The Basics for Beginners
by Nicole Snell
If you're new to training, or just new to the Figure Athlete site, you're probably overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information available here and elsewhere on the web. But you don't need to be intimidated.
You've taken the first step by making the decision that you want to change your body, so let me be your personal tour guide to beginning your fitness program. This article will give you the basics of diet and training, which should help you hit the ground running, and accomplish your goals.
1: The Basics of Diet
When we talk about diet, we mean everything you habitually eat, not "a diet" that you go on specifically to lose or gain weight.
You can't expect your body to run in tip-top shape if you don't feed it high-quality nutrients.
First of all, you need to drink water: about four to six quarts throughout the day. This sounds like a lot, but when your body is metabolizing body fat, you need water to stay hydrated and to help flush the toxins out of your system.
Protein is next on the list of essentials, and you should consume between one and one and a half grams of protein for each pound you weigh. Next on the menu are the complex carbohydrates such as oatmeal, brown rice, and other whole grains, as well as starchy vegetables such as sweet potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, and spinach.
You also need healthy fats such as are found in almonds, salmon, olive oil, flax, nut butters and other omega-3 sources.
You are what you eat. Eat good stuff.
Pick foods from these categories that you like and can easily incorporate into your daily meal plans. If you like what you eat, you're less likely to fall off the wagon.
Portion control is vital and is going to make the difference between losing weight, gaining weight or staying the same. Be sure to measure your portions by serving size (read the label) or better yet, use a digital food scale. Keep a food diary of what you eat because it will hold you accountable to yourself for everything you put in your body.
Avoid or eliminate sugar, enriched wheat flour, candy, unhealthy saturated fats, and as much processed food as possible. Processed food contains many chemicals and additives that our bodies just can't handle, and this can have a negative effect on your weight loss efforts.
Avoid or eliminate bad stuff.
Even sugar substitutes can affect your weight loss goals if used in excess. It's also very important to read food labels so you know exactly what you're putting into your body. Rid your house of all things sugary, refined and junk right now, because if it's not there, it can't tempt you.
A word about supplements
Nutrient supplementation is an important element of your diet. An overview of the many valuable supplements out there (including the extremely valuable ones right here on this site) would take up a whole article, so let's get very, very basic.
All you really need is a daily multivitamin, and an omega-3 fatty acid supplement like Flameout™. Before and after a weight training session, I recommend BCAA (branched chain amino acids), which assist with muscle building, and L-glutamine, which is great at preserving muscle when you're doing cardio and trying to burn fat.
If nothing else, you need this.
2: The Basics of Meal Frequency and Timing
Not only is what you eat important, but so is when and how you eat. Studies have shown that eating five or six small meals every two or three hours instead of three large meals helps keep your metabolism revved up throughout the course of your day.
Break out the Tupperware and bring your meals with you to work or on errands. Cook or mix up your food the night before, or cook a bag of chicken or salmon on the weekends and freeze it, so you have quick access to it throughout the week.
Bringing your food with you will ensure that you always have a healthy meal to put into your body, instead of being at the mercy of fast food restaurants and vending machines when you're starving.
The timing of your meals around your workout is more of an advanced technique, but it's also an important element to your fitness and weight loss goals. To keep things simple, just remember to eat a protein/carb meal about an hour before a weight-training workout in order to replenish the glycogen stores in your muscles and power your workout.
After your weight training session, you need to get protein into your body fast. Drinking a protein shake or a post-workout recovery shake (like Surge® right after your workout is an option, and you should make sure to eat a real meal 45 minutes to an hour later.
Remember that in order to burn fat and lose weight, you have to burn more calories than you eat. One pound of fat is 3500 calories, so by reducing the amount of calories you eat, and adding in more activity to create a deficit of 3500 calories per week, you will lose fat. It's as simple as that!
