Achieve Better Weight Results By Exercising

Exercise is the second largest contributing factor to the quality and length of your life (after your nutritional intake). The benefits of regular exercise are many and include increased energy, improved circulation, lower resting heart rate, lower blood pressure, greater strength, and mood regulation.

Exercise is for everyone, no matter how old. You can safely start exercising at ANY age, if you do it correctly. The results are almost immediate and are cumulative – every session you do, builds on the previous session. Even if you have never exercised before and are now in your 70’s, the benefits of a gentle stretching and walking program will amaze you – improved circulation, vitality, mood, zest for life, digestion, and suppleness to name a few. One of the eastern philosophies of exercise is that ‘flowing water never stagnates, the hinge on a busy door never rusts’. The earlier you start, the greater the cumulative health benefits. Exercise is something you can do literally until the end of your life. It will keep you physically and mentally younger than your years.

Latest research is also showing that exercise is one of the most powerful antidepressants known, and better results are being achieved through exercise than through prescription drugs. One study shows that 10 months of regular, moderate exercise outperformed the popular antidepressant Zoloft in easing symptoms in young adults, and that 30 minutes of aerobic exercise 3-5 times a week cut symptoms of depression by 50% in young adults1. Quite a relevant statistic when you consider that 20 million Americans suffer from depression.

The Minimum Exercise You Have To Do!

The minimum exercise you need to do to achieve some health and anti-aging benefits is only 15 minutes per day. Knowing this might motivate you to start if you are not currently active. Or you can choose to exercise for 30 minutes every second day, but the idea is to get a minimum of around 2 hours a week, spread over the week. Remember this is a minimum – the more you exercise (up to a point), the greater the health benefits. And if you want to seriously change your body, you will need to spend more time exercising. It depends completely on your own personal goals and it is essential that you determine these before you start on any exercise program. Are you just starting after many years of inactivity? Do you want to run a marathon, enter a body-building contest, or just maintain a certain level of basic fitness and suppleness? Click here (add link to the-success-factor) for information that will assist you in determining your health and fitness goals. And if your goal is to alleviate depression, the best results seem to come from as much as 90 minutes a day (built up to this level from your own appropriate level of fitness).

Exercising for Top Health

The ideal for anti-aging and life-extension is to do all 3 types of exercise – cardiovascular, weight-bearing and stretching (some types of exercises combine one or more of these forms, like Pilates (link to Pilates below) and the Tao exercises (link to Tao exercises)). The aim of this website is to show you the principles of all 3 types of exercise, and to give you ideas on how to fit them into your life. If you have more specific exercise goals, this website will help you with those too.

Many people have a negative attitude toward exercise, perhaps because of bad experiences in the past, or because it can be difficult to stick to a program and once you stop, it’s so difficult to start again. One way to overcome this is to change your mindset to exercise. Once you understand the benefits and are clear on your personal long-term health goals, it becomes easier to do. It is also a lot easier to squeeze 15 minutes of exercise a day into a busy schedule, than feeling you have to be in the gym 2 hours every day in order to keep fit. It’s also vital to choose a type of exercise you enjoy, to try new things, and to change the type of exercise when you get bored. This will all help you to make exercise a lifelong habit.

Starting – and Sticking To! – An Exercise Program

1. Get a personal trainer. Not only will he/she help you to do specific exercises in the most effective way, but will keep you motivated when the going gets tough. Tell him/her up front what your personal goals are. He/she can design a program that will help you achieve this.

2. Exercise with a friend. Make a specific time to meet each day.

3. Develop a regular routine and stick to it with determination. Routine is a great way to develop habits, which will ultimately get you where you want to be.

4. Book you exercise schedule into your diary, as you would a business meeting. Give it the same priority as any other appointment.

5. Get your partner or family to join you and make it fun. Plan fun weekend activities that get you going.

6. Set specific, measurable goals.

7. Remember that nothing worthwhile is achieved without effort. It takes 30 days to form a habit. Do whatever it takes to stick to your program for this time. Thereafter it becomes so much easier.

