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Free & Effective at-home Workouts for the Fit Mom at NapTime
At home workouts are all over the internet, yet finding the ones that are safe and effective for fatloss are harder to come by. Most especially, those workouts that won’t wake the baby are hard to find for Avidly Fit Moms and Fit Moms in training. What I have to share with you today is a link to a fabulous facebook fitness page of my dear friend and PHENOMENAL Fit Mom and NPC Athlete, Nathalie.
Nathalie is also a dear friend whom I have worked with for years to get her stage presentation just perfect to showcase Nathalie’s beautiful body lines, which has earned her several first-place titles on the NPC stage, as well as in several other bikini and physique competitions outside of the NPC. She is a French Native and a mother to a beautiful boy, Sean, who comes with her to our gym, Steel Barbells (15115 Califa Street, Van Nuys, CA). Although I am her posing and presentation coach, I am also her nutritionist, and Nathalie trains herself with some of the most incredibly glute-sculpting workouts I have ever seen and taken part in! She is extraordinary at creating the perfect butt for women to prance around with pride in! I call Nathalie the “French Booty Maker”! Not only is the “French Booty Maker” workout great, but the creator, Nathalie Bernard, is a very special woman. Nathalie is filled with an incomparable vibrance and a faith in her clients that is truly invigorating for their workouts! She has a victorious spirit (whihc you can see displayed in her story about overcoming a surgery nightmare this past year, it’s a tear-jerker, but very inspiring).
We just love this Fit Mom at Steel Barbells! Check her out at her Facebook Page and keep up with all of her great fitness videos (posted daily) and photos of good times and hardcore workouts with her clients at Steele Barbells Gym.
In the meantime, check out one of the fun but very challenging glute workouts that Nat and I did (it’s part of her “French Booty Maker” routine that she created). Fun stuff, but man, does it ever burn the fat off of your butt! No wonder this Fit Momma doesn’t have cellulite. Nathlie Bernard- remember to join her and I at our Facebook group America’s Hottest Fit Moms.
Burn Fat Naturally Fit Moms!
Hollywood’s Anti-Aging Secret: The Natural Way to Fat Loss, Youth, and Fitness Longevity for Everyone
Two years ago Dr. Patricia Wexler let one of Hollywood’s fat loss and anti-aging secrets out of the bag–Growth Hormone. “Actresses use it to slim abdominal fat and increase muscle tone and libido,” Wexler said.
http://shine.yahoo.com/
Actresses with insider connections to discreet doctors may inject their way to a youthful, fit and sexy body, but you can boost your own growth hormone naturally without any side effects by exercising smarter, Fit Moms and friends!
Human Growth Hormone is naturally secreted by the pituitary gland to regenerate cells, strengthen bones and make the immune system stronger. Its biggest effect, the ones the movie stars are after, is fat burning, which leads to a lean, fit, sculpted and beautiful physique, of course. Growth Hormone turns your body into a fat burning machine. Most women produce less than 10 nano grams of GH per milliliter of blood. A nano gram is one-billionth of gram, which means a little GH goes a long way.
The natural way for all you Fit Moms and Friends to boost your natural GH levels, and get the same effects as the starlets, is to ditch the pink dumbells and treadmill for sprints and real weights. Yes, weight training can lead to fat loss, Fit Moms, without leading you to a “bulky” physique (which is a common misconception that Fit Moms and most of our female friends have yodeled for years!). Weight training is the key to fat loss, anti-aging, and even well-maintained weight loss! Fit Moms and Friends, read more to learn the key to unlocking that potential in your body through weight training and sprints!
The results of an experiment on the effects of sprinting on women published in Oxford University’s journal Acta Physiologica found “Women elicited a greater response of serum GH to sprint exercise” than men. They always say men are the stronger gender physically, but it seems that in this trend, nature is possibly trying to bring ladies into a balance in this sense. Even the body’s nature is to bring balance between the sexes! The swedish scientists who conducted the experiment concluded, “this may contribute to explaining the earlier observed muscle hypertrophy in women in response to sprint training.” If you want toned, shapely legs, Fit Moms and Friends, well, even the doctors and scientists are suggesting that you run sprints. If you don’t run, then look at our other fat burning articles on interval training, which will yield similar results.
