Whats The Most Scientific Workout?

With winter closing in, don’t let your fitness fall behind! The calories you burn during workouts are inconsequential to your overall body weight or body fat content! Instead, it is how well you use your exercise time to reprogram your daily physiology that matters. Use strength training 3 times a week, for 30 mins plus your favourite cardio such as brisk walking, swimming and cycling.

What are the options?

At the gym with equipment, hopefully with good instruction.
At fit camp using your own body weight as resistance.
Or using you tube videos, picking exercises at random.
At the swimming pool with aqua aerobics using resistance bands.
At home using resistance bands and dumbbells, with the 24 Fit Workout.

All have their merits. Which is best? The one you will do on a regular basis that becomes habit forming.

The most scientific? Take a look at the 24 Fit Workout, a 24 week programme with 3 phases.

24-fit-video-485

  • Teach your body to burn body fat over time rather than just burn carbs..
  • Address common vulnerabilities of the human body regardless of age or previous activity level. Make your body more resilient to injury, unlike many “insane workouts” which lead to injuries
  • Periodization training so you need to sequence your training, to develop one aspect of fitness at a time and then use that as a foundation to build the next. And principles which recognise that all exercise is much less effective if rest and recovery periods are not provided.
  • Workout lasts for 30 mins, the time it would take you to drive to the gym and back!. This length of workout is achievable over time. “Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.”
  • You will be less likely to quit the 24 Fit Workout once you get started because it follows scientific training principles. The program progresses your fitness naturally, so that you not only keep going, but never want to stop!
  • Improve posture with 24Fit. Standing up straight can improve breathing and digestion. And uses less energy. A good antidote for all those people stuck at their desks all day.
  •  Has 3 levels of difficulty so any age, any condition, anyone can build a better body! ( beginner, intermediate and advanced)
  •  Clear instruction, it’s like having a PT in the room with you.
  •  Includes nutritional advice, which is so important to get results, including what to take around exercise
  •  Developed by Robert Forster a PT that has has worked with top athletes such as Pete Sampras, Jackie Joyner Kersee, Florence “Flo-Jo” Joyner, Greg Foster, Allyson Felix, as well as weight management clients looking to burn fat. Thirty years of experience in a set of 13 DVDs! He learnt from his work with endurance athletes how to burn fat as an energy source, rather than carbs.

Why step up your Strength Training as you age?

“By your mid-30s, most people still look young, but are already experiencing the BIG Three of aging: deteriorating lean muscle mass, worsening posture, and crumbling joints” say Robert Forster, Physical Therapist and PT.

Many people say that, as they age, they eat and exercise the same amount but still gain weight. One of the main causes of this is loss of muscle mass. The more muscle mass you have, the more calories you burn. Strength training preserves and even increases muscle mass, keeping metabolism at a high level.

The key to sustainable weight loss (as opposed to the “yoyo” weight loss and weight gain of trendy weight loss fads) is a high resting metabolic rate.

Stop The Insanity

stop-the-insanity-images“Every day we see more extreme “fitness programs” advertised with high-intensity workouts and volumes of work that even my elite athletes would never hold up to. And every day, we see the injuries in the clinic that define these workouts as ill-designed, dangerous, and unsustainable. What most recreational athletes and fitness buffs don’t realize is that elite athletes spend more than half of their time in the gym on injury prevention, and the rest of the time on performance enhancement. Safe and effective stretching and injury prevention workouts might not be spectacular to watch, but they allow athletes to work harder at their sport and in the gym on performance enhancement.” Robert Forster – Physical Therapist to 42 Olympic Medalists, NBA and Grand Slam Champions and Member of the Governor’s Council on Physical Fitness.

Everyone knows how to work hard — it’s those who work equally hard on stretching, recovery, and injury prevention who reach their highest genetic potential in sport and in health.

24 Fit Workout

The basic premise of all well designed exercise programs is the progressive overload principle. Fitness must be “pushed” from below, i.e. starting slow and progressing to harder workouts slowly. The periodisation model used by 24Fit builds your fitness up with a stair step series of methodical, progressive challenges and recoveries that strengthen your body and keep brain and brawn fresh.

There are 3 phases each of 8 weeks:

Phase 1 – Stability.
Phase 2 – Strength.
Phase 3 – Power.

Phase 1 is about establishing stability throughout every part of your body. Thats Spine and Pelvic Stabilization, Shoulder Stabilization and Total Body Integration. By the time you’ve completed Phase 1, you’ll not only have improved posture and joint health, but your body will also be properly prepared for the strength and power workouts to come in Phases 2 and 3.

Contrast that with some high intensive workouts creating a plethora of overuse and traumatic injuries and other ill designed training programs that not even Olympians would hold up under the stress of these workouts.

Get ready! Armed with a bulletproof fitness program and solid science based nutrition you’ll get great results..

