Looking Good & Toning Up
- A timeless way to look good
- Nutrition and Looking Good
- Everyone has their time
- A natural way to look good
- Fat loss not weight loss
- Looking confident and attractive
A timeless way to look good
Whatever your age, if you look fit and healthy and you will be a long way along the path to looking good.
Most people will agree that a major component of looking good is looking lean and toned. This doesn’t mean looking like you are skin and bones by achieve thinness in unhealthy ways, it simply means structuring your lifestyle to include some regular, well planned and sustainable exercise and nutrition elements.
Personal training can help you to gain the knowledge to enable you to look good and achieve some or all of the following in a healthy and sustainable way:
- Losing fat
- Dropping some clothes sizes
- Toning up
- Gettting a flat stomach
- Putting on muscle
- Selectively building muscle to balance the proportions of your body (A little size in your shoulders can make your butt look smaller)
Achieving a fit looking body generally requires more than just a few half hour walks a week. This is a great way to start and it will help you live longer but eventually you have to build a body that can cope with higher intensity exercise if you really want to look great and have increased quality of life.
A personal trainer can create a balanced program that will help you get results now but also build your core strength and technique so you can safely progress to higher levels of exercise which will allow you maintain a great looking body in the time you have available.
If you want to get yourself looking great give us a call on 1300 132 116 and we will get you on the way to success.
Nutrition and Looking Good
Nutrition is an important part of looking good. To lose fat from your body you have to create a situation where your energy expenditure is greater than your energy intake. The equation is:
Energy expenditure - Energy intake = Gain /Loss
Personal training will assist you with increasing your energy expenditure through exercise. For the other part of the equation we can assist with some basic changes that will reduce the energy intake or we can recommend a good nutritionist to provide specialised advice.
Avoid The Fad Diets
There are many fad diets that come and go. Regardless of their differences all of them are simply a way of reducing the energy expenditure side of the equation. The main thing you should consider when choosing these diets is how sustainable they are and what they do to your long-term health.
The sad reason that so many of these diets exist is simply that the energy expenditure of the average person is incredibly low in comparison to what evolution has designed our bodies for.
When you analyse the latest health “miracle” diets they usually involve some combination of:
- Reduction in the volume / portion size of food eaten
- Eating more low GI foods
- Eating less processed foods
- Eating more fruit and vegetables, and,
- Exercise
Easy as this may sound, fitting this into everyday life is where the challenge lies. We can give you helpful tips on how you can fit this in with your everyday life.
Keep It Simple - You Don't Have To Be A Saint
My preference for a nutrition plan is to keep it simple. You don’t have to be a saint. Most of your week try to eat meals that incorporate some regular hi fibre foods, low GI foods, fruit and vegetables, some good fat sources and limited saturated fat (mainly animal fats). For a good summary on all of this go to the link below:
http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/
sixtyminutes/stories/2005_03_06/story_1315.asp
And if you don’t want to be as strict with your diet, then the best advice I can give is to start building a body that has the core strength and flexibility to allow you exercise at a higher level of exercise. It takes a little more time to follow this path but long term you will feel better, look better and you will burn more energy in less time so you can eat what you want.
Everyone has their time
You are only as old as you look. If you agree with this then you should realise that staying young is more about keeping your body performing well than worrying about how large a number you have to describe your age.
The longer you can stay looking the same, the better you look as you get older. Think of how it would feel if you have the figure and fitness of an average 20 year old when you are age 50. It is possible.
The time of your life
If you want the time of your life as you get older then you have to recognise that if your body is getting slower in life it is more to do with inaction than old age.
Your muscle mass begins to waste away in your late twenties and early thirties. It continues to decline at the rate of 10% per decade and with it goes your capability for high-energy burning exercise and fast, strong movement.
If, however, you get involved in some form of exercise that stimulates your strength muscles regularly, you can stay active and fit while the average person goes backwards and spends their life complaining about old age.
So draw a line in the sand and commit to overcoming inaction in your life. Call us and we will help you ensure that as you pass 30, 40, 50, 60 years old and beyond, you will be having the time of your life.
A natural way to look good
The growth of body building was great for increasing the numbers of gyms, but it has created the association in many people's minds that weights will make them big and bulky.
You can see how this stereotype has come about when you see people who have obviously done a lot of weights work to keep fit but look out of proportion. Their muscles look defined but it just doesn’t look right. This is because they perform an exercise plan that concentrates on only building certain muscles groups and in the process they lose a natural balanced look.
Using Strength Work To Look Really Good
The best looking bodies you will see are athletes who do a couple of strength sessions a week to allow them to avoid injury and to undertake stronger movements, and who then spend the rest of their training doing their chosen sport or acitvity.
Strength work doesn't necessarilly have to make you increase muscle size. If your goal to put on muscle size a program can be written to achieve this. However, if you want to tone up the best way to use weights / strength work is to use this training to supplement some other activity.
We can assist you to use weights, strength and core stability training regularly to build your ability to cope with workloads. Then we can provide you with a structured, interesting and challenging program in some whole body activity that will progress to higher levels over time. Looking good will follow naturally!
Fat loss not weight loss
Most people will agree that looking lean and fit is good looking. However, many people try to lose fat by setting a goal of weight loss.
Weight is a really misleading way to judge your success at trimming down. There are at least two very good reasons for this. The first is that 1 kilo of muscle takes up much less size and space than a kilo of fat. Because of this you can put on weight and actually have your clothes sizes fall considerably. If you were tracking you weight you might become disillusioned even though you were losing size, losing fat and getting fitter.
The second is that your body is made up largely of water. One litre of water weighs 1 kg. As your hydration varies so will weight. Given you can lose a couple of litres in a single session it doesn’t provide a very good guide. For women it can be particularly misleading as the fluid retention in their bodies varies with their menstrual cycle.
The best way to measure fat loss is by skin folds, taking your girth measurements or by having a particular item of clothing you want to fit into. By using these means you will have a better guide of if you are trimming down and you will be more motivated to continue your exercise program.
Looking confident and attractive
If someone tells you to walk confidently, what would you do? Pull your shoulders back, hold your head high and walk tall! What you may not realise is that all of these things are related to good core stability.
Your core strength refers largely to the muscles of your trunk and butt. Look at the following list and see how core stability relates to the elements of a confident walk.
- Pull your shoulders back & hold your head high – Upper back and scapula control exercises.
- Walk tall - Hold your abs in and use you butt muscles when you walk.
Therefore the basis of looking confident can lie in good posture and core strength.
Body Features That Look Good
As with confidence, the features of looking good are also the features of a well performing body. Good proportion comes from having shoulders that balance the width of your hips.
A flat stomach is all about good core stability. A tight butt is all about having a deep butt, not a wide butt, which is a result of using these muscles to produce efficient movements.
At the end of the day performing a balanced strength program which incorporates core stability in combination with a regular sustained whole body exercise workout will achieve a well balanced body for most people.
Giving you the right knowledge to allow you to achieve the objectives above is our speciality. Get looking great and performing well now.
