Fitness & Wellness

There are no mysteries about getting fit. It’s just a matter of doing it. You simply wake up, kick A@#, repeat. That’s the real secret behind fitness, but there are also many other things that can help you reach your goals faster. Consider combining a healthy diet with your workout. Not only will you lose weight faster, you’ll feel better and get more from the workout and every waking moment. A healthy diet devoid of processed food can put pep in your step so you have the energy to maximize your workout.

Add strength training to your workout.

Strength training not only provides a great deal of benefits for your health, it also helps melt fat away faster. While endurance training burns huge amounts of calories, too, it also burns lean muscle mass. When you do strength training it burns calories while also building muscle mass. The more muscle tissue you have, the easier it is to shed weight. That’s because muscle tissue burns more calories than fat tissue does. Strength training also stimulates after burn, which raises the number of calories you burn for up to 48 hours.

Circuit training gets you to your goal quicker.

You can target multiple muscle groups at once with circuit training. Each routine is a mix of exercises to help you reach your goal quicker. Circuit training is a time saver. As you swiftly move from one exercise to another, you’ll boost your cardio health and burn calories, which helps you reach your weight loss goal quicker.

Vary your workout.

One of the reasons Iron Fit offers so many different types of exercise options is that each one has something to offer. It’s also to help motivate clients. While you might not love calisthenics, you might love doing kettlebells or kicking and punching your way to fitness. It’s one reason Iron Fit has so many different options available and introduce them to each client. You might not think you’ll love a specific method of exercise, but once you try it, end up loving it. Not only does varying your workout avoid boredom and plateauing, it ensures every muscle is worked on every plane.

• Don’t make the gym the only place to get exercise. Whenever you get the chance to walk a little further, do it. Park further from the grocery door. Take breaks from sitting and move around every 50 minutes.
• Vary your speed. Whether you’re walking, working out or cleaning house, varying your speed from top speed to recovery speed every few minutes acts like a high intensity interval training session.
• Get adequate sleep. You can’t do your best if you’re not getting enough sleep. Lack of sleep can cause you to eat more by disrupting the balance of leptin and ghrelin hormones.
• Use a workout that’s created specifically for your fitness level and needs. We create it for you at Iron Fit.

For more information, contact us today at Iron Fit San Antonio

Trying to find the best diet to help you lose weight can be confusing. We don’t recommend dieting and believe the best option is healthy eating. However, it’s interesting to note that eating healthy can be low carb dieting. Low carb diets don’t contain processed foods or sugary products, which is part of a program of healthy eating. The information provided on a low carb diet shows the types of foods to eat on this diet and includes the positives and negatives.

Identifying foods to avoid on a low carb diet is easier than noting the ones to eat.

You normally associate dieting with a limited list of foods, but just like eating healthy, low carb diets provide lots of options. As noted before, sugar products and highly processed foods aren’t allowed on this type of diet, neither are soft drinks, artificial sweeteners, most vegetable oils and ice cream. That means it eliminates most of the low fat and diet food you find on the market. These are processed foods and often contain sugar to enhance the flavor that was lost when fat was removed. One thing that healthy eating includes that isn’t part of a low carb diet or is limited is pasta and bread.

You’ll find a lot of food that’s high in protein and/or may have fat.

How you get your calories changes when you go with a diet that’s lower in carbohydrates. Instead of getting most of your energy from carbohydrates, you get it from foods higher in fat and protein. When you eat carbohydrates, like traditional diets, your body changes those carbohydrates’ glucose to glycogen and then stores the glycogen in the liver. When the liver is at maximum storage capacity, the body converts it to fat. Cutting back on carbohydrates makes your body get fuel elsewhere and that’s body fat.

There are health benefits that come with low carbohydrate diets.

Low carbohydrate diets lower the insulin levels and reduces the risk for insulin resistance, which is a precursor to Type 2 diabetes. This type of diet also helps lower the LDL levels, the bad cholesterol, and increase the HDL or good cholesterol levels. It stabilizes blood sugar levels and triglyceride levels. They type of food consumed in a low carb diet have many health benefits. For instance, grass fed beef and butter from grass fed cows is high in Omega fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid—CLA—that makes it heart healthy.

