There are two different types of resistance training, machine resistance and freeweight resistance.
Freeweight resistance training is always preferred for those who are really looking to build muscle and add on pounds. The raw motion in which you must perform each rep with a barbell or a dumbbell helps to fully build the muscle and the surrounding stabilizer muscles. There are literally hundreds of different freeweight training exercises that target all of the muscle groups in the body.
Machine resistance training is an alternative form of building muscle if you don't have freeweight access. I've never been a fan of machines because they lack in two major areas. They don't allow you to perform the motions of each rep along a range of motion which is suitable to your own body, and they don't help build stabilizer muscles. This can lead to injury in cases where people only use machine resistance with heavy weight for an extended period of time.
- Cardiovascular Training for Fat Loss
As most of everyone knows, cardiovascular training is what you need to perform if you want to lose fat. This is one of the fitness tips that most are accustomed to. The term cardiovascular training is just another term for raising your heat rate for an extended period of time. So as you can imagine, there are literally thousands of activities that can do this. Running, jogging, biking, sex, elliptical training, rowing, rock climbing, etc.. The key is finding an activity that is strenuous enough to raise your heart rate, and fun enough for you to keep doing on a consistent basis.
- Resistance Training can help Lose Fat
If you supplement your exercise program with resistance training, you can enforce your efforts of fat loss by building muscle. Muscle requires more energy to sustain itself, which means they require more calories (hence they burn more calories).
- Cardiovascular Training can help Building Muscle
On the same note for cardio training, you can also supplement your resistance training program with cardio training. Cardiovascular training increases endurance, which means more blood flow to your muscles. And more blood flow to your muscles means a quicker recovery time which helps you build more muscle mass. The type of cardio training that is conducive towards building muscle is sprint training or any other type of activity that is short bouts of intense activity followed by resting.
Following
these fitness tips will help go a long way in building muscle and losing fat.
Of course there are a lot more specifics you can acquaint yourself with. And
that is where we come in. FitPractical is a service which educates their members
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