Living a healthy lifestyle is a struggle for most people, including myself. For half of my life I have tried to adhere to a basic healthy lifestyle guide by not eating fast food, limiting soda and eating plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables. I thought this was good enough but then I noticed my weight increase. I discussed my condition with friends and there were varying reasons that the weight gain was a result of getting older; basically it was expected. I found this extremely depressing and hard to accept. After further reflection I decided to hire a fitness coach and get to the bottom of my dilemma.
The first belief my coach argued was getting older does not mean you necessarily gain weight. We then analyzed my healthy lifestyle guide and discovered areas that were either not working or needed reevaluation. We ended up focusing on three main areas: balanced diet, cardiovascular activity and weight training.
The first sessions with my fitness coach we spent a lot of time studying my diet and observed I was lacking balance. I steered towards eating lots of fruit, not enough vegetables and overdose on carbs. He recommended I start constructing my meals to follow a 50%30%20% diet; each meal will be made up of of carbs, protein and fat. 50% of my meal will be carbohydrates, 30% will be protein and 20% will be fat, and then restrict the meals to 350-400 calories. Finally he suggested that I eat five of these balanced meals every day making a total of 1750-2000 calories a day.
I published my meals following the 50/30/20 guidelines on my website easyportions.com.
After building the diet plan we turned our attention to exercise. Reviewing my current workout program highlighted my workouts were not intense enough and the time I spent exercising were not an efficient use of my time. The new goals for each training session focused on burning fat through cardiovascular intensity and building muscles.
The design of my new cardiovascular workout sessions focused on pushing past my Target Heart Rate (THR) via interval training. Interval training is defined as exercising at high intensity for one minute followed by 2 minutes lower intensity and repeating the cycle 4 times for a total of 20 to 25 minutes. One of my favorite cardio workouts is running up and down a steep hill - the steeper the better; the workout starts with a 5 minute warm-up usually walking down the hill. The intervals are running up the hill for 1 minute, walk down the hill for two minutes then turn around and run back up the hill for one minute; this routine I did four times and end the workout with a five minute cool down period. The benefit of including hills in the cardio program is if running up the hill is too daunting walking up a hill still increases the heart rate.
The final section of my new healthy lifestyle guide focused on increasing my muscle mass. My personal trainer and I started with main muscle groups which are the legs, back and chest; building up muscles lets the body to burn fat during resting stages. Resistance training began with lunges, squats, push ups and rows using basic body weight then increasing the load as I became stronger.
Putting all the elements together, my training looks like this:
* Monday – Cardio
* Tuesday – Resistance
* Wednesday – Cardio
* Thursday – Resistance
* Friday – Cardio
* Saturday – Cardio and Resistance
* Sunday – Rest
Following the steps highlighted by my coach and sticking to my healthy lifestyle guide I have felt healthier than I have in years. I hope sharing my ideas can give you the boost you need to begin developing your own healthy lifestyle guide
To learn more about me and for more information visit my website.
Tags: healthy lifestyle guide