This assumes that you’re already working out consistently, at least 4 times a week, trying to watch your diet, but haven’t seen much in the way of fat reduction. Try this simple tip for just one week: Make time for a 15 - 45 minute walk every day for a week, and watch what happens!

That’s it! It’s just that simple. As long as you don’t increase your calorie intake by eating that extra slice of cheese when you get back, you will notice a fat reduction. Remember, the Law of Thermodynamics demands that unless you’re burning more than consuming, you will not lose weight. Burning an extra 100-300 calories every day just may be what your body needs to shed those extra pounds.

Think of the thousands of products you’ve seen on TV, the Internet, in the stores, the newspapers, the classified, eBay, and more. All have their merits. Some are effective, some are bunk, and others are just great marketing. The real key to losing weight however is simply you must burn more calories than you take in. It’s that simple.

Previously, I have posted an RMR calculator to help you determine your metabolic intake. I’ve also recommended you go to Livestrong.com and begin a food journal. Here let me suggest some simple tips which will provide a nutritionally sound base to go into caloric deficit.

1. Keep a bottle or glass of water with you all day. Drinking 12, eight-ounce glasses (3 quarts) a day is hard enough, but did you know that for every 25 pounds in excess of ideal body weight you must drink an additional 8 ounces to help metabolize it? Something to think about. Water will also help you to feel less hungry.
2. Make sure you have adequate protein in your diet. Your body can’t manufacture it, and so with weight loss, you don’t want to cannibalize muscle. At least two protein shakes a day with some blended fruit is a low fat and nutritious meal replacement.
3. Each meal must contain complex carbohydrates, vs. simple sugars and white flours. Complex carbs usually have more fiber, are broken down more slowly, and help regulate blood sugar and insulin levels, which is critical if you’re diabetic (or even if you’re not.)
4. Finally, just reduce portions! As the famed Jillian Michaels says, “Never be hungry, but never be full.”

If you’re hungry too often you’re not eating frequently enough (every 2-3 hours) but if you’re full after a meal you’ve eaten too much. If you become in tune with your body, you will know if you’re losing or gaining weight.

One final word on appropriate caloric deficit. If your doing all of the above, and your diet is balanced and includes daily vitamin supplementation, you may want to go to a second workout, even if it’s just walking for 15 minutes. You will find that this second session makes a tremendous difference when done on a daily basis.

There are many important principles to bodybuilding, losing weight, getting fit, that you just can’t ignore if you wish to “cut up” and get fit. Key among them is the principle that you just can’t lose body fat until you are in caloric deficit, but while maintaining adequate proteins, carbs, and all other important nutrients while in the deficit zone.

If you are following the dietary principles set forth at fittransition.com, I have a recommendation which will make the calorie game more scientific. Livestrong.com is a fantastic web site which will allow you to enter your daily intake, calculate your caloric needs, and your caloric burn due to exercise. It makes the fat loss game much more accurate and easy to do.

For example, one day I stopped at a convenience store and indulged myself with a breakfast burrito from Rico. On a whim I typed it into my account on livestrong.com and was delighted to see the product was there, complete with the number of calories, grams of fat, protein, carbs, and milligrams of sodium. Of course, that particular indulgence cost me about 587 calories - yes it’s a fat burrito - and taught me the value of not buying them very often.

Livestrong.com even tracks how many glasses of water you drink per day. Also instructive to note is the number of calories that you burn during exercise. I’m a two-a-day-er, and it would be easy to guess my actual caloric burn. With Livestrong I now know that I am burning over 1000 calories a day with my exercise routine, so I need to carefully monitor my protein intake and meal frequency to ensure I’m feeding my NASCAR (my body) properly.

By the way, I’ve driven a NASCAR, and wow what a thrill! I can’t imagine pulling up to the local Chevron to fill it up. It runs on special fuel. Similarly, run your body on special fuel. Livestrong.com will help you to do this!

When my clients come into the gym where I do some training in the evenings, they are always excited to be there and work with me. That is true of most of our trainers - their clients don’t generally regret purchasing personal training. It helps them to know what to do. It motivates them, and it holds them accountable.

