burn FAT effectively
/earlier this week, i got some help in the weight room from my professional basketball playing bro-in-law,
Brian!
he is also a trainer in his off-season. can you tell? he provided me with a fantastic upper body workout cause i need all the help i can get when i'm on my own.
we did a bunch of stuff! variety is so important in order to tone and grow the entire muscle group- i appreciated (but hated) them all. s/n, i'm looking forward to a nice, even tan.
hammer curls. i've ALWAYS wanted bulging biceps, especially when my arm is relaxed!!
lat pull downs with straight arms- great tricep/back/shoulder exercise.
afterwards, i did my cardio with a concentration on burning...
******FAT******
HR monitors have completely changed the way i workout. up until i became a Lifetime Fitness instructor, i figured a super-duper sweaty workout = the BEST workout ever. if i didn't achieve sweaty-mess status every single time i hit the gym, i didn't feel like i burned enough or did enough, and i'd leave feeling inadequate. i soon learned that different zones burn different things.
i found Sonny's Polar FT7 on amazon.com as well as my own. how it works:
1. put the wrist watch on (serves as a plain ol' watch as well)
2. strap on the chest transmitter, and make sure it's secure and close to your heart, literally.
3. start the watch, do your workout, then stop it. afterwards, you can look forward to seeing:
your average and max heart rates,
your total workout time plus the total amount of calories burned,
AND,
just how long you stayed in your fat burning zone! isn't that awesome?! love this thing. this is super important to me because my training focuses on staying in my fat burning zone, not so much my total amount of cals burned. also, that was a very brief synopsis- you still need to read the directions :)
more convincing:
- not all gym equipment is up to date- some machines don't have those neat sensors on them you can hold to find your heart rate. one of the machines i like to use in particular is the stairmaster, and the ones in my gym don't have sensors. plus, i don't like to have to hold those side rails anyway! having a HR monitor handy solves that issue.
- even if you are on a machine with the HR sensors present, your chest transmitter syncs with the machine's signal and displays your HR without you having to grip them! i appreciate that. sometimes those sensors just don't work correctly at all, or it will give me a crazy triple digit number that is clearly false. and again, having to hold those sensors slows down my groove.
- most watch models have a feature that beeps when you are out of your fat burning range to let you know whether you need to speed up or slow down. neat!
now, HOW DO YOU FIND YOUR FAT BURNING ZONE????
this info is no secret and is available all over the net! follow these steps and you can't go wrong.
sure, other zones burn other things, but i focused on fat for this post. so ultimately, your fat burning zone is where your heart rate needs to STAY for the duration of your workout to burn MAXIMUM fat.
le