Yes, this is Empowerment for Everyone- Mother nature has in some ways leveled the playing field. We Fit Moms can get stronger with this work as we continue to do it, without gaining the muscle that a man will. Women cannot get big, bulky muscles from natural GH, but they get larger percentage increase from GH boosting exercises than men and a few extra nanograms will deliver a flat stomache and tight butt fast.
The quickest way to boost GH is to run sprints (as I stated earlier, check the fat burning category of articles at http://nitasworld.com/blogs for further articles on interval training, which will deliver similar results). The research shows that they key to effective sprints are the intensity, the speed you run, not how many you do or how far you sprint. When I use the word “effective” I am relating the “effective” results of sprinting or interval training to how well this exercise style will burn fat, helping the body look and feel sculpted and lean and beautiful, which is what every woman is striving for when we do any workout. Am I right, Fit Moms? I mean, seriously, which one of us wouldn’t kill (or sprint) to have Selma Hayek’s killer calves, and that Fit Mama’s fit and sexy thighs?
Do you think that it’s inconvenient to do sprints? Well, it takes less time than cardio to burn the calories you can burn in just a few minutes of sprinting, so time is not an issue, Fit Moms. And all you skeptic friends and fit moms are sure to realize that location is easier with sprints than going to the corner store. You already take your kids to half the places you can sprint, fit moms, and all the pet owners take their “kids” (pets) to the other places. None of this is rocket science. Not one of these places is an inconvenience Fit Moms and Friends, because you already go there!
Fat burning Sprints can be done anywhere: An empty parking lot, a low-traffic residential street, the play ground on the weekends at our kid’s school, the park while the kids play, or the sports field or running track at your teenager’s high school at night or on weekends. If you haven’t sprinted recently, don’t jump in head first running as hard as you can the first day, start by doing strides at a pace faster than a jog for four repetitions of 50 to 100 yards. Gradually increase the speed you sprint until you can do four of them all at all out racing speed. When you can do four at full speed, add an extra sprint every week. To make sure your intensity stays high, use a stop watch to time your sprint workout and push yourself to get them done in less time.
By running sprints three times a week and adding some negatives to your weight training, you can boost your natural Growth Hormone levels, burn more body-fat than you do with cardio, and save more time while you preserve your joints and bones, since sprinting is better for your bones and joints than jogging.
Here is a clip of my business partner and co-author JD Johannes running sprints:
http://www.youtube.com/
As good as sprints are, the scientific research shows the super GH booster is lifting heavy weights.
An experiment conducted at the University of Virginia found, “For each incremental increase in exercise intensity, the fractional stimulation of GH secretion is greater in women than in men.”
That means the heavier weights you lift, the more GH your body produces. The biggest boost in natural GH came when women used weights that were heavier than they could actually lift. When you use a weight that is heavier than you can lift up with good form, but that you can control on the way down, your GH levels skyrocket. These types of lifts are called negatives and
an experiement published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found that heavy negatives boost natural GH more than anything else. Pull ups, curls, squats, lunges and other types of weight training are really effective for this type of effect, and all these exercises will help you get a sculpted, toned, beautiful physique.
Weight lifting makes us fit moms feel more Powerful!
beginners start here, but you can work your way up to military style, which is the goal
fit moms can get sculpted, fight cellulite and look more beautiful with squats! www.nitasworld.com
And Dr. Patricia Wexler does not approve:
“Human Growth Hormone is unsafe. I know dermatologists and actresses who use it to slim abdominal fat and increase muscle tone and libido. But it can accelerate also a hidden cancer to grow. It can cause funny bone spurs to grow and enlargement of the heart … just to name a few of the many reasons why I consider it unsafe.”
Women get more out of sprints than men. More GH, etc. “Women elicited a greater response of serum GH and insulin to sprint exercise. This may contribute to explaining the earlier observed muscle hypertrophy in women in response to sprint training.”
Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research
“The findings suggest that the acute metabolic and GH responses in the 90/70% condition were more favourable compared with the 70/70% condition, and a significant correlation between the optimal ECC load and 1RM per BM-ratio was observed.”
Heavy eccentric load produces best hormonal response…heavy negatives
University of Virginia, Journal of Applied Physiology
“For each incremental increase in exercise intensity, the fractional stimulation of GH secretion is greater in women than in men.”
Fit Moms, Runners, Cardio Does Not Work!