Chart Your Progress

1. Know exactly what you want to achieve with your exercise

The only way to get somewhere is to know where you are going. Once you have decided this, you need to write it down. The power of written goals has been proven time and time again. Without them, you may try an exercise here, a technique there – but ultimately, you will flounder, as you don’t have the motivation, direction or purpose that comes from having written goals.

2. Know exactly where you are starting from

To know where you want to get to, you also need to be absolutely honest about where you are now. In terms of exercise, this means measurements like your weight and body fat percentage (see below).

This will give you a starting point, a point from which to plot your course forward.

3. Formulate a plan for exercising

Once you have a written goal, you need to formulate your own individual plan on how to get there. The information that follows on this website is a good place to start, but there is a wealth of information available which you can also use to devise an exercise program that suits you – your level of fitness, your lifestyle, your body type, what you want to achieve, the time you have available. Write down your plan and slot it into your diary. You can check out the book Ultimate Health for more information. If you don’t make time to exercise, it’s not going to happen!

4. Work the plan

Act on your plan consistently. You can have the best goals in the world, but without action, they are worthless. Yes, it’s going to be hard work! Yes, it’s going to be a mental challenge! Yes, it’s sometimes going to feel impossible to stick to! Nothing worth having comes without effort – day in, day out. You have to do something every day that will move you closer to your goal. If you lapse, do not get disheartened. Start again as soon as you can, and see it as a temporary slip-up.

5. Keep checking

Once you have developed the habit of exercising, and you are exercising regularly, keep referring back to your goals. Is your body changing the way you wanted it to? Do you have more energy? Are you more alert, supple and stronger? The truth about exercise is that you need to keep improving – running slightly harder or longer, lifting slightly heavier weights, becoming more flexible every month. If you never change what you are doing, your body will simply adapt to the exercise and stop developing. So keep referring to your goals to determine if you are achieving what you set out to. And if you are not, change! Modify your program or change the type of exercise you do – just don’t give up. The path to success is always an arduous one. You’ll have days where you feel discouraged and days you don’t exercise, due to illness or circumstances or laziness. But don’t let these stand in the way of your ultimate goal – to keep exercising for life. If you ‘fall off the wagon’, no matter for how long, simply get back on again!

The BEST Measure Of Your State Of Health

By far a better method of determining your current state of health, and your predicted lifespan, is not weight but body fat percentage. In terms of an indication of health, weight can be virtually meaningless.

One of the most common methods of determining ‘ideal weight’ is the height-weight chart. These charts, often used by insurance companies, doctors and the military, tell you how much you should weigh based on your height. Although these charts are still popular, they’re very misleading.

Here are some examples:

A 1.72 meter (5ft8in) bodybuilder weighing 92kgs (200lbs) would be grossly overweight according to the chart. But his body fat may be in the single digits and he might have visible ‘six-pack’ abs.

A 60kg (105 lbs) woman could have 30% body fat. An 80kg man could have 27% body fat. Both have acceptable weights according to the chart, but both would be classified as obese.

‘Ideal weight’ from the charts doesn’t take body fat into account and therefore, they can’t accurately predict how much you should weigh.

Similarly, many people are totally obsessed with scale weight. The problem again with the scale, is that it doesn’t tell you how much of your weight is fat and how much is muscle, or lean tissue. Scale weight can also fluctuate on a daily basis due to water levels.

It is easy to lose weight (just dehydrate yourself for a weekend and you will lose a few kilos or pounds). Losing fat, without losing muscle, is a lot harder.

If you want to make a real and lasting difference to your health, you must get rid of your preoccupation with the scale and judge your progress instead on body fat percentage. This is a difficult change to make, but it is essential to long-term success – and is a far more accurate measure of your health than the scale.

