Outdoors -Finally Nice Weather........

3 Class times ---Let's Roll!!

Spring Bootcamp Schedule

NEW Schedule

We're finally Outdoors!!!

Mon/Wed 6:15pm

Wed/Fri 7am

33 Providence Rd Westford

see you then!!!

It's that time of year.........

All right, the peeps are finally gone…….NO more Easter Candy……..

It’s that time of year, if you noticed the stores are gearing up for warmer weather. They are showing more bikinis and short pants. Yes, it’s supposed to be spring, someone should have told us here in New England. Yes, spring is just around the corner……

Some of you have been on a plan for a while and have dropped some weight, but still feel you could drop a few more. Here’s the thing, some of you started out on a new plan and the pounds were dropping, you’re sticking to your plan and getting in all your workouts, but you feel like you’ve crashed. DO NOT GIVE UP!

Warning Warning!!! You hit the dreaded plateau!

The scale won’t budge. Measurements stay the same, no change to how your clothes are fitting. In fact, you may even start to GAIN weight. Noooooooooo………..

This is where we start to panic, this can make a grown man weep……..this is not the time to quit or try another plan. If you’re following a good plan and have everything in place, stay on course…..

Please do not panic. This is where some folks, especially you ladies, think you can just do MORE cardio to try to burn it off. Please off the treadmill…………

 
 
No need to panic…….

First thing, review your goals and make sure you have everything in place.

Number 1.  Do not replace your weight training with cardio. Again, science backs this up –Resistance training is your BEST option when trying to lose body fat and transforming your body. Not the pink dumbbells and not small muscles like biceps or triceps. Think legs, back and chest. Working full-body will burn a tremendous amount of calories. Especially ladies, get stronger. You will not bulk up. Building lean sexy muscle will not only look good and make you appear thinner. It will burn calories at a higher rate WHEN YOU ARE AT REST.

Here are a few ways to get you on your way……helping you bust through any plateau and keep you shedding off unwanted fat.

If you’ve been eating clean for a while –you may have to mix things up.

Plan, Plan , Plan

First thing, take a look at your goals and make sure your plan is still in place.  Write them down. To succeed you have to have an end goal. Don’t just wing it.

Cycle Your Carbs

Not saying going zero carbs –never a good idea. Some folks make things worse when they hit a plateau. That is, they start cutting them out completely. It might work for a day or two, but it’s going to catch up with you. Your body is smart and it will give out the wrong signals and will instantly start slowing down your metabolic rate. This will make fat loss next to impossible, not to mention it’s way too tough following a zero carb diet…………..

A better strategy may be to cycle your carbs. It’s never a good idea to follow a food plan where you’re consuming the exact same number of calories every day. Again, that smart body of yours has to be fooled. An example of carb cycling you could have one day with a very low carb intake and the next you increase your carbs. This will keep the metabolism guessing as to what’s coming next and help keep it revved up higher than it ever was. What that means you lose fat and you have a better chance of holding on to your lean muscle. The added benefit…we enjoy good carbs and kill some of those cravings. As a general rule, have the higher carb intake on days you weight train, and a lower intake on cardio days or rest days. You should increase your fat intake when you reduce your carbs – your body still requires energy.

Often cycling your carbs is all that’s needed to reignite your metabolism and get your fat loss moving again. Now remember, think GOOD carbs, rice, whole grain pasta and quinoa and one of the best Sweet potatoes. If you want more information on carb cycling, a great read is by Chris Powell (ABC’s Extreme Make-over).  Choose to Lose

Cut down the long slow cardio or running and Add High Intensity Interval Training

 

If you’re not fighting injuries and you want to try something new.  That works! Try Interval Training.  Now I have to be honest, it’s not easy, but if fat loss is your goal. Interval training is the most effective form of cardio to boost your metabolism to see increased rates of fat loss. Plus, you’ll see accelerated fitness gains as well.

Intervals can be as easy as just alternating between a run and a walk for 30 minutes. The idea is to push yourself for 15 seconds to 1 minute then rest or SLOW walk for 1 minute. The rest is to allow your heart rate to get back to a normal rate, for exercise(120 beats. or so)

My favorite is sprinting at the High School track. But the options are limitless –any piece of equipment can be used. Just make sure you are still allowing time for sufficient recovery between workouts so that you don’t over train.  And more is not necessarily better. Allow yourself enough time to recover.

Here is an example of interval training Workout

 
So, we still have plenty of time to get ready for the Beach…..let’s go!!!!

Keep Training!!

 

Bodyweight Finisher

If you need a quicker workout this week or want to add a Finisher, try this!
Merry Christmas from MarkOne Fitness!

Your Mom was right about not skipping breakfast!

Yes mom was right, Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Then why do so many people skip this meal.

Oh yes I forgot.

• I'm not hungry.
• I don't have time.
• I'll just have coffee.
• That way I'll have less calories, you know calories in calories out.
• I'll burn so much more fat on an empty stomach when I workout in the AM.
• I have 2 bigger meals later on.

It's endless, we've heard them all. Most likely these are the same people struggling with their weight and resist change. Well, we've tried for years to get the word out about not skipping breakfast. Researchers have been listening ---and it's not good news for those folks who still don't want to face the facts.......check out this study posted from the guardian .

Skipping breakfast primes brain to seek high-calorie food, study finds:
Brain scans show people who miss meal respond more positively to unhealthy foods than those who have eaten.