What You Should Eat Before You Work Out

The right fuel before you work out might can help you perform at your best.

Your body relies on a good store of carbohydrate to maintain blood sugar while you exercise – but after an overnight fast, those stores could be running low. So eating before a hard workout can help provide enough fuel for working muscles. There’s a practical reason for eating before a long workout, too – it keeps you from getting hungry while you work out.

What You Should Eat Before You Work Out

Since carbs are so important to your body’s engine, your pre-workout meal should be relatively high in carbohydrate. A little bit of protein is good, too. It will slow digestion just a little bit – enough to allow the carbs to enter the bloodstream a little more slowly and steadily. On the other hand, you don’t want to eat a lot of fat right before you head out – it can slow digestion too much and leave you feeling uncomfortably full. And save your high fibre foods for afterwards, too, since they also take a while to work their way through your system.

what-to-eat-before-a-workoutAs far as what specific foods you eat – there are no hard and fast rules. A smoothie made with fruit, milk and protein powder works well if you’ll be working out relatively soon after eating; a turkey sandwich and a bowl of soup at lunch will be pretty well digested if you’re going for a run in the mid-afternoon. If you work out in the mornings but you just don’t like breakfast foods, then eat whatever appeals to you. Most people don’t see anything ‘wrong’ with eating a bowl of cereal for dinner, so why should it be ‘wrong’ to eat leftovers for breakfast?.
When You Should Eat Before You Work Out

There are specific guidelines for meal timing – but in reality, you have to go with what feels right. Some people can eat as usual just before exercising, while others prefer a lighter load in the stomach. Generally speaking, the longer you have to digest your meal before you start working out, the larger and more solid your meal can be.

If you’re going to be working out within an hour or so of eating, then you’ll want a small semi-solid or liquid meal that will empty from your stomach relatively quickly. A smoothie, for example, would be light and easy to digest. If you’re going to work out in the mid-afternoon, a regular, well-balanced meal at lunch should have you covered. If you’ve got a hard workout scheduled right before dinner, you’ll need a light snack in the mid-afternoon – a carton of low-fat yogurt with some fruit would work.

How Much You Should Eat Before You Work Out

Some athletes like to know the specifics of what they should eat before a workout – and the guidelines are very specific. Most people just use the ‘trial and error’ method until they figure out the eating schedule that works for them.

For those of you who want to know the details, here they are: athletes are advised to eat between 1 and 4 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight (or, 0.5 grams of carbohydrate per pound of body weight) one to four hours before exercising. The reason for the range is that it depends on how soon you’re going to exercise after eating. The longer you have to digest, the more you can eat at the pre-exercise meal.

1 hour to digest before exercise – 1 gram carbohydrate/kg body weight
2 hours to digest before exercise – 2 grams carbohydrate/kg body weight
3 hours to digest before exercise – 3 grams carbohydrate/kg body weight
4 hours to digest before exercise – 4 grams carbohydrate/kg body weight

Don’t Eat More Than You Burn

One final note – if your workouts aren’t particularly vigorous or lengthy, this advice may not apply to you. Not everyone needs to fuel up before exercising. If your routine consists of a 30-minute brisk walk in the morning, that’s a great regimen – but it’s also not so intense that you need to top off your tank before you head out.

Written by Susan Bowerman, MS, RD, CSSD. Susan is a paid consultant for Herbalife.

Include Stretching Into Your Daily Routine

stretching-24-fit-workoutStretching only takes a moment, yet most of us don’t do it at all, and because we don’t, our bodies could be subject to unnecessary pain.

“It comes to my attention that people spend more time on the health of their teeth than they do the rest of their body,” said physical therapist and develeoper of the 24 Fit Workout Robert Forster

Forster says we don’t even do the basics to keep our system running smoothly, namely simple stretching.

“The fascia, the tendons the ligaments, they by nature tighten over time. If you leave them unstretched, they will shorten,” Forster said.

And that shortening alters the position of joints at the bone, which causes poor posture, and that can lead to injury. Many of us sit for long periods of time, and that can result in tight hip joints, which can affect the spine.

Slouching at the computer or car causes the chest to tighten, head to jut forward and the upper back is thrown out of alignment, creating a host of hurt. But small stretch breaks throughout the day can really help.

Include stretching into your daily routine with the 24 Fit Workout. Thats clear instruction on a set of 13 DVDs backed up with Forster’s 30 years of experience.

Robert Forster developed the Herbalife24FIT program with Herbalife. He is one of the leading physical therapists for athletes, both recreational and elite. Over the course of his 30-year career, he has successfully trained Olympic gold medalists, U.S. Open and Wimbledon champions, NBA superstars and triathlon world-record holders. Tired of encountering ill-advised training programs that only cause more injury, Robert created a new approach to physical therapy, which is divided into phases that follow the body’s natural healing and growth patterns.