• You can tip your toe into a low carb diet by first giving up sugary products, processed food, bread and pasta. While it’s a healthy change, if you’re going to adopt a complete low carb diet, talk to your health care professional first.
• While vegetables and fruit contain carbs, you can have them on low carb diets. Vegetables do contain carbohydrates, the carbs are more complex, so they don’t spike sugar levels and take longer to get into your bloodstream.
• You do have to be more careful with the type of fruit you eat on a low carb diet, making choices that are low in sugar. You also need to avoid starchy vegetables.
• There are temporary side effects of low carb diets that include fatigue, muscle cramps, rash, digestive upsets, bad breath, weakness and headache. Extremely restricted carbs for long periods can create a host of nutritional and long term problems.

For more information, contact us today at Iron Fit San Antonio

If you’re ready to sign up for weekly deliveries of fat burning food, you wouldn’t be alone. Anyone that’s been eating healthy and wants to make weight loss faster would naturally be interested. These foods tend to burn a higher number of calories to digest than they actually contain. They also may help build muscle tissue—and that muscle tissue burns more calories than fat tissue does. They may also promote fat burning. For instance, raw almonds not only are a good snack that fill you up, they also build muscle tissue.

The thermogenic effect of food plays a big role.

What’s the thermogenic effect? It’s the amount of calories used to digest a food. For instance, food high in fiber require more calories to process as does brown rice. Whole grains and brown rice take more calories to process than they contain. However, remember whole grain products contain other ingredients, too. Brown rice, compared to white rice, even start out lower in calories. While lean protein, like chicken, still provide calories, it takes about a third of their calories to digest. There’s a reason that celery is always presented as a diet food. It has a high thermogenic effect.

Do you want to burn more fat? Try these foods.

Food that spikes your insulin level encourages the accumulation of fat around the middle. That’s why eating food that prevent that can be a real help to dieters. Salmon, walnuts, sardines, kale, brown rice and olive oil help keep insulin level. Foods high Omega-3 fatty acids help fat burning. Oily fish, flaxseed oil and both meat and milk products from grass fed cows are higher in Omega-3 fatty acid. A diet rich in blueberries helps reduce fat around your middle—belly fat. Oatmeal, lettuce and other high fiber foods help reduce belly fat, too.

Boost your metabolism and increase your weight loss with food.

People use the word metabolism often, but most people don’t understand exactly what it is. It’s the amount of energy it takes to keep your body functioning on a basic level. Even when you’re asleep, your body burns calories keeping various functions going. You burn calories just breathing! The higher your metabolism, the more calories you burn without additional effort. Foods that boost your metabolism include almonds, lean meat, eggs, beans, chia seeds and dark chocolate, just to name a few.

• You know that spicy, hot feeling that hot peppers produce in your mouth? The capsaicin in it burns and does the same to fat. It heats the body, which requires calories to cool and breaks down fat in the process.
• Many seeds help give your metabolism a boost. Try sprinkling hemp seed on your cereal in the morning for a quickie boost that burns a few extra calories.
• Potassium is your friend when it comes to increasing your basal metabolism—calories burned while at rest, such as sitting. Bananas are a good source of potassium.
• You can get extra help from switching drinks. For instance, that cup of coffee in the morning may contain caffeine to rev your metabolism, but green tea has both caffeine and catechin, a flavonoid that breaks down fat. Don’t add sugar.

For more information, contact us today at Iron Fit San Antonio

If you’re one of my clients in San Antonio, Texas, you know that we look at various factors, besides the number on the scale, to check your progress. There’s a reason for that. Sometimes, the scales lie. That’s right, the scales simply don’t give the whole picture and by doing that, lead you to believe you’re a failure. There are other ways to keep the report from the scales in perspective and truly judge whether you’re making progress.

If you’re working out regularly, you’re most likely building muscle tissue.

Sometimes, people make great progress exercising and eat healthy meals, but when weigh in time comes, find they lost less than they wanted, didn’t lose anything or occasionally, gained a pound. How could that happen? Well it’s easy, they’ve been working out and building muscle tissue, which weighs more per cubic inch than fat tissue does. Luckily, muscle tissue is more compact, so a pound of muscle tissue would fit in a much smaller container than a pound of fat tissue. You’ll be slimmer, even if he scales say you aren’t.

