Trainer's Blog

If you want results, yes. If not, then no.

This shouldn’t be the only thing you do with your treadmill...
In my article titled ‘Cardio’, I expounded on the many benefits of walking and said it was my preferred form of cardio. From an article by Tim Henriques (Director of the National Personal Training Institute of VA, I’ll just summarize the finer points of it.

Tim’s opinion and mine as well, is that walking on an inclined treadmill is the most effective and safest form of cardio if fat loss (without muscle loss) is the goal.

Tim’s Pros of walking:

• Walking does not over-stress the body, and in fact is restorative, you feel better after a walk, not worse.
• You can’t overtrain with walking. (Arnold Schwarzenegger once said that the body was built to walk 40 miles a day, so my guess is nobody is going to over-walk themselves)
• Walking is low intensity, thus it burns primarily fat for fuel, and walking briskly at an incline for 4-8 hours a week will burn a significant amount of fat.
• Walking burns almost no muscle, I won’t go into what’s going on with the glucose in your body when you do more intense cardio, just suffice it to say, it’s true.
• Helps the body recover from resistance training.
• Does not cause unwanted adaptation like more intense cardio does (it won’t make you lose lean mass or get weaker)
• Also, it’s great for stress relief, it’s functional, increases ability to...

Cross training weights and running

Runners don’t usually like (or at least agree with) lifters and lifters don’t usually like runners. Why? Maybe it’s got something to do with each party thinking that they are the one stop shop, they have it all figured out, their sport gets the best results and that the other group is just a bunch of meatheads or sissies. This thinking is not exactly the most scientific, objective and/or productive approach to this debate.

I personally hate running. The Marines made me do it and I love my Marine Corps – but I still hate me some runnin. Maybe it’s because I'm lazy. The way I see it, if it’s gonna take more than 3 hours a week to stay fit, I don’t want anything to do with it. I’ll just be fat, avoid the subject when brought up, pop 12 pills every day and wear black like the rest of the country. Luckily for me, it doesn’t have to be that way (thank God…).

There’s an answer for all you runners out there that want a great physique but cant seem to get it from running alone and that answer is to cross train with free weights.

That last sentence is likely where I lose about 95% of you die-hard runners out there. No problem. You don’t want to and consequently can’t be helped anyway. You will be the ones to pay for the orhto doc’s yacht.

Again, if you must run, the solution is to cross train running with weight training. This approach will...

First Pearl: Don't Be Afraid To Ask Questions!

5 Pieces of Fitness Wisdom For You:

1)      If you own a dog, you should walk it. Cesar Millan recommends you walk your dog at least an hour and a half a day to satisfy their natural instinct of migration, and it calms them down too, so no more expensive dog obedience training! It will be a great bonding experience for you and your pet, and you’ll lose weight in the process! If you split you’re walking into two separate sessions a day, say, 45 minutes in the morning and 45 minutes in the evening, it’ll be more effective for fat loss than if you had walked an hour and a half in one session. Chrisitian Thibaudeau, a very well-respected Olypmic weightlifter and highly sought-after personal trainer for professional athletes, said it this way, "Dividing one's volume into two session will ALWAYS be more effective than doing the same work in one session. This is true both for growth(muscle gain) and fat loss. Specifically when it comes to fat loss. Two sessions have been shown to increase caloric expenditure moreso than doing the exact same volume in one session."

2)      People who jog are what weightlifters call “The Walking Wounded”. You wanna know why? Just look at a jogger, usually they’ll have knee braces on, or if they don’t, they look as if they’re about to fall forward at any moment as they jog down the street breathless...

But fear not, there is a simple answer: intensity and the lack thereof. Cardio can be an effective supplement to your training. If  the goal is to be lean, you must either do high-intensity cardio or low-intensity cardio as well as weight-lifting.

High-intensity cardio is similar to weightlifting, and the body responds to it in a similar way, by getting stronger or faster. This is a good thing, as improving performance makes you look better! Also, high-intensity cardio forces the body to adapt in a more favorable way than it does to medium pace cardio; to sprint faster your body needs to become stronger, and this leads to some muscle gain in the muscles being used, but more importantly it leads to no muscle loss! Examples of high-intensity cardio include sprinting, walking intervals on an inclined treadmill and circuit training with weights.

Low-intensity cardio is walking or riding a bike at a conversational pace, as you can carry on a conversation while doing it. The good thing about low-intensity cardio is that it too does not burn muscle, or at least a lot less than medium pace cardio does. This is because walking does not cause an adaptation to occur, your body does not need to change drastically to become more efficient at walking. It just needs energy, which it will get primarily from fat.

The final word on cardio is that it has its place as a supplement to your weight lifting and not as the only form of training you do - so if you’re gonna run,...