8
exercise mistakes
+
8 easy fixes from Hilary Phelps
“instead of waiting for your workout, seize opportunities to burn calories during your everyday routine.”
mistake #1
Eating too few calories. It’s safe to eat 500 calories less than you need to maintain your weight. However, if you eat any less, your body will think it’s starving. When you starve yourself, you become leptin-resistant and lose muscle tissue. Your metabolic rate will slow down. Chances are, you’ll wind up gaining back the weight you lost. So if you want to create a deficit of 500+ calories per day, burn the additional calories through exercise, rather than starving yourself.
mistake #2
Measuring your progress by weight, not by inches. When you exercise, you displace fat with lean muscle. So losing 10 pounds could mean that you’ve actually lost 16-17 pounds of fat, but gained 6-7 pounds of lean muscle. Since muscle is denser (i.e. it takes up less space per pound), you’re likely to lose inches and pant sizes faster than pounds.
mistake #4
Doing the same exercise routine over and over. When you flex the same muscles the same way every time you workout, your body recognizes it as a “routine.” It becomes more efficient and hits a plateau and you see diminished returns. By contrast, when you challenge your body with different exercises each week, you burn more calories and get more overall benefit. You can also get this benefit by changing the order of exercises. When your body never knows what type of activity you’re doing next, it can’t get efficient.
mistake #5
Not working your legs enough. The best way to burn calories is to exercise your biggest muscle group: your legs and glute muscles — lunges, squats, jumping rope and jumping jacks.
Plus, muscle tissue burns more calories per day than fat tissue. So increasing your muscle mass also raise your metabolism. That means you burn more calories while at rest!
Breathing hard indicates that your heart rate is high. The faster your heart rate, the more calories you burn, and the higher your afterburn, which is the increase in calories you burn while at rest post workout. The afterburn can last anywhere from 3 to 14 hours. When you’re physically active, your metabolism runs higher and you burn more calories throughout the day.
mistake #3
Trying to stick with a boring routine. Change it up! When exercise is boring, you’re more likely to quit. This is another reason to change your routine each week, or mix up the order of exercises.
12 july 2013 | purely summer
mistake #6
Resting for too long between exercises.