I am 39 years old and am trying to shift 10 kilos or so. I am 5ft 4 and weigh 67 kilos (approx 147 pounds)
I have started a competition at work "The Biggest Loser" which is their take of the TV programme - weekly weigh ins for 12 weeks and the person with the highest percentage of weight lost, wins a big prize. As you can imagine, the motivation amongst us is running high. I have started eating really clean and cut down severly on sugars and also watching my carb intake. I already have a gym membership so I have this week been dragging myself out of bed at 5.30am and going to the gym.. four times this last week. I like simplicity and the workout the gym instructor put together was complicated and bored me and so I have just been doing my own thing and I figured I would most likely to stick to the routine if I just did the stuff I enjoyed doing. Fifteen mins on the treadmill sprinting, fifteen mins on the weight machines (hate the free weight room) and then further fifteen mins cardio (cross trainer) What I am puzzled with is the conflicting information out there! Some trainers say cardio, cardio, cardio for weight loss and to forget weights if you need to drop the weight.. others (including the instructor at my gym who is aware of the competition at work) strongly disagrees. He has advised me to focus on doing weight training moves which uses the biggest muscles in my body such as the assisted chin up machines and nothing but compound moves including squats and lunges also using dumbells. Some trainers such as the one at my friends gym says dont use the cardio machines with resistance unless you want to grow muscle in that area! So the elliptical machine should be on Level 0 or 1. I am confused with all this conflicting information!
What do you think about my routine? Should I focus on cardio and instead of doing 50/50 weights and cardio.. decrease the time I spend on weights?
Obviously, while the competition is running, I only want to see the results show on the scale!
Obviously you could dehydrate yourself in the sauna (healthy-neutral), use laxatives to 'cleanse' your colon (unhealthy) and avoid sodium (healthy).
We should all be weight-training, both for cosmetic and health effects. If we weight-train then we'll probably lose the same amount of weight but more of what we lose is actually fat. If we're in a deficit and don't weight-train then a higher proportion of what we lose is muscle.
If you spend half an hour using a cardio machine on the lowest setting and as a result your heart-rate has not elevated and you have not worked up a sweat then you've 1) not sufficiently engaged your cardio-vascular system 2) have burnt fewer calories than you would have at a higher setting. On the other hand if you set the resistance so high that the machine barely moves that's hardly clever either.
It's too late now but you should have had extra coins in your pockets and drunk lots of water at the initial weigh-in
I would highly recommend ditching the cardio completely and focus solely on weight/resistence training. And not just weight training, but progressive weight training. If you are truly in a position where you need to lose fat, cardio is not going to do it for you, but DIET will be 100% of your weight loss. You can't outrun, outbike, outeliptical a poor diet. Get your eating nailed down to eating in a deficit (the more significant the more weight you'll lose) and you'll win your contest. Cardio is not necessary for weight loss and often will just make you feel hungry and negate any good thing you've done in your diet. Now if you only have a few pounds to lose, then its a different ball game.
