Optimal Life Fitness, for health, fitness and a new lifestyle outdoors.

BJ’s Seven Steps to a better body!

The following is a guide to how to be in the best shape of your life for the rest of your life. The guide is no quick fix it is about finding balance in your life in a way that adds to your well-being and self. It is about implementing proactive and consistent choices. Often we don’t know what the right choices are to get us where we need to be, this guide is exactly that- it is the right choices. The guide is made up of seven steps, the steps are complementary and some of them overlap. All seven steps are of equal importance, however the order or sequence is also important.

The seven steps to a better body:
1. Weight Training (Resistance training) 2-3 times per week
2. Sort out your Nutrition
3. Ditch the long slow stuff!
4. Increase your NEPA (Non Exercise Physical Activity)
5. Get Enough REST! Sleep, sleep, sleep
6. Allow time for restoration and rejuvenation
7. Have some fun- PLAY! Recreation and Leisure

1. Weight Training

It’s no coincidence that weight training is top of the list. The importance of resistance training to the human body is huge. Weight training or resistance training (the same thing the term weight training can scare some people) has a lot of advantages: it develops and strengthens our musculo-skeletal system; which gives us our structure and allows us to move.

The benefits of weight training include:
- Increases of LBM (lean body mass) which: - speeds up resting metabolism which helps to burn fat i.e., the more muscle we have the more we burn fat!
- Improvements to posture
- Increases in strength
- Improved neuromuscular coordination and pro-prioception (coordination and balance).

To get full benefits from weight training you need to be doing a minimum of 2 sessions each week, 3 is ideal. Sessions should be approximately 45minutes long, including a warm up and cool down and may last up to an hour but should not exceed this.

Regardless of an individuals goals exercises should be made up of large compound/ multi-joint exercises; which replicate natural movements. Natural movements can generally be broken into the following; Squat, lunge, bend, push, pull, (push and pull horizontally and vertically), rotation, translation and locomotion. For a balanced well working and injury free body these movements should be preformed equally and none of them should be left out. More information regarding weight training will follow in this series of articles

2. Sort out your Nutrition

There’s no point sculpting the body beautiful if what you’re feeding the machine is a load of crap. Never in the history of man have we had such an over supply of nutrients, yet in the west we would have been hard pressed to find a time when (on average) our bodies were fed so badly.

Food use to be so simple: it grew from the ground, ran on the land, swam in the sea, flew in the sky and got eaten. Nowadays we can eat food that doesn’t move, gets sprayed with chemicals, doesn’t see sunlight, is fed things that it was never intended to be fed and on the whole is not as nutritious as it once was.

We can’t stop eating, but we need to cut through the misinformation out there that surrounds food (food is big industry and lot’s of conspiracy theories surround why we are fed so much crap). As well as the misinformation concerning food, science is learning more all the time about how our bodies respond to what we put inside it, so what was in vogue 20 years ago (high carbohydrate diets) is not necessarily good for us. Seven steps to sorting out your food are as follows:

I – Keep a food diary
II – Eat breakfast
III- Eat protein at every meal (don’t eat carbohydrates on their own)
IV- Eat organic, whole foods where possible
V - Eat 6 times a day
VI- Concentrate your carbohydrates around your activity

3. Ditch the Long Slow Stuff

There are still too many people trying to change their bodies by doing continuous, moderate intensity, aerobic exercise- it just doesn’t work! These same people generally display joint and muscular pain, no muscle tone and are soft around the middle. A good comparison is to compare the bodies of joggers and sprinters, most of us if we had the choice would prefer to look like sprinters, however most of us train like recreational joggers and as a result look like this.

Most of the cardio machines out there don’t help they have signs on them that tell people that their fat burning zones are at about 60% of their maximum heart rates. This fat burning zone is not exactly correct, at 60% of your maximum heart rate your primary fuel source as a percentage is fats- but big deal, at 60% MHR you’re not really doing much and the total amount of energy expended is very little.

You are much better off working at higher intensities (75%+) where the total amount of energy expended is higher, the main fuel source will be glycogen (carbohydrate) but the carry over effect is far greater as you will be burning more total energy during the period plus you’ll be burning energy for up to 48hrs after the session and you will get a hell of a lot fitter more quickly.

So in short perform shorter more intense cardio sessions an example of these is to perform intervals.

4. Increase your NEPA

NEPA is Non Exercise Physical Activity and basically we just don’t do enough of it anymore. Often we move (only just) from our homes, to our vehicles or public transport and then to our desks, then back to our homes and then to bed. And when I say move it’s not very far or with much effort.

NEPA is about doing a little more, being more active. NEPA can be walking to work, or to a bus or tube stop further from your destination, taking the stairs, walking up the escalators, standing instead of sitting on public transport. Instead of using machinery and technology be proactive get out and do, lift you kids on your shoulders, carry the shopping rather than push it in a trolley. You get the point JUST DO MORE!!

5. Get enough rest- Sleep

Sleep is where our bodies are able to rest. During sleep our bodies and brains are able to recover and repair themselves. Sleep allows our cells and tissue to regenerate, it’s been proven that incomplete, lack of or interrupted sleep puts our bodies in a catabolic state (cell tissues are broken down) whereas proper sleep puts our bodies in an anabolic state of growth and repair. This anabolic state is important as it is where our cells including brain cells are repaired and regenerated. It has been proven that sufficient sleep benefits alertness, memory and problem solving, and overall health, as well as reducing the risk of accidents.

Are we getting enough- probably not, 8 hours is ideal for adults it has been proven that less than this results in loss of cognitive function. Studies from the university College of London have found short sleep has been shown to be a risk factor for weight gain, hypertension and Type 2 diabetes and therefore recommend a minimum of 7 hours each night.

Steps to a better nights sleep:
- Comfortable bedding
- A dark room (block out blinds/shutters)
- Don’t eat too heavily before going to bed
- Don’t overstimulate prior to going to bed (television)
- Remove all electromagnetic stimulus from the bedroom (electrical clocks, appliances, tvs, radios
- Relax your mind and body before bed (see 6.)

6. Allow time for restoration and rejuvenation If we are getting a minimum of 8 hours sleep each night we should be getting most of what is needed here. However other forms of both mental and physical restoration and rejuvenation are important and also available. Examples are activities such as Tai Chi, Yoga, meditation, reading. Painting, having a massage, sauna, steam or Turkish bath. Some of these restorative activities can also overlap as exercise or NEPA, and can also overlap with play time 7.

7. Play Play as in having fun is also extremely important. Kicking a football, throwing a rugby ball around, skipping and jumping, tumbling, playing a sport doing things that you enjoy that don’t feel like you’re doing much at all and have a huge value and importance.