3: The Basics of Cardio Training
The goal of most beginners seems to be losing fat and gaining some degree of muscle definition. In order to achieve this, you need to engage in both cardiovascular activities to lose body fat and weight training to stimulate muscle growth.
Cardiovascular exercise, also referred to as "cardio" or "energy systems work," is any type of activity that increases your heart and respiration rate.
Walking, running, skiing, tennis, volleyball, biking, aerobics, hiking, and circuit training are all forms of cardio. When you increase your heart rate, your body converts fat and carbohydrates into energy to fuel your muscles, resulting in burning calories and losing body fat.
Even if losing body fat is your ultimate goal, you shouldn't overlook the other benefits of cardiovascular exercise: it helps to lower blood pressure and cholesterol level, it reduces your appetite, strengthens your heart and lungs, and even causes your body to release chemicals in the brain that improve your mood.
It's important to understand that cardio alone isn't enough. You need resistance (weight) training as well to increase lean mass, and to give you the muscle definition you desire. Muscle is alive, and requires your body to use calories in order to maintain itself. The more muscle you have, the higher your metabolism has to be. A higher metabolism means you're burning calories and body fat, even when you're not exercising!
Body fat, on the other hand, isn't alive, so it requires zero calories to exist. Fat just sits there, taking up valuable real estate.
This means that in order to burn fat and gain lean muscle you must increase the amount of muscle on your body through resistance training, while burning off excess fat using cardiovascular exercise.
Generally speaking, especially as a beginner, you should do cardio work 3-5 times a week, at least 20 minutes each session. You should remember three important things:
• Choose one cardio program, and stick with it long enough to see if it will work for you. If it doesn't, then try a different program.
• Pick a form of cardio that you enjoy, because it will help you to stick with your program and not get bored or burnt out.
• Always do your cardio after your weight training, if you're doing both in the same session.
With those things in mind, let's take a look at the two main types of cardio training.
Steady State Cardio
Steady State Cardio simply refers to any type of aerobic activity that you maintain for 30-60 minutes at a time, at 50-60% of your maximum effort. Jogging, running, the elliptical machine, stair stepper and cycling are all forms of steady state cardio.
The idea behind this form of cardio is that by keeping your body in its fat burning zone (lower intensity/lower heart rate zone) that you will optimize the amount of fat you are burning while minimizing the amount of muscle that you might burn.
A basic heart rate (HR) formula to calculate your maximum heart rate and optimal fat burning heart rate is:
220 - your age = max HR
max HR x .65 = low end of optimum fat burning zone
max HR x. 85= high end of optimum fat burning zone
For example, if you're 28 years old:
220 - 28 = 192 (max HR)
192 x .60 =115
192 x .80= 153
By this example, your heart rate should stay between 115 and 153 to keep you in your estimated fat burning zone, and minimize muscle loss. To get a heart rate calculation that is specific to your body, you can get your metabolism tested at most sports education facilities or universities.
Interval Training
Commonly referred to as HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training), interval training refers to alternating between periods of high intensity/high heart rate and resting periods where you allow your heart rate to recover enough to repeat.
This type of cardio is done for shorter time periods (15-30 minutes) and can be performed on any machine in the gym or in just about any activity by adjusting the speed or resistance in order to reach a higher level of intensity. An example of an interval routine on a treadmill would be:
Warm-up: 5 minutes
Intervals:
1 minute at 7.0 mph
2 minutes at 3.5 mph
(Repeat 2 times)
Cool-down: 5 minutes
The idea behind this form of cardio is that the higher intensity levels allow your body to burn fat for a longer period of time following the exercise as well as burning more calories during a shorter duration of exercise time. When your heart rate is higher, you are consuming more oxygen and therefore burning more calories.
There are also many interval training routines that will serve as energy systems work and melt that fat right off your body. A couple of examples of this are Rachel Cosgrove's Get Metabolic workout, and Steven Morris' Triple Threats program.
