According to the top fitness experts, 3 things are likely to stand in your way. First, droopy posture: standing tall makes you look learner instantly. Next, excess belly fat: it doesn’t just hide your abs; it’s a health hazard, too. And finally, limited mobility caused by not varying your routine: bed, car, desk, reverse and repeat.
Goal No. 1: Stand up straight!
Sitting is murder on your posture. And these days we do it more than ever. A 2008 survey by Vanderbilt University’s institute for Medicine and Public Health found that women spend nearly 8 hours a day parked on their fannies, often hunched over a keyboard or slumped on the sofa. When women do get off the couch, they spend hours working on their ‘beach’ muscles, like the chest, abs and quads, and neglect posterior muscles, like the traps, back, hamstrings and glutes. The result muscle imbalance that doesn’t just look bad (saggy buns are never pretty) but also prevents your body from operating optimally.
Get there: Bolster your backside with strength moves that target your entire posterior chain, the muscles that run from the back of your head to your heels. These include the erector spinae, which are cable-like muscles that flank your spin to your bum to the base of your skull; they keep your vertebrae properly stacked as you bend and twist. Then, there are the glutes, the largest muscles in your body and the hamstrings, the set of 3 muscles that run diagonally across the backs of your thighs. Your glutes give you the power to run without toppling over, while your hamstrings keep your hips stable so you can, say, bend forward to curb your pooch without failing on your face. At the bottom of the chain are the calves, which protect your knees from excess pressure.
Goal No.2: Bulletproof your body!
One of the top 10 workout trends of 2008, according to the American Council on Exercise, was “Functional fitness” – training by doing movements that mimic activities typically done outside of the gym. This is good news, because too many people still follow the old body-builder model of training, isolating individual muscles with moves like bicep curls or triceps kickbacks. They may make you look good when you stand still and flex for the mirror, but those narrow-minded moves don’t help you bend and twist in ways that are actually useful. Think about it: how often do you bench-press your groceries? In reality, lugging produce recruits muscles from all over your body- legs, back, shoulders-and you need to train them to work together.
Get there: Do workouts that imitate real life. To build lean muscle; burn fat; increase strength, endurance and range of motion; and stay injury-free, opt for functional-fitness moves: instead of moving a weight up and down, in and out, for instance, pull it diagonally across your body as if you were lifting your shopping bags out of the backseat. That way, you train your muscles to work together, in all planes of motion. With functional fitness, the result is a lean, athletic body that looks fantastic and is built for performance.
Goal No.3: Banish Belly Fat!
The average woman’s waist circumference has been growing for 15 years and now hovers at a dangerous 37 inches. Because it’s linked to heart disease, diabetes and cancer, excess belly fat can wreck your health.
Get there: do speed intervals. A study from Canada found that exercisers who did 30 minute workouts that included short, hard efforts lost 3 times as much fat in 15 weeks as their peers who performed steady-paced easier workouts for 45 minutes.
Technically, you burn more fat as fuel during low-intensity exercise. But you become a better fat burner overall even when resting by raising your fitness ceiling, which you do by going fast. People found that interval training increases your cells’ fat-frying ability by up to 50%. And because they’re harder to do than pokey one-speed workouts, your body takes longer to return to normal after you’re done (meaning you keep torching calories long after you’ve showered). As a belly-busting bonus, vigorous exercise lowers stress. Stress hormones like cortisol are a know contributor to abdominal fat.
Tags: fitness
