The title of this blog was on the cover of Women’s Health this month; obviously a great headline sells magazines, and who doesn’t want to look better naked? I usually don’t read many fitness magazines because most of them are designed to sell supplements or have bogus articles in them, but I was curious to see what type of workout they were promoting. It was actually nice to see they were promoting exactly what we recommend for fat loss and backed it up with some studies.

The research continues to mount that when it comes to long, drawn-out steady state cardio, it is not the way to go for fat loss. Below is taken from Women’s Health:

“In a study published in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, researchers tracked women who did 45 minutes of steady state aerobic cardio at 78% of their maximum heart rate five days a week. After 12 weeks the women experienced no change in their body composition compared to women who didn’t exercise or diet.”

Once again, what we do at Florida Fitness Coaches in terms of programming and personal fitness coaching is ahead of the curve. We moved away from steady state training a long time ago and continue to refine our methods to get you the best results possible so you can look better naked!!

Try this quick fat blasting workout next time instead of 45 minutes on the treadmill:

Mountain Climber

Prisoner Squats

Alternating Lunges

Get – ups

Plank to Push-up

Do each exercise as much as you can for 45 seconds. Rest 15-30 seconds between each exercise. Take a 60 second break and repeat the whole cycle. During your first week do 4 rounds, working up to 8-10 rounds.

If you would like more guidance and individualized instruction please come in and try us out for 7 days with no obligation. Included in the 7 days is Boot Camp and personal training.

As the title implies some recent studies have come out once again validating our training concepts. Below is a recent blog from Alywn Cosgrove breaking down some recent studies regarding the effects of Kettlebell training.

A recent study came out of Truman State University and looked at the metabolic effect of kettlebell training

The subjects were asked to swing a kettlebell as many times as they could in a 12 minute period (sets, reps and rest period it seems were freestyled – the subjects rested whenever they wanted)

The researchers found that the subjects completed between 198 and 333 swings in the time frame (265 swings average ) and worked at an average heart rate of 86% of max and at 65% of their previously measured oxygen consumption [VO2max]. They concluded that

“Continuous kettlebell swings can impart a metabolic challenge of sufficient intensity to increase Vo2max. Heart rate was substantially higher than Vo2 during kettlebell swings. Kettlebells provide a useful tool with which coaches may improve the cardiorespiratory fitness of their athletes.”

This validates what several of you training yourself, training clients or who just hate doing traditional cardio have probably known for a while… We don’t have to do traditional cardiovascular training (running, cycling etc) to get a cardiovascular training effect. 12 mins of kettlebell swings can be used as a great cardio tool, as can bodyweight circuits, sleds, sandbags etc.

Taking that a step further, we can see that it may actually be a better choice of cardio training for some clients.

12 mins of running  as a comparison obviously involves a lot more repetitions through the joints than an average of 265 reps of kettlebell swings.  So for some clients/trainees, we can get a similar metabolic effect, heart rate, oxygen consumption (and therefore calories burned) while reducing the total reps and joint stress in deconditioned clients.

The bottom line is that we can use non-traditional metabolic training such as this, to provide cardiovascular training benefits.

Try the following at the end of your next workout:

Start the stopwatch.
Do 10-12 swings at the top of each minute, and rest for the remainder of the minute.
Repeat for 10-12 mins