Bodybuilders don’t run, and nor do obese people. But I’m not a bodybuilder, or an obese person. I’m a fitness chick, a fit mom, and a fitness personality. My goals are obviously different from a bodybuilder’s goals, and definitely, I have a different lifestyle choice than a person whose main goals involve constant fulfillment of my taste-bud compulsions.
At this stage in my life, my goal is always to become truly fit and achieve prime longevity. As one point in my career as a fitness competitor, I was running a lot and lifting weights with an extremely high carb, high protein diet, and only then I was starting to resemble a bodybuilder. People who didn’t know better thought I was one.
But you know what kind of fit physique athletes have a lot of muscle, and are really lean, with Olympic level stamina and power? Women’s Fitness competitors.
They run. They run a lot. They do weekly sprints, middle-distance, plyometrics anything that will get their heart to the bursting point.
And if these women can carry body-toned muscle around, while running and with the power and stamina to do our fitness routines—well they are worth at least probing into the minds of. Where I learned about my own fitness interval training from was from my ex-husband, who was basically my trainer before I met my trainer of 13 years, Tim Sparkes, at Die Hard Gym in Arizona. My ex-husband was a former track and football star in high school and college.
What I learned from my ex-husband is that I was doing my running all wrong. First of all, I jogged, and I did so very lazily. I loathed the cardio work, so I dragged myself through it. It didn’t matter that I was a fit mom, a fit chick, or a fitness athlete in training. I was thinking about my cardio conditioning the wrong way, as most of us do for the first few years of our fitness quests.
Just about every fitness center has some serious runners as members. These “fitness” people log 20 to 40 miles a week and are in great cardio vascular condition—but most of them look remarkably average. They do not have much muscle and many of them are skinny fat. Sure they have strong hearts, but some of them store more body fat and subcutaneous water than the person who is walking into a gym for the first time. These runners are not in poor health, but their shape is generally not of the optimal fitness aesthetic grade considering the fitness workload they are undergoing. I believe in running, I do. I also like working out smarter, and distance running for fitness is definitely the harder path, if you’re trying to look better and even feel better.
The best explanation for this phenomena may be controversial, but the facts are right in front of us. Cardiovascular exercise DOES NOT WORK to lose body fat long term, period!!
Why is this? Let’s take a hypothetical individual: Female, 30 years old, 145 pounds, sedentary. She decides she wants to be fit and “get toned” (keep in mind, everyone has a different idea of this word, so it’s subjective). So she takes up running on the treadmill for an hour a day 5 days/week. Nothing else in her life changes, her diet and lifestyle remain the same. In the first week she loses 5 pounds. If she maintained her consistency 5 days a week, would she lose 250 pounds this year? Of course not, and why is this?
Firstly cardiovascular activity is very efficient at chewing up muscle tissue, the steps are as follows:
1. Conversion from fast twitch muscle fiber to slow twitch muscle fiber, by
acquiring mitochondria and relinquishing contractile protein. Smaller fiber, less
RMR.
2. Excessive Cortisol released in response to the damage to the fiber as a result of the exercise. Cortisol acts as a natural analgesic, but severely hampers protein synthesis and muscle repair. It also damages the immune system, and ultimately will contribute to all of our deaths – so I’m not sure why anyone would do anything that would accelerate this process.
3. It has been shown that high volume cardiovascular exercise can completely deplete satellite cells in muscle fiber, which means no new fiber can grow or existing fiber be repaired, and as we age, we have a natural propensity to lose muscle as well as bone density. Muscle helps our metabolism and enhances bone density.
4. Growth Hormone levels decline with high volume cardiovascular exercise, which also hampers the repair process. Low growth hormone also accelerates aging.
5. To sum it up, you can’t train all day, and you can’t stop eating, but you can always build a bit more muscle, so quit the cardio and concentrate on the weight lifting.
Secondly, after all these details about how cardio fitness training eats up muscle, you must know that the first week of ANY fitness program, and likely the first month even, you will lose weight with rapid results. That’s water weight dropping off because you are actually getting off of your butt. That’s not the “weight” you are losing, it’s the water. You are not really getting more fit, but your body is filtering out a bit so that it can set a better foundation for you to start getting fit.
Your weight-loss will look more like 8-12 pounds monthly if you’re doing it right and if you expect it to stay off. If you’re an athlete or you’re training for an athletic event, your body requires more training than average, and more extreme dieting than average, but that’s not average for a person who is just trying to lose weight and just starting to get fit.