The bottom line with cardio is that you have many options and there is no right or wrong method to follow. So experiment and find the type that works for you and fits your lifestyle and goals.
4: The Basics of Resistance Training
Resistance training is the yang to the cardio yin. Lifting weights is essential to increasing your fat burning ability, muscle appearance, and your overall fitness. And ladies, listen up: lifting weights will not make you "bulky."
Your aim should be to safely lift as much weight as you can, with good form, for the number of sets and reps prescribed in the workout program you're following. If you can do more reps than is prescribed by your plan without breaking a sweat, then it's time to increase that weight.
It's best to stick to compound exercises (exercises that use more than one muscle group) because recruiting more muscles burns more calories overall and gives you more bang for your buck. For example, squats work the hamstrings, quads, calves and glutes, whereas the isolation hamstring curl machine works only the hamstrings.
There are two methods commonly used to approach a weight-training workout: body part splits and full body workouts.
Body Part Splits
In this method, you perform 2 or 3 exercises for each individual muscle over 3 to 4 different sessions during the week. A basic beginner's 3-day body part split for weight training would look something like this:
Day 1: Shoulders and arms (biceps and triceps)
Day: Cardio
Day 3: Legs (quads, hamstrings, glutes, calves) and abs
Day 4: Cardio
Day 5: Back and chest
Day 6: Cardio
Day 7: Cardio
The advantage to this type of training is that you're able to isolate each muscle group and work it to fatigue with plenty of time to rest before you have to work that muscle again. Many feel that unless you are already fit with a substantial amount of muscle mass on your body that you shouldn't use body part splits, but instead utilize full body workouts.
Full Body Workouts
In this method, each time you hit the gym to lift weights you perform exercises for both the upper and lower body. You can perform exercises by the type of muscle movement being used instead of dividing up individual muscle groups.
For example, you'd perform an upper body pushing movement (push ups, bench press), an upper body pulling movement (pull ups, rows), a lower body compound movement (squats, deadlifts), and an abdominal movement (crunches/hanging leg lifts). You can also perform exercises for upper and lower body muscle groups by completing one exercise for each muscle: one for chest, one for back, one for shoulders, one for glutes, etc.
There are several advantages to full body workouts: They save time since you're working all major muscles using compound movements instead of training each muscle separately, and boost your heart rate by recruiting more muscles for each exercise, increasing the amount of calories you're burning.
You're also able to lift heavier, and you can hit the gym with less frequency
Got your basics covered? The little black dress is waiting!
No matter which method you choose, remember to challenge yourself in every workout. You have to overload your muscles in order to stimulate growth.
If you keep lifting 10 pounds without ever increasing the load, your muscles have no incentive to grow. But when you increase the weight to 15 pounds, suddenly the muscle has to work harder, and will adapt and grow in order to handle the extra stress.
The Basics in a Nutshell
Let's review everything we've covered.
• Make sure to eat plenty of healthy protein, carbs and fats.
• Avoid sugar, enriched or refined products, and processed foods.
• A multivitamin and omega-3 supplement like Flameout™ will ensure you're getting the nutrients your body needs.
• Use a food diary to keep track of what you eat, and measure your portions.
• Eat 4-6 small meals each day and make sure each meal has a protein and carbohydrate component.
• Bring your food with you.
• Eat to fuel your workouts and drink plenty of water.
• Do at least 20 minutes of cardiovascular activity, three to five days a week.
• Pick activities that you like to do.
• Engage in resistance training to stimulate muscle growth
• Don't be afraid to lift heavy, but safely.
• Pick the training method that best fits your lifestyle and goals.
As you progress from beginner to intermediate to advanced fitness levels, don't be afraid to experiment with new techniques and programs to challenger your body and keep things fresh. Remember, building muscle and losing fat takes time, but by following these basic steps you're on your way to transforming your body!
The Basics for Beginners
Thanks for this post, heaps of info, enjoyed reading it!
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