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Health & Fitness

Is Your Exercise Routine Outdated?

Lori Murphy, Personal Trainer and Fat Loss Expert, discusses ways to determine if your fitness routine is outdated and ineffective.

Is Your Exercise Routine Outdated?

Have you ever wondered if all those minutes you spend in the gym are burning fat or just time?

Unfortunately with 80% of gym-goers, time is the primary thing you're burning. So many well-meaning people are still exercising with outdated notions of what constitutes an effective workout. We don't want that to be you!

Here are the top 3 outdated, time-burning exercise techniques to NOT DO:

1) Slow and Steady Cardio Sessions: Walk into most gyms and you'll see every single piece of cardio equipment full of people in a slow, steady state of cardio. Meanwhile the free weight area is a ghost town. The idea that one should plug away for hours in a steady state of low-intensity cardio in order to burn fat is the ULTIMATE outdated exercise technique. New science has clearly proven that explosions of speed and intensity are the future of fat burn.

2) Weight Machine Wandering: Do you wander among the weight machines, plop down on an open one and crank out a set (without adjusting the weight or seat)? Hey look, a new machine is open ... off you go. There's no rhyme or reason, and many times technique and form are way off.  We don't need to explain how this haphazard exercise technique burns more time than fat.

3) Chronic Low Intensity: When you simply go through the motions during your workout, that's classic low-intensity. You're not pushing yourself with challenging weight, you're not trying to go faster, and you're not really breaking a sweat. Oh and, big surprise, you're also not burning any fat. Each workout should be a challenge to go harder than the day before. If you find yourself just-going-through-the-motions then quickly pick up the pace.

So what's the secret to burning fat?

A challenging routine that incorporates strength training, intervals of intense cardio and is done with intensity. If you can't get this intensity on your own consider finding a personal trainer or take a class where the instructor and classmates will push you to work hard. It's difficult for most of us to create that intensity on our own, but necessary to see results.

Yours in Health & Fitness,
Lori Murphy
Personal Trainer and Fat Loss Expert
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