That was a very strong argument for not doing cardio. But I need to be able to keep up with kids, work, training clients, caring for my household, and still having stamina in the gym. Cardio conditioning is a must for me. Plus, I need strength and power.
The solution was to train like a professional female fitness athlete—specifically, one that always wins the fitness routine portion of the contest. And what does the fitness athlete woman do? Sprints.
For women who run, but they want a great physique:
With high-intensity interval training you “sprint” on any cardio exercise for short bursts that go for less than two minutes, and then you slow to moderate, and sometimes even low-intensity pace for a short burst. You want to go high intensity to kick your heart rate way up, and then you drop the intensity to less your body rest, while not giving your heart rate enough time to drop out beneath a fat-burning zone. If you do this for short bursts of time, you don’t give your heart rate a chance to drop severely, and therein, you are able to keep your body burning fat, burning calories, and staying hard at work, even though you won’t feel like you’re working hard while your body recovers during your lower-paced durations.
Like cardio, this too can strengthen your heart, and keep you from feeling sluggish. On the other hand, in comparison to cardio, interval training burns fat for longer periods of time. You will burn fat for up to 13 hours post-workout with intervals, whereas with cardio at a constant moderate rate will only burn fat efficiently for up to 2 hours post workout. So, why would you spend more time and burn less fat, much less want to gamble the possibility of kicking out cortisol? This is why many fitness professionals who know what they are doing will not recommend long dull high, low or medium-intensity periods of cardio.
The best way to gain cardio conditioning and maintain muscle is to do what all fat-burning physique athletes does—sprints.
As sprinting becomes the core of your cardio conditioning program and distance running becomes the ‘functional’ training, so you do it for form, awareness, and monitoring. It’s a means for measurement when needed, but it’s not necessary for the actual progress.
When I started doing sprints in the morning for my cardio, my strength gains in the gym accelerated a little bit and I started to get leaner without really trying, and my husband noticed an extreme difference in how my body was responsive to my diet and weight training. My lines and cuts in my muscles showed up and they never had before I started sprinting. My workouts were more exhilarating and I could produce more within them because my fitness level and stamina was increased through sprinting.
Now I was able to get more in my fitness routines, I could run with my daughter in her stroller for better bursts so I wasn’t gasping for air. I was stronger than I would ever need to be on the fitness stage or in the gym. I had burst speed and explosiveness and I had the stamina and endurance to keep up with any of the guys at the gym.
So, I am not advising the novice to average fitness person to sprint, but I am encouraging those of you who run– just try this for 6 weeks and see how rapidly and extremely your fitness levels, your energy, your stamina, and your physique changes. See how lean you get and watch a sculpted physique appear that you never knew you had.
As for the fitness enthusiast who is new to the world of fitness and fit physique training, try intervals, we have more blogs on the Fat Burning Workouts categories to your left here in the blog at nitasworld.com. Check it out. Be well, Be You, BE PHENOMENAL! You are worth the work!
-Nita Lee Marquez
America’s Hottest Fit Mom ™
Fitness Empowerment Author
Miss National Fitness
Proud Mother of Three
Get in Shape Fit Moms Burn Fat!
Fit Moms looking to burn calories, burn fat, and get leaner, listen up. Cardio is cardio because, yes, it's generally good for strengthening your heart, and if you have medical conditions that prohibit you from high intensity workouts, exercise of all types should take place more safely through caution so as to fit those needs for a low to moderate intensity. Test your limits, fit moms, but be aware of your body.
Speak to your physician to see if you're as fit of a mom as you think. Note your body's current limitations, they may not stay where they are in terms of your fitness level, because with time and consistent exercise you will adapt. However, whatever fit mom's limits are at this time, pay heed. Don't over-do it fit mamas! Moderation and consistency is key until you grow into your capacity to challenge yourself with intensity. But eventually, sooner than later no doubt, you will want and need to challenge yourself with some intensity. Cardio alone will not do the trick when it comes to burning calories effectively, much less burning fat.
Cardio, is not the be all end all to losing weight, despite the common misconception most fit moms, and people in general seem to have. Keep in mind I am not shunning cardio, but I am simply telling people that if you are working hard already, mom or not, you lift or do various other activities, you want to burn fat specifically. If you are trying to burn fat specifically, there is a more intense, effective, time-efficient and fat-burning workout than cardio. As I said, Cardio is not the Be-all End-all!
