This is the first in a series of posts on the best things baby boomer women (actually women of ALL ages!) can do to improve their fat loss efforts. In our efforts to get and stay fit, we often do some things that may be counter-productive. Today’s tip for accelerated weight loss is……

Switch your “steady state” and low level cardio to INTERVAL TRAINING
Interval training is a superior form of exercise for fat loss for many reasons. Before I get into these reasons, let’s first define interval training: Interval training can take many forms, but it is usually described as a method of exercise that alternates periods of very hard effort with periods of easy to moderate effort. When I refer to “steady state” exercise, I’m referring to a cardio workout where you get your heart rate up to a moderate level, and keep it there. An example of this would be running on a track or on a treadmill at the same speed for your entire workout.

Examples of interval training:
-Segments of fast walking interspersed with segments of moderate walking
-Segments of running (hard effort) interspersed with segments of slower running (moderate effort).

Interval training can be done with walking, running, biking or swimming programs as well as on cardiovascular machines such as treadmills and stair climbers.

The benefits of interval training for women who want to shed body fat are tremendous! Here are just a few:
-Greater improvements in fitness
-More calories burned per session
-Greater fat loss
-Higher metabolic “afterburn” (you’re still burning calories after the exercise is over!)

Research hasn’t given us the ideal hard work/moderate work ratio yet. I suggest you mix it up. One day you might do 30 seconds hard/90 seconds moderate, and another day, you might just do an interval based on distance (for instance, on a track you might go really fast on the straight parts and recover on the curved parts). With interval training, the sky is the limit! You could have a different workout each and every time. This really challenges your body, which is another way to keep stimulating it to improve. If we always do the same thing when we work out, our body adapts. Interval training provides a wonderful change and really fires up our metabolism.

Interval training can be difficult, so it’s best to start it slowly. A great way to start an interval training program is to exchange an interval workout for just one “steady state” cardio workout a week, and then work up from there. Start with just 4 or 5 intervals the first time you try this and work up slowly to 8-10 intervals per workout.

Another great thing about interval training is that you can do a much shorter workout and still get wonderful benefits from it. This is one of the greatest features of interval training for busy women like us, as far as I’m concerned!

If I could only give one tip to a boomer women on how to spur on fat loss, interval training would be it. I encourage you to give it a try!

Stay tuned for my next fat loss tip for boomer women.

Becky

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Ah, yes, those dreaded “trouble spots”. I just had a new customer today tell me that she wanted to work on hers. There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting certain parts of your body to look leaner and more toned. In fact, I have a free booklet you can download by filling out your name and email address right up there in the right hand corner of this page that will help you get great looking arms. But, when this new customer mentioned those two words–trouble spots–I realized I needed to go into my little speech about how working a certain part of your body doesn’t remove body fat from that area. It bears repeating here.

Exercises that target your legs, your rear or your abs are great and should be in your program. In fact, I hope you do exercises that hit just those areas! However, we need to remember that doing squats (for the legs and rear) or a stability ball crunch (for the abs) won’t whittle down the girth of any of those areas. We’ll certainly strengthen those areas and perhaps they’ll feel firmer or tighter. But, I’d submit to you that they’ll still be “trouble spots” unless you’re also doing something to shed body fat.

That’s why I told my new customer she’ll be doing exercises that utilize a lot of her body at once as well as doing interval cardio workouts. Remember that old song that went something like “the leg bone’s connected to the shin bone, the shin bone’s connected to the…..”?. This is a great way to look at exercise and the human body. We function due to movement of many muscles moving in concert with each other. It’s best to exercise the body this way and get lots of joints moving at once. This serves several great functions. First, we exercise using movements that are functional –they’re similar to activities we do in “real life”. Second, by moving large muscle groups and several joints at once (say the legs and rear) as opposed to single joint movement (like a biceps curl) we burn more calories while doing the exercise (muscles gobble up calories when they’re working hard!). Again, I see nothing wrong with biceps curls, but they should be an added extra to a full body strength training routine using multi-joint exercises. Burning a serious amount of calories in a strength training routine and following up with an interval cardio routine is the best way I can help a baby boomer shed body fat. That and a supportive nutrition plan, of course!

So, I have a little education to do in my first session with my new personal training customer tomorrow. After a brief evaluation and a good warm up, we’ll do a nice beginner level full body workout (mostly using body weight and maybe a few exercise bands), and finish up with an interval cardio workout on a stationary bike. We’ll be done in 45 minutes, most likely. It’s going to be a very different workout for this woman, a baby boomer in her early fifties. She was expecting a lot of low intensity cardio and strength work on machines. I guarantee she’s never worked out like this before!

I’ll be back later this week to give you more information on how to do cardio-interval workouts.

Committed to your success,

Becky

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