Treadmill Exercise

Walking and running on a treadmill can cut down on a lot of the impact and force through your joints that happens when walking or running on pavement and especially cement. Most treadmills offer the option of many settings to regulate and keep track of your time, distance and incline for each workout. Having the treadmill indoors also helps keep up consistency in your workouts, even when the weather fails you and saves you from battling hills, wind resistance and uneven terrain of the outdoors.

The Best Basic Form

• Pump your arms. Try to maintain your arm swing in a forward and back motion to increase your balance and coordination, and to maintain your cadence. This is useful to develop an efficient running form. Pumping your arms drives your legs.
• Keep your head level. Resist looking up to watch TV or at other distractions while running. Tilting your head back can throw your weight balance off and shift you into a more extended posture, making it hard to go forward.
• Land on the middle of your foot, roll off your toes.While you want a good heel strike with walking, when you are running, evidence has shown that landing in the midfoot and rolling through the toes is more efficient and softer on the knees.
• Run in the middle of the tread. Be safe. Position yourself to make sure each step lands in the middle of the tread. This reduces stress on your neck and shoulders from lifting your arms if you are running too close to the edge.
• Tilt forward a little. Keep your momentum moving forward by leaning forward a tad. Start a whole body lean from your ankles and let gravity work for you.
• Find a rhythm.Keeping a steady pace will allow you to work on your breathing and let you go further. To work on increasing your speed, aim to shorten your stride. Count the number of times your foot makes contact with the treadmill: shoot for 46-48 times in 30 seconds.
• Incline yourself! The easiest way to banish calories without noticing is to add a very easy incline to your workout. You will barely notice level 1-2, and this will simulate the challenges of the outdoors.

Elevate Your Indoor Workout

Use the treadmill to act as your moving track. You can start these moves with the treadmill on a stationary setting or very slow setting, and increase speed as your coordination improves.

• Intervals. Trying running at a variety of speeds. Turn up the level of speed for 0.25 mile and work through increases in incline. You can do intervals for distance or time. Change up your workouts in general. One day go for distance and the next go for speed intervals with walking inclines to recover the next.
• Incline Pyramid: Start at an incline level 4 and increase by one level every minute until you get to level 8. Then go back down one level every minute back down to 0 incline. Walk 5 minutes at level 0 to cool down.
• Karaokes/ Grapevines.This one is tricky, but works on many coordination skills and your lateral mobility. Face both directions with a few strides facing forward in between. Do not try this one if you cannot interweave your feet and perform this exercise on solid ground. Watch this video for a short how-to.

• Try Sidestepping. For some strength moves on the treadmill, turn down the speed to a slow walking pace and hold onto the side hand rail and face the side of treadmill (perpendicular to the direction of the tread). Do 10-15 sidesteps to each side with 10-15 strides going forward in between. As you improve, try doing a deeper squat sidestep and upping your speed.
• Lunges. On a stationary treadmill, hold on and do lunges.
• Squats. On a stationary treadmill, hold on and do squats with good form.

Workout Tips to Consider

Have a plan before you walk into the gym, and stick to it.
Set health/ workout goals for yourself, both for the short term and long term.
Read more tips on how to lose weight fast.
Workout when you’re outside of the gym by following the working man’s weight loss tips.

What Causes Belly Fat Build-up?

Excess belly fat is so common because many factors can contribute to this “spare tire”, “love handles”, “muffin tops”, or “pot belly” syndrome.  If all the root causes are not addressed all at the same time, then there is no way your belly fat will go away.  Here are some factors that contribute to excess belly fat:

• High calorie diet that is heavy on trans fat
  It’s no myth that eating too much can make you fat.  If you consume more energy than your body can burn, then your body stores that extra energy as fat for later use.  Researchers at Wake Forest University have also found that trans fat is a major contributor to belly fat.
• Not enough sleep or irregular sleeping patterns
  Sleep deprivation lowers the amount of leptin in your system, the chemical used for suppressing appetite.  Sleep deprivation can also lower your insulin levels, which helps regular your blood sugar.  Toying with these chemicals in your body so often by sleeping irregularly can have permanent adverse affects on your body (obesity and diabetes) .
• High stress levels
  Prolonged stress can causes our body to produce an excess of the cortisol hormone.  A small amount of these hormones are beneficial, but a large consistent amount can be detrimental to your health in many ways.  You guessed it, one of the drawbacks of cortisol is that it also contributes to belly fat.
• Lack of exercise or incorrect exercise routines
  It’s simple math.  If you consume more energy (calories) than you burn each day, that extra energy gets stored as fat cells.  Believe it or not, localized stomach workouts are actually one of the least effective workouts for burning off excess belly fat.
• Drug abuse (alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana)
  Drugs have adverse effects on your energy levels and appetite.  After one night of binge drinking, your metabolism slows down temporarily and will not recover for two days.  Cigarette cravings often feel like hunger cravings so people misunderstand and ingest food even when they are already full.  A well-known side effect of Marijuana is its ability to promote appetite.

How to Attack These Root Causes

I will be writing a few articles to talk about some of these things in more detail later on.  For now, here are some quick suggestions:

1. Come up with a weekly school/work/life schedule that works in the following elements: 7-9 hours of sleep starting at about the same time each night, minimum 4.5 hours of exercise, grocery shopping, and cooking time.
2. Come up with a healthy eating pattern (more on this on a later article) and try to not eat trans fat.  You can also try to incorporate these natural fat burning foods into your diet. I suggest that if you don’t have time to cook, you should either shift to eating simpler meals (cereal, salad, soup, fruits, steamed vegetables, etc.) or try freezer cooking to save time and still be able to eat healthy.  In general, food cooked at home is much healthier than food purchased from restaurants.
3. Try to exercise at least 4.5 hours a week. Three times each week at the gym: spend 45 minutes on weight lifting workouts focusing on building slow-twitch muscles and spend 45 minutes doing interval training (alternating low intensity and high intensity aerobic based exercises).  Slow-twitch muscles should help you burn extra fat day-by-day.
4. Find a way to de-stress yourself.  Try scheduling a meditation or yoga session weekly.  It might also help to adopt a new regime for getting work done or find ways to improve your mood.
5. Say no to drugs.  Try to limit yourself to 3 drinks at social events.  If you are a smoker, remind yourself that feeling of hunger can just be cigarette cravings.  You really don’t have to drink or smoke to be social.  I’ve lost a total of 20 lbs. ever since I’ve stopped smoking and stopped binge drinking.
6. Take fish oil supplements to help improve your metabolism. See another post on the fish oil supplements out there.

More Help Is on the Way

I will be continuing this discussion in later posts, going into detail on which exercises to perform, which diet plan to follow and which de-stressing techniques to try.  Until then check out my post on using the ECA Stack for weight loss and stay tuned to this blog via the RSS feed!