When I am training fit moms, or anyone other types of clients who are working to get into their most fit condition, we are hitting the track, the treadmill, and a lot of fit moms step or do the eliptical. They are either warming up on the scene or doing high-intensity interval training. While I have encouraged people to do intervals when they are wanting to gain lean muscle and break down fat at the same time, I also suggest people start small and build up.
Starting off slowly in any exercise program is always heavily advised so as to issue protection from injuries. When you do a high-intensity interval training workout, however, you must have already gotten to a point where you have the ability to go hardcore, and you want to break through a threshold or fat-barrier.
Look fit moms, chasing kids is definitely cardio at times, and sometimes even anaerobic, but know that your greatest strength physically is going to come from true intensity, so work your way up. You are worth the work, and the fat-burning information and fitness instruction is available to you. If you’re looking for strength, go hardcore, but if you’re just looking to lose fat and burn some calories, this is the story… start off slowly, but start doing intervals immediately. Condition your body to the process of changing intensities. If you can’t go really hardcore, then stick to the machines like the stepmill or the bike or even the elliptical.
As you are the catalyst to fatburning in just getting off the couch and doing something at all, you obviously have a work ethic with
which to reach your goals, and you know that you can and will go as hard and long as you need to in order to reach that goal. With
high-intensity interval training you can go for less time, more intensity (in spurts) and stay consistent in your body’s abilities
to use fat for fuel, which is what everyone wants.
With high-intensity interval training you “sprint” on any cardio exercise for short bursts that go for less than two minutes, and
then you slow to moderate, and sometimes even low-intensity pace for a short burst. You want to go high intensity to kick your heart
rate way up, and then you drop the intensity to less your body rest, while not giving your heart rate enough time to drop out beneath a fat-burning zone. If you do this for short bursts of time, you don’t give your heart rate a chance to drop severely, and therein,
you are able to keep your body burning fat, burning calories, and staying hard at work, even though you won’t feel like you’re working hard while your body recovers during your lower-paced durations.
Like cardio, this too can strengthen your heart, and keep you from feeling sluggish, which moms who are fit or not can all totally understand. We need the energy to do all that we have to for our kids to keep them moving, motivated and constantly evolving. We can obtain the right energy levels from proper hydration and interval training.
On another note beyond what has to do with energy increase, in comparison to cardio, interval training burns fat for longer periods of time. You will burn fat for up to 13 hours post-workout with intervals, whereas with cardio at a constant moderate rate will only burn fat efficiently for up to 2 hours post workout. So, why would you spend more time and burn less fat, much less want to gamble the possibility of kicking out cortisol? This is why many fitness professionals who know what they are doing will not recommend long dull high, low or medium-intensity periods of cardio.
True fitness professionals understand and push the many benefits of interval training workouts over cardio. From energy gains to fat loss, and from high calorie burns to lower impact on joints, intervals are the supreme workout when weighed against cardio. An added benefit for us fit moms: intervals will target cellulite better than cardio ever could!
Work safe, start slowly when needed, but work smart and work your way up into higher intensity levels. Challenge yourself, Be Phenomenal Fit Moms & Friends, You are Worth the Work!
America’s Hottest Fit Moms are Taking Over! Workout Mamas!! Fat Burning Tips for the Fit Mom…
If you’re like me, you love your babies, but you also love your alone time. Fit mothers, like many women, are over achievers, and we want it all: the strong mind and spirit, the healthy body, but more than anything a Fit Mom wants to keep the balance between family time & the healthy time for her fitness goals.
How can we balance it? Being a fit mom, and then just being a fit woman in solitude when we need to? Well there are a few simple ways that I’ve found worked for me and many women who were fit and super, beautiful, powerful moms. I decided to list a few things here for all the fit moms (and maybe some dads, too!) who are really amped about having their solitude, although, most fit mamas love their fitness time with the family also! If you’re anything like me though, girl, you NEED the solitude! I get mine as often as possible, and with three children, as a single mother who works, the mommy-solitude-time is hard to come by!
Finding this solitude has helped me maintain my sanity on many a day though. Even as fit as you get, however, you still need that personal time. Especially all us single parents! If you don’t get personal time, and make time for your fitness goals, you will drive yourself crazy losing your identity in full-time parenting and a full-time career. You have got to make time for yourself, and fitness during that time is the most effective way to create more power and effectiveness in all that you do, while at the same time, fitness brings you clarity on yourself, and elates your state of mind.
