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How to set health and fitness goals Everyone sets themselves a fitness or weight goal for the New Year, fierce with conviction and raring to go. Almost everyone, inevitably, becomes disappointed within weeks as reality kicks in. All these people have one thing in common: unrealistic goals. You need specific targets, concrete results and a way of measuring your progress. In short, if you break down your long-term goal into small steps your body will find it much easier to become stronger, leaner and fitter. Building on this theory, The Peak Physique Programme is a 12-week, 3-phase fitness plan, designed to achieve results by maximising your body`s physical potential and sustaining progress over a long-term period. The first thing you need to realise is what you really want to achieve and what it will take. If you want to lose half your body weight but only have a few hours a week away from work, you will need to be flexible and exercise at home. If you have more time to commit to training, you will reap more benefits from a carefully regulated fitness schedule. Secondly, your body responds to exercise depending on the type of training you do. Do you merely want to lose weight, or tone up? Working out which you want and need to do more can be tricky, it is advisable to see your doctor to find out whether you are the correct BMI or you could check with your health insurer provider Aviva (http://www.aviva.co.uk/life-insurance/) or another company to see if they have any recommendations. The Peak Physique Programme helps to assess which exercises are right for you, beginning with a comprehensive Foundation programme. Once you begin to train regularly, it is important to start fresh exercise routines every four to eight weeks to continue to progress and also to avoid becoming bored and demotivated. Focus on the exercises that you enjoy and ask your personal trainer to incorporate more such sessions into your workouts, to stop you from burning out. In The Peak Physique Programme, this stage is the Improvement phase, where you will be constantly challenged by new exercises.
As all professional athletes know, recovery is just as important as training. As hard as it may be to grasp initially, overtraining will tire out your body and hamper your progress. For those starting a programme, three to four sessions a week with one or two days recovery between each is adequate. Remember to warm up and down and take care when choosing what footwear to buy, as the wrong sort of shoe can cause all sorts of aches and pains, or even more serious problems. If you have followed The Peak Physique Programme you will now have graduated to the Results phase, where it becomes crucial that your fitness levels are maintained to avoid falling back into old habits.
Don't abandon New Year's resolutions, but make them specific, be honest about why you want to achieve your goal. The Peak Physique Programme is ideal for this because is provides the external force that will drive you and help you achieve your goals in the simplest possible way. A good tip is also to recruit a friend with similar goals, so that you can push each other when the going gets tough! helps to assess which exercises are right for you, beginning with a comprehensive Foundation programme.
Once you begin to train regularly, it is important to start fresh exercise routines every four to eight weeks to continue to progress and also to avoid becoming bored and demotivated. Focus on the exercises that you enjoy and ask your personal trainer to incorporate more such sessions into your workouts, to stop you from burning out. In The Peak Physique Programme, this stage is the Improvement phase, where you will be constantly challenged by new exercises.
As all professional athletes know, recovery is just as important as training. As hard as it may be to grasp initially, overtraining will tire out your body and hamper your progress. For those starting a programme, three to four sessions a week with one or two days recovery between each is adequate. Remember to warm up and down and take care when choosing what footwear to buy, as the wrong sort of shoe can cause all sorts of aches and pains, or even more serious problems. If you have followed The Peak Physique Programme you will now have graduated to the Results phase, where it becomes crucial that your fitness levels are maintained to avoid falling back into old habits.
Don't abandon New Year's resolutions, but make them specific, be honest about why you want to achieve your goal. The Peak Physique Programme is ideal for this because is provides the external force that will drive you and help you achieve your goals in the simplest possible way. A good tip is also to recruit a friend with similar goals, so that you can push each other when the going gets tough! The (Fat) Burning QuestionWhich exercise is best for burning fat from the stomach? The best one for the arms? Or the hips? I get asked questions like these alot, and my answer is always the same - removing fat from a particular body part by targeting it with an exercise (or ‘spot reduction') is impossible! Improving body shape involves both toning the muscles and stripping away excess fat which is stored in a layer between the skin and muscle. When you exercise a particular body part, the muscle may change shape over time but this has no direct effect on the surrounding layer of fat and hence the overall shape and appearance of the body part. It is only when you strip away this fat layer that definition and tone becomes apparent, and this is achieved by working the whole body to raise your metabolism and burn lots of calories. To help explain this further, let's discuss how the fat gets there in the first place. Your body wants to store fat! Think about blowing up a lilo on the beach - there are normally 4 or 5 long chambers and one for the ‘pillow' at the end. These chambers are normally flat but when you start to blow the lilo up the pillow inflates until it is full of air. Then the first long chamber fills up, then the next one along and so on. In our bodies, we have millions of tiny cells designed to store fat - these are like the chambers in the lilo. Most of these cells are empty and flat, but they begin to fill up when we consume more energy (food) than we actually need - the body converts it into fat so that we have a reserve supply of energy. This is an evolutionary legacy - for early humans who needed to hunt their food it was very important to ensure they had enough back up energy to last until the next meal came along. Nowadays the idea of running out of food in the western world is unthinkable and it is very easy for those fat storage cells to fill up. Fat cells are located all over the body but there are a high proportion around the hips and thigh area in women, and the stomach in men. These are the ones that tend to ‘fill up' first - rather like the pillow chamber in the lilo. When these begin to reach their capacity, further excess fat is stored elsewhere, such as the arms. This is what causes the bumps and curves we don't want! Take action now! The longer the fat is stored for, the harder it is for the body to access it for energy (how difficult is it get to the garden furniture at the back of the shed after it's been there all winter?!), and the more recently deposited fat stores will be used first. This is why your arms may be the first body part you notice changing shape when you start exercising, even if you're not doing any arm exercises, and is also the reason it seems hard to shift the weight from your stomach and hips. So, you can't choose where fat is lost from, but if you exercise regularly you will eventually use up the ‘recent' fat stores and your body will start targeting those stubborn areas for energy - so stick to your active lifestyle if you want to see results!
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