Mark Twain once said, “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.” Not only is his advice right when it comes to getting ahead, it’s also right when it comes to fat loss. The #1 secret to really succeeding at getting rid of fat, is you need to first understand what your major task is, and then break it down.
[If you can look at this picture and not feel a major urge to eat a donut afterwards, then you will have no trouble with fat loss. For the rest of you, think how disgusting eating those donuts can make you look and resist the urge!]
With so many people trying to lose weight, and so much information on fat loss targeted towards those people, the skinny guy (or girl who wants to add a bit of good looking muscle) gets left out in the cold. As someone who has been skinny and had to work to put on weight and muscle, I know how frustrating it is to have trouble putting on weight. You work out, eat a tremendous amount of food, but still aren’t able to put on weight, and sometimes even lose weight.
At a certain point, you throw in the towel, blame your genes and metabolism, and forget about your dream of turning into a ripped guy. Well, it’s time to reawaken your dream of getting ripped, because it wasn’t your metabolism that was holding you back. It was just the way you were going about putting on muscle mass.
You know the saying that to really succeed at something, you have to put your heart into it? It turns out to be more literal than you thought. There’s more and more studies proving that short bursts of intense exercise that really get the heart rate up are superior to longer, less intense cardio. That means that not only do you need less time to get into great shape, but that you’ll be less likely to get overuse injuries since you won’t be putting a lot of pressure on the joints for an extended period of time.
[The first person ever to run a marathon dropped dead after completing it. There are better and safer ways to go about getting into shape.]
Getting The Heart Pumping Helps Get Results
What I’m going to tell you is probably going to go against anything that you’ve ever heard when it comes to fitness. That is that the first step to getting into great shape is not working out. In fact, it has nothing to do with exercise at all. The first step to getting into shape is nutrition. Week one of your fitness program should be 100% dedicated to changing your diet!
[A balanced diet of nuts, vegetables, fruits, lean meat, some whole wheat bread and milk products is not only healthy, but will energize your body. That being said, eating raw flowers is NOT recommended!]
Why Eating “Real Food” Is The Most Important Part Of Your Fitness Plan
The truth is that what you eat is infinitely more important than your workout routine. Your entire day revolves to some extent around eating, but only a small part is dedicated to an intense workout. That’s why what you eat has such a huge impact on your body. Afterall, you are what you eat!
You may be one of the millions of people who have never worked out. Or perhaps you used to be a marathon runner back in high school, but life just got too busy and you haven’t hit the track in 20 years. Either way, between your career and family, you just don’t have the time to keep in shape anymore. That’s just how life goes anyway. You’re not a professional athlete, and can’t expect to have the time to spend hours every day to stay in shape. Right?
Wrong.
Staying in shape doesn’t require you to dedicate hours of time to training every day. It doesn’t even require that you workout daily. All it requires is dedication and consistency. Sure, it’s not a walk in the park, but it’s well worth it and if you’re already motivated enough to be reading this site, then chances are you have what it takes to get fit as well.
While some of you may be fitness instructors yourself, I’m sure there are those of you just getting into working out for the first time. So for you, let’s go over the basics. How to do pushups, pullups, situps or planks properly. Once you have that down, you’ll be able to do a basic but excellent body-weight workout routine that is advised by the Navy Seals to do before training. I also did the workout routine that I’m going to show you before I was accepted into a special forces unit in the IDF.
Before we continue: A set is a series of repetitions. A repetition is the act of performing the exercise. So for push ups, one repetition would be do go all the way down, and then back up again. The amount of repetitions you do before stopping to rest, is a set. So 3 sets of 10 push ups means that you do 10 push ups, rest, and repeat 2 more times. Okay, now you’re ready to continue.