We are all told that breakfast is the most important meal of the day – and now neuroscientists are starting to understand why. Skipping the first meal of the day not only means you eat more at lunch, research has found, but also means your brain is primed to seek out unhealthier, higher-calorie foods.

Dieters who skip meals often end up gaining weight over the long term, but why this happens is not well understood. Tony Goldstone, of the MRC Clinical Science Centre at Imperial College London, scanned the brains of people who skipped meals and found mechanisms at work that could help explain the conundrum.

Prolonged fasting of any kind seemed to prime certain brain regions to gravitate towards higher-calorie foods when the person did eventually find a meal. "That makes evolutionary sense if you're in a negative energy-balance situation," he said. "You're not going to waste your time going for lettuce." He will present the results of his study on Wednesday at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans.

In the experiment, Goldstone scanned the brains of 21 men and women, all around the age of 25, on two separate days while they were shown pictures of food and asked to rate how appealing they found everything from chocolate and pizzas to vegetables and fish. On one of the days, the volunteers skipped breakfast before their scans; on the other, they were given a 750-calorie breakfast of cereals, bread and jam an hour beforehand. After the scans on both days, the volunteers were given lunch, where they could eat as much as they liked.

"Not surprisingly, when they are fasted they are hungry and they rate the high-calorie foods as more appealing than when they are fed," said Goldstone. "For low-calorie foods, the effect is not as marked. When they come out of the scanner, they are given lunch and they eat more when they haven't had breakfast."

When the volunteers had skipped breakfast, they ate around 20% more at lunch, compared with days when they had eaten a normal breakfast. Their brain scans also showed that activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, which is just above the eyes, was especially responsive to high-calorie foods.

"We believe that bit encodes the value of rewards – how rewarding, how pleasant, how tasty something is. Not just food but other rewards seem to be signalled there in the brain," said Goldstone.
The more you like the food you're eating, the more active the orbitofrontal cortex becomes, and when people are asked to suppress their desire for tasty foods, its activity drops.

The changing activity in this brain region could also explain why different methods of weight-control surgery work to differing degrees.

Gastric bypass surgery, for example, involves sealing off parts of a person's gut so that they end up with a smaller stomach, and this produces an average of 20-25% weight loss. In gastric band surgery, doctors tie a band around the gut, which they gradually inflate over the course of a few weeks. This provides, on average, a 15-20% weight loss. "People describe to us that, after gastric bypass, they really don't crave high-calorie foods at all," said Goldstone. "The banding people say: 'I'm not hungry but I do still like those [high-calorie] foods.'"

His research team carried out brain-scanning studies on people who had undergone gastric surgery and found that the orbitofrontal cortex activity was less in the people who had had bypass surgery, compared with the banding. "One of the reasons we think people do better after bypass is that you alter the craving for high-calorie foods, which is mediated by the orbitofrontal cortex," said Goldstone. "We think that is possibly mediated by hormone changes and possibly also they get a little bit ill when they eat the high-calorie foods and they learn that they feel sick and so they avoid those foods."

There you have it-----please please have that first meal first thing in the morning!

New Fall Schedule

Here's the Oct- Nov schedule.   4 Locations!!!

Still Outdoors MarkOne Fitness
WED & FRI 7AM

Nashoba Tech Westford
MON 6:15PM
http://www.nashoba.tec.ma.us/education/components/scrapbook/default.php?sectiondetailid=366

Roudenbush Community Westford
FRI 915AM
New! METFIT TOTAL BODY CONDITIONING Instructor: Mark Hebert http://www.roudenbush.org/new/search.php?Search=metfit

Westford Regency
(Members Only)
Thurs 6:45am
http://westfordregency.com/wr-health-club/

Come try out a class!

Fat Loss Bodyweight Circuit

Don’t have enough time to workout? Are you stuck home with zero equipment, but want a workout? How about limited space? Hotel room? You get it, a NO EXCUSE WORKOUT. Try this bodyweight workout, it’s something that you can do anywhere, and quicker than anything else. That means no travel time to the gym, no messing around with equipment, and no excuses for not having enough time…

There’s several ways you can do this. You can set a specific time say 10-30 minutes and see how many rounds you can complete or just do 3-4 sets.

Here we go, this is a bodyweight circuit that can help you lose weight, burn calories, and blast your metabolism into high gear for hours. You don’t need equipment or weights for this routine either. You can do this fat loss workout anywhere! Again, some of the video has LeeAnne uses a weight or Valslides –if you don’t have them it’s not a problem. You can do this anywhere!!!

 Fat Loss Circuit

1.    Bodyweight Prisoner squat (10-20 reps)

2.    Pushup (10-20 reps) – modified on knees is okay

3.    Swing Lunge (10 reps per leg)

4.    Plank (30 second hold)

5.    Pop Squats (30 seconds)

6.    Modified Turkish Getup (10-15 per side)

7.    Mountain Climber (20-30 seconds) just bring in a leg at a time

Do this entire circuit without any rest between the exercises. Rest for 1 full minute at the end of the circuit and repeat.

For the beginners out there I would suggest that you do fewer repetitions and take slightly longer rests until you adapt and are in better overall condition to step up the intensity levels.

There you have it. This is an example of a Fat Loss Circuit –give it a shot and let me know what you think!