Taking measurements, besides weighing in, can give you a more accurate picture.

If you take measurements all over your body and find that while you may not have lost a pound, you still lost inches. You’re making progress! One of the most important measurements is around your middle. The fat around your middle tends to be visceral fat, which crowds internal organs, making it the most unhealthy fat to have. If that measurement is smaller, you’re not only successfully losing weight, you’re improving your overall health.

Judge your progress by how your clothes fit.

Do you have a pair of pants or shorts that are a smidge too tight? Those can be your guide to whether you’re progressing or not. Every month, take out that clothing item and see how it fits. If it’s loose, you’re a winner! There will come a point when the clothing is so loose it will fall off. That’s when you use another pair of pants or shorts. It’s hard to judge just how much smaller you are when the pants have been too big for months. Most people have to buy new clothing at that point and usually buy it a bit snug if they have more weight to lose.

• Scales can lie for other reasons. Your body weight is constantly fluctuating. Water retention, bloating and other problems can make you heavier. One way to avoid worrying about the daily fluctuations is to weigh in each week at the same time, on the same day of the week.
• You’ll really benefit from exercise in a second way, besides losing inches. Muscle tissue requires more calories for maintenance, so the more you have, the more calories you’ll burn, boosting your metabolism.
• Don’t ignore the scales, especially if you know you haven’t been true to your plan. While they are just one way to measure progress, weighing is also important. Just don’t judge yourself with every minor fluctuation.
• Check out our 28 day jumpstart at Iron Fit. You’ll get the results you want quickly and love the scales again, even if they sometimes lie.

For more information, contact us today at Iron Fit San Antonio

Losing weight can take a lot of effort, especially if you’re working off the pounds at the gym. It can mean creating a weekly menu and shopping list, then making all the food on the weekend for healthy meals throughout the week. If you just know you’re not going to do that and don’t want to sweat off pounds in the gym, here are tips for weight loss for lazy people, not that you are. You can use some of these tips to supplement a program of weight loss.

Start with a planned mealtime and a sit down meal.

Eating at all hours isn’t always the easiest way to go. If you have a planned mealtime, it doesn’t take any effort, but can help you avoid snacking. When you know that dinner is in a half hour, you’ll be less likely to grab a snack from the cupboard. Sitting down at the table for all meals makes and not eating in front of the television can also make mealtime more mindful and let you watch portion control.

Fill up on water before a meal and make it cold water.

Drink an eight ounce or larger glass of water before a meal and you’ll find that you eat less. Water fills you up, not out, so you’ll eat less. One study showed that it lowered the caloric intake enough that if you just drank a glass of water before one meal a day, the number of calories you saved would cause you to shed about eight pounds a year! Cold water also makes your body burn more calories, so that can add to the loss.

Switch out that soft drink for a glass of water or unsweetened green tea.

If you drink one soft drink a day, you’re adding over 100 calories to your intake. Cutting it out and drinking water or green tea means you’ll consume 100 less calories a day and in 35 days would lose a pound. If you substituted with green tea, you’ll also be boosting your metabolism to burn even more and helping to burn belly fat. Don’t even consider diet soft drinks. Studies show they actually make you gain weight. Part of the reason is that the trigger the release of insulin, but there’s no sugar, so it disrupts the metabolic system.

• If you want your portion to larger, try smaller plates. That certainly doesn’t take any effort to use a salad plate instead of a dinner plate.
• Get out of sweatpants and into form fitting jeans. It’s easy to overeat in sweatpants. They kindly expand to accommodate our expanding belly. Form fitting jeans will tell you right away when you’ve eaten too much.
• Park further from the store or walk down the stairs. I know that taking the stairs, especially going up will burn more calories, but if you’re being lazy, just take the stairs down, where it’s easier and park a little further from the store. Moving a little more throughout the day adds up.
• When you’re ready to start a formal exercise program, try our 28 day jumpstart at Iron Fit. You’ll be amazed at how great you feel after a few workouts and never want to take the lazy person’s route again.

For more information, contact us today at Iron Fit San Antonio