Another common method of judging ideal weight is Body Mass Index. Again, this is a poor measure of health and weight because it doesn’t take into account body fat vs. lean tissue.

Body Mass index (BMI) is a measurement of body overweight determined by dividing weight (in kilograms) by height (in meters) squared. Then, if your BMI is 27.3 or higher (for females) or 27.8 or higher (for males), you are obese.

Again, if we take the example of a fit bodybuilder (who happens to have single-digit body fat, but BMI makes no room for this):

Weight: 92 kgs

Height: 1.72 m squared = 2.96 m

92 kgs/2.96 meters = 31.08 BMI

This guy’s weight appears to be a serious health risk and he needs to lose weight as fast as possible. But obviously, this is not the case.

Conversely, someone could have a ‘healthy’ BMI of 19-22% and yet have a dangerously high level of body fat.

The bottom line is: forget about weight, height-weight charts or Body Mass Index – the answer is body fat testing.

Body fat testing

The reason to measure body composition is to distinguish between fat and muscle. Instead of looking at weight, a body composition test looks at body fat and lean body mass. A weekly body composition test allows you to measure and record the exact effect your nutrition and exercise is having on your body.

Many people mistake activity for achievement. You could think you are working hard in the gym and dieting properly, and actually your body is not changing at all. The only way of knowing if you are making progress towards your goals is if you are measuring every week, and the best way you can measure is your body composition. The only goals worthy of your effort are fat loss and muscle gain, not weight loss or gain.

The chart below shows body fat percentage for men and women. An optimal, and achievable, percentage of body fat for a non-athlete is 10-14% for men and 16-20% for women. At these ‘ideal’ body fat percentages, you will look lean and, for the most part, fat-free.

High body fat levels have been linked to many diseases (see chapter 3). Being categorized as ‘clinically obese’ means that body fat is at such a level that these health problems become a concern. Men are considered borderline at 25% body fat and clinically obese at 30%. Women are borderline at 30% and clinically obese at 35% body fat.

Body Fat Rating Scale	Men (%)	Women (%)
Competition Ready (‘ripped’)	3 – 6	9 – 12
Very Lean (excellent)	9	15
Lean (good)	10 – 14	16 – 20
Average (fair)	15 – 19	21 – 25
Below Average (poor)	20 – 25	26 – 30
Major improvement needed (very poor)	26 – 30	31 – 40

Many gyms will have equipment to measure your body fat. Ideally, take a measurement once a week to chart your progress.

Another method that is easy, practical, accessible and reliable is skinfold testing. It is based on the fact that most body fat is stored in layers just beneath the skin. (The rest is stored around organs and in muscles).

By measuring the amount of fat you have beneath the skin by ‘pinching’ folds of skin and fat at several locations, you get a very accurate estimate of your overall fat percentage. A skilled tester can get a highly accurate reading. Most of all, skinfold testing is practical and quick.

The skinfold test is performed with a vice-like instrument called a skinfold caliper. The jaws of the caliper pinch a fold of skin and fat and measure the thickness of the fat fold in millimeters. You can obtain your own calipers from some health shops or fitness centers. Instructions on how to use them will come with the calipers. This is important, as different sites on the body are measured.

Anywhere from 1 to 11 sites on the body can be measured. A very accurate reading can be obtained from as little as 4 sites. Even if only the upper body is measured, it still gives a very accurate estimate of total body fat. Skinfold testing is surprisingly accurate. The accuracy of the test is determined more by the skill of the tester than the equipment. Because of this, there may be slight variations from tester to tester. Therefore, try to have your skinfold test done by the same person or machine every week. The most important thing is to do it regularly, and record the measurements, so you can chart your progress.

Once you have your body fat percentage, you can calculate your lean body mass (subtract the percentage of fat from your total weight), and chart your progression in this, especially if you are trying to increase lean body mass. Otherwise, body fat percentage is adequate for most people to keep track of how you are doing.