Single moms who work for a living find it especially challenging to stay fit, and I get it. If I wasn’t already “in the industry,” sure, yea, I would imagine that finding the balance would be difficult. The good news is that finding time for your physical fitness isn’t impossible. The even better news is that finding time will help you gain more energy, more patience, and more resourcefulness; because the more activity you perform, well, the more energized you will feel. Let yourself use fitness to stay in balance.
When I absolutely feel like pulling my hair out, I can maintain my composure, because I know I will have that treadmill to take it out on later. Or maybe I’ll get to do sprints out in front of my house. Perhaps I will be lifting weights at the gym next time I go. Either way, I get into the zen-zone by going to the gym or going for a run when begin to feel frustrated. Fitness is that answer to all our issues.
Unlike getting tanked (which makes us smell like something crawled into our mouths and took a dump, if you ask me), fitness will help me produce more effective outcomes and powerful outputs. With drinking or sitting around watching tv to escape my life’s challenges, I solve nothing. When we work out, we think more, we get more clear with a more fit and active body, so we are more likely to go into problem-solving mode rather than cowering in our issues.
Look, I have had that week where the rent was a month late and the collectors were calling about my car payment. I see more possibilities and an end in sight when I’m working out rather than sitting around. Fitness is cheap, easy, and accessible, and it makes you feel more powerful. It’s free to go for a run in the neighborhood or run some plyometrics and push-ups at the park. My kids can come with me to the park and play or read while I work out. We can go to the track together. Either way you play it, being a fit mom is the best way to be a mom if you are working toward building a better life and being in a half-way decent mood while building your empire.
There is nothing more refreshing than knowing you are the fittest you can be, and even better knowing that you are doing the best you can. When you stay fit, you stay optimal. And if your fitness is family-first fitness, well all the better. Here are a few more tips from my friends:
1)Yoga classes to stretch and relax the muscles and ease tension in your muscles and mind. Stay empowered, do yoga Fit Moms!
work the yoga, fit moms!
2)Weight lifting makes you feel stronger, more powerful, and unconquerable. Conquer your problems with strength and clarity Fit Moms!
Weight lifting makes us fit moms feel more Powerful!
3)Push-ups, right when you wake up make you go through your day feeling like a champ. Resolve to do push-ups before the kids wake up, stretch and then go run the day and let life know that it can’t run you, Fit Mama!!
beginners start here, but you can work your way up to military style, which is the goal
4)Run in the neighborhood, doing interval training for a refresher before the kids get up. Just jog, walk and sprint in cycles up and down your block so your house in view and you can open your lungs, your mind, and your soul to rule the world you live in for the day, so it’s problems cannot rule you Fit Mom!
Here’s the 3-minute Solution to Jiggly Armfat…
EVERY BUSY MOM has a million things to do in the day, so what mom has time to do one hour at the gym every day? There is no such thing as a quick fix, but there is such a thing as consistency creating results. Three minutes a day is all you need to make time for in order to keep your arms from jiggling and you can get the sculpted arms you always see on stars like Hillary Swank, Jenna Elfman, Rhianna, and my fave tv trainer, Jillian Michaels 
If you’re a mom, a mom-to-be, a busy mom, or a mom to adult children, chances are you are challenged with your time availability. Here’s a fast solution to the arm issue that every woman struggles with.
Most women start noticing their arms start to jiggle in about the mid-30′s, and they think that by then, there is nothing that can be done to make their arms sculpted and beautiful again. Not true! There IS a solution for jiggly armfat! If you will practice your push-ups for just THREE MINUTES A DAY, you CAN GET RID OF JIGGLY ARMFAT!
Yes, in just three minutes of push-ups, you can watch your arms get more sculpted, your shoulders will get more defined, and that jiggle on the back of your arm will get tame and toned! It’s a great feeling to look into the mirror and see solid, sculpted, beautiful arms, but it’s even cooler to FEEL STRONGER than ever before!
In three minutes of time, you can make your arms look more sculpted, and you will feel stronger too! Listen, moms and everyone, you can make yourself look great, and it does NOT have to take 2 hours out of every day! You can sculpt and strengthen your arms in just a few minutes each day, whether it’s before you wake up the baby from naptime, or while you are baking your fish & chicken (for the fitness moms and fitness families out there); or, if you do your push ups first thing in the morning to kick your day off with an arm-sculpting strength-boosting workout.
