Fit and Youthful Life

Guest Author: Dane Fletcher


Many bodybuilders do cardio only by the clock. They know they have to hop on the treadmill and knock out 30 or 45 minutes’ worth of plugging away, and they’re done. Some more educated bodybuilders will occasionally attempt to tailor their program, opting for custom incline/intensity levels or perhaps keeping an eye on calories burned. The most intelligent bodybuilders will take heart rate into consideration when completing their cardio, in order to garner the most effective results.

Bodybuilders should be training at their optimal heart rate, which is 50 to 60 percent of their maximum heart rate. There are several steps to calculating this number.

- First, find your maximum heart rate (MHR). This is easy. Subtract your age from the number 220. If you are 30 years old, then your maximum heart rate is 220 minus 30, or 190

- Next, multiply your MHR by .50, and write down this number. This is you’re your optimal minimum.

- Next, multiply your MHR by .60, and write down this number. This number is your optimal maximum.

Now, as you complete your cardio, try to keep your heart rate between your optimal minimum and optimal maximum. It’s that easy!

In bodybuilding, “the more the better!” axiom often rings true. The more weight you lift, the bigger your muscles become. The more food you eat, the bigger you get. The more sleep you get, the better rested you become. However, in the case of cardio training intensity, more is not necessarily better. Training at heart rates of 70% or more will lead to the body consuming muscle to keep up with such an intense workload, instead of utilizing carbohydrates in the body or fat stores.

Training at levels of 50 to 60 percent is perfect for bodybuilders. If you find that 30 minutes at 50-60% is not leading to desired loss of body fat, raise the duration to 45 minutes, or use a split session (one in the morning and one following your weight training). If this additional cardio training does not help, it’s time to re-evaluate your current diet and supplementation program. Cut daily calories by 300-500, add ECA or Tridenosen, and you should be on your way to a leaner physique.



Look Young Again

Guest Author: Craig Ballantyne


I’m not a huge fan of cardio, spinning, or aerobics in terms of people looking to lose body fat obviously in short time periods. I mean if somebody likes doing it; if somebody wants to be the triathlete, you know what, go ahead and do it and love what you do.

But I’m not a big fan of it for those people I see who are running on the sidewalk and look like they despise every single minute they are doing it.

That is probably a greater percentage of the people who do it when they are looking to lose weight. There are a lot of research studies to say that aerobics and cardio aren’t the greatest way to lose weight. And I’m not a fan of having somebody do stuff they don’t like to achieve a goal when there are other ways to do it.

I’m not a big fan of certain machines in the gym for cardio. It may not be the machine itself, but it may be the excuses. Its human nature that some of these machines allow us to slide by and do stuff that we think is helping us, but subconsciously we’re taking the easy way out.

I have what I call the human nature test; because I always make fun of elliptical machines and I really think that they are not again what people make them out to be.

Let’s say you take 100 people. You go to a mega gym – you’ve got 100 treadmills and 100 elliptical machines – you take 100 people into that room and you say, “Okay, you have to work out for 30 minutes at a pretty good pace. You choose your machine.”

You know darn well that 70-80 of those people are going to be on the elliptical machines rather than the treadmill. To me, that says something. I just think that we’re wired to take the easy way out.

You can extend it even further and say, “Okay, you’ve got 100 people; you’ve got 100 treadmills and a track. Go do your training. You can either do the treadmill or the track.” You know 80% of those people are probably going to use the treadmill.

Humans take the easy way out when given hard choices. The other thing that I’m against in terms of cardio is – I refer to it as one of the dark sides of cardio – is that people can get injured doing a high volume of cardio work.

Of course, to be fair, you can get injured doing a high volume of body building work. When I was young and reading the magazines, I was doing too much upper body work and had a little bit of shoulder problems; not anything I haven’t been able to get over.

So injury risk is often proportional to the volume of exercise you do. Too much volume in lifting, too much volume in cardio, or even too much volume in crunches and you’re going to end up in the doctor’s office or the physiotherapy office.

Ironically, many trainers and physiotherapists are the worst offenders of over-use injuries. There is one physio that I worked in a gym where she worked, and she literally could not walk properly because she did so many spinning classes.

Spinning classes are another thing I’m not a huge fan of. On one side, there’s great benefit to your fat loss program because of the group mentality because social support is huge. Working out in that group encourages you to come back. And a lot of people have fun with it. Plus, its interval training in nature. So lots of good things about spinning.

But I figure, why do something for 45 minutes when you can get the same results in 20 minutes? Also, I’m not a big fan of the high RPM spinning because I think that’s where a lot of hip problems have been developed in people that I’ve trained personally and also in some of the classes I’ve watched.

I just don’t think that it’s great for your hips, especially in women who have hip problems already from childbirth, to be going at 140-160 RPM or whatever they are doing and you just watch their bodies flopping around without the right torso strength and endurance and stability there, they are going to end up with problems.

One last thing I’ll say on this is that an aerobic training program is probably one of the worst places to start a 300 pound person out on a fat loss program because their muscles are not prepared for this and neither are their joints. Quite frankly, I wouldn’t want to run with an extra 120 pounds on my back, or even walk quickly. We need to re-examine where we start people out.

So if you are not getting the results you want but you are doing a lot of cardio, spinning, or aerobics classes, decrease the volume, try some interval training, and focus on quality workouts for fat burning.



Instant Skin Tightener

Guest Author: Rando Meresmaa


The goal for anyone who wants to lose fat is to achieve maximum fat burning in the shortest time possible. It is very important to choose or create the right training program that is the most effective. There are a lot of discussions and arguments about what is more effective: long duration and low intensity workouts or high intensity workouts. This can be very confusing for people. A personal trainer in one gym suggests low intensity workouts and if you go to a different gym then a personal trainer there may suggest high intensity workouts.

So how much cardio is needed to burn fat?

As it is with so many other things, both sides have some truth in them. The low intensity aerobic exercise proponents say that this method is more effective in burning body fat because if your heart rate gets out of the target heart rate, you stop burning fat for fuel and start using carbohydrates for fuel. That is why so many experts promote this method.

But the problem with this method is that if your exercise is low in intensity, then you just do not burn enough calories. If you don´t burn enough calories then you will not lose fat. It is better to use more intense exercises in your workouts because they burn more calories. High intensity aerobic exercise can use as much as 65% of the body’s energy needs in the form of carbohydrate. Burning calories is more important than what you use for fuel. The harder you work out the more calories you burn.

But high intensity exercises are only effective if you can maintain it long enough to burn more calories then with low intensity. To burn calories effectively your workout has to last from 25-60 minutes. If you do a very high intensity workout but you it only lasts for 15 minutes then it is not effective. The trick is to find the right tempo. The most effective method to burn calories is a relatively high intensity for 30 minutes or so. The only way to find out what is the most effective zone for you, is to find it out yourself. There is no magic number. Trial and error!