Joy Fitness #4 - Exercise Intensity

          Hey everyone, hope the week is going well so far..only a couple more days until the weekend so hang in there. The weather hasn't been too comforting lately; just reminds us all that although we had a warm winter and a hot spring thus far, we are still technically in April. So for those of you who haven't gotten to where you would like to be yet, there still is a significant amount of time to make progress! On another note, I was able to mess around with my blog and make it look a lot better by switching the background and picture display, so hopefully you guys like it..it was actually pretty easy, blogger.com is relatively simple for me, and I haven't had much experience doing this type of stuff either. Anyway, I want to discourse about exercise intensity. Basically, how hard you are working when you are doing your weight lifting or cardio. The reason I want to address this topic is because so many times, I always see people at the gym doing the same exercise at the same level of intensity. Granted, I don't know what their personal goals are, but I could bet that they would want to lower their body fat, as most people strive to do. Now like I stated in my other post, any exercise is better than no exercise. Find something you enjoy doing, and keep doing it. But to those of you who already have been working out on a permanent basis, I encourage you to switch up your exercise intensity. For example, one of my clients is a great long-distance runner. She runs 5-6 miles daily, and even entered herself into half-marathon events on a few different occasions. However, her one main goal was to reduce her body fat to an amount that she was comfortable with and liked seeing herself in the mirror. Now when I look at her cardio routine, I definitely altered 2 of her 6 days of cardio from a 5-6 mile run, to a 20 minute sprint/walk session. This is also called HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training). You can also do this type of cardio on a bike, elliptical, treadmill, anything you choose..It's basically just elevating your heart rate to a certain point (working harder), and then coming back down to a slower heart rate for a period of time, then repeating. The human body adapts so quickly to stress it's unbelievable; this is why I needed to add sprints to her routine. After adding sprints and some different types of strength training routines, she was able to drop an additional 3 inches from her waist and 6 lbs of body fat. The point here is, there's two energy systems in your body...aerobic (exercising but can still breathe somewhat normally), and anaerobic (gasping for air). The best way to drop body fat is through a combination of both energy systems, a.k.a. your exercise intensity!