What is the big secret? Push-ups. Yep, that’s it, good old-fashioned push-ups. You may want to start out with the “girl” push-ups
beginners start here, but you can work your way up to military style, which is the goal
these are military style push-ups you see jessica biel doing here
Continue to BE PHENOMENAL!
Great Fat Burning Workouts- Interval Training
Having America’s Hottest Fit Mom Personal Training as a business, when I go to the gym, people think I spend all afternoon there working out. The truth is, as a single mom, I have three children, and therefore, I am often short on time due to my responsibilities throughout the day as a personal training business owner and a single mother. I get up a couple of hours before my children do, brush my teeth, throw on my gym clothes, and I either go for a run in the neighborhood or I hit the gym for a quick workout (now that I don’t have a roommate, thankfully I have a teenager in the house so that I can be gone for 30 minutes or so while they sleep). I have to do my workout first thing in the morning because I know that I may not have the time to do it for the rest of the day.
The question remains, though, how does one get into great shape with very little time in each day to work out? The answer: Do Fat Burning workouts. Interval training is one of the most fat burning workouts for ANYONE in ANY CONDITION OF FITNESS. Variety is key for getting a lean physique, don’t get me wrong. And, a common misconception is that the best fat-burning workout is cardio. Let me state as a fitness professional, as a personal trainer, and as a mom who keeps my bodyfat low with a low time-investment in my workouts: CARDIO IS NOT NOT, AND I REPEAT- NOT the best way to BURN FAT. CARDIO IS good, but NOT THE BEST. JD, my co-author in my first book FIT FOR COMBAT, is also a big fan of using this for fatloss. In fact, JD lost over 80 pounds, and interval training was the only thing he did besides weights. He used no cardio. You can find out more about that by clicking the book link below and getting a copy of the book we wrote for men and women of all fitness levels.
Fat burning is optimal for about two hours post-workout, when you do cardio at a moderate intensity. Whereas, Interval training will help your body hold a maximal fat burning mode for an average thirteen hours post-workout. Another thing with cardio is that you get minimal conditioning, as opposed to interval training, which generally gives your fast twitch fibers more of a workout. That will give you a more conditioned and chiseled look, helping decrease cellulite, which every mom fights after having children. On top of that, you can do 20 minutes of high-intensity-interval-training (otherwise known as “HIIT”), and in that twenty minutes you will burn the same amount of calories you will burn in two hours of cardio at a constant low to moderate pace.
Interval training for anyone is easy and fast. It involves a two- to five-minute warm-up. The intervals, and then a two to five-minute cool down. It doesn’t matter if it’s bicycling, stationary cardio, step-mill, stair-master, treadmill, running, walking, jump-roping, or the eliptical.
How to do Interval training:
1)Warm up for two minutes (if you need it, you may warm up for more time, up to five minutes)
So, if you’re in low-fitness-level condition, do the bicycle at level 2 to warmup, or walk, or 2.9 rpm’s on the treadmill, etc.
If you’re in great shape do the treadmill at a warm-up of 5.9 rpm’s
2)Set yourself at a pace of what YOUR OWN HIGH INTENSITY level of workout is, and go for 30 seconds.
So, if you’re in low-fitness-level condition, do the bicycle at level 4 for your high-intensity interval, or you could set the treadmill at 4.5
If you’re in great shape, do the bike at level 7 or 8 for your high-intensity-interval, or do the eliptical at levels 13-15 for high-intensity. Or run on the treadmill at 9-11 rpm’s.
3)Do your low-intensity level for the low interval for 30-45 seconds.
4)Repeat the cycle for at least four sets and go no more than 8 sets, and then cool down with two minutes or more at your low-intensity, and you’re through!
For me, as a mom, this style of workouts is my be-all, end-all to staying in great condition year-round. Because like I said, on average right now, I only have time for about twenty-minutes a day for a workout before the kids get up. When I get home, I get them up, I make their lunches (sometimes, I even let them make their own!), make a quick breakfast for them all, get everyone finished up for the morning and we get on the road to school, and I kick off another day at work for America’s Hottest Fit Mom Personal Training!
you can learn more about fat burning and interval training in FIT FOR COMBAT (my first book)…Buy fit for combat system book here