Not everyone however has the budget for personal training. Here are two options, one inexpensive, one affordable, that might help:

1. For $15, You can download a PDF eBook called FitTransition. (www.fittransition.com) FitTransition shows a three-phase workout program and gives sound nutritional guidance. It also gives you membership to the gallery, which shows you shots of the exercises, so you know how to do them.
2. For $149, and a $30/month subscription, you can have access to The KeyChain trainer (click link bottom of this page.) The KeyChain trainer is a step above, as the $30 a month gives you access to dozens of trainers, and you may workout as many times as you like. The trainer talks to you and tells you what to do from a neat little MP3-type device, and counts your reps for you, all while you are listening to your iTunes playlist or the music that gets downloaded each day when you create your workout. I use this for my own personal training, and I find that I work out harder, never worry about the routine I’m using, and it keeps me from cheating on reps and sets.

There you have it! Two inexpensive options to help you know what to do and how to do it. Compare personal training at $50-$175/half hour per session, which gets very expensive.

If you were to pull up to the pump in a NASCAR and fill it with standard unleaded gasoline, it wouldn’t run very well. NASCARs use 100 octane fuel! Similarly, your bodies need proper nutrition to function optimally. That is the first secret to getting ripped.

The second secret - although the same thing - is percentage of body fat as it relates to nutrition or caloric intake. If your abs are buried below a layer of fat, you’ll never see them no matter how hard you work out! Gauging your caloric expenditure, workout expenditure, and caloric intake however is difficult. Lance Armstrong’s site, Livestrong.com makes this easy! I highly recommend it!

At Livestrong.com, you can create a free account called the Daily Plate. Here you enter your food choices and before you’re done typing, dozens of options are coming up on the screen. So if you buy a breakfast burrito at the local gas station, and it’s made by Rico, it’s there! If you down a Minute Maid pomegranate juice, it’s there. It will tell you how many calories per serving and the serving size, how much sodium, protein, carbs, and this by grams, milligrams and also percentages. It makes the science of thermodynamics a snap!

Remember, you can’t really get ripped until you lose the body fat covering your muscles, and you can’t lose it if you don’t know whether you’re in a nutritionally-sound caloric deficit. That’s my tip - go to Livestrong.com and take a few minutes every day to see how you’re doing nutritionally. You’ll be glad you did!

This time of year many women and as many men are looking to feel more comfortable on the beach, around the pool, at the family reunion, or just to be able to do the Summer hiking and backpacking they love without embarrassment or fitness issues. With this in mind, what is the greatest key to your success?

The answer is nutrition, but it’s the one that gets most overlooked. We’ve dealt with the topic of nutrition in previous blogs, and will in many more, so for today, the key concept is resistance training and consistency. Put very simply, here’s what you must do:

1. Be consistent in your training regimen. You must train every day, and train with the appropriate split and intensity. You must develop a caloric deficit to lose weight, which means upping your output and downing your food intake. Note however that key nutrients from vegetables, lean meats, and whole grains must not be eliminated from your diet, rather moderated.
2. Resistance training is a key factor to weight loss and fitness for many reasons, but you one is that you will burn more calories overall and enhance your basal metabolic rate buy adding muscle. Remember that 1 extra pound of muscle, for example, will burn approximately 50 calories when your body is at rest.

So that’s today’s message - be consistent and ensure you are doing resistance training 4-5 times per week.

What does it mean if your toes turn out when you squat, or if your knees knock in? What does it mean if you lift your heels when you squat, or you raise your head or your shoulders when you press? Even if these problems don’t plague you, do you really understand the value of core and stability training prior to cycling into a hypertrophy and strength or power program?

Chances are you don’t know the answers to these questions. I do, and any good personal trainer will as well. You may have arthro-kinetic imbalances which can be corrected by the proper stretching, myofascial release techniques, and training the proper balance and core muscles to correct and strengthen adductors, abductors, and other core areas which may be causing joint or other misalignment problems.

Did you know that if you’re training too much in cardio zone 3, you could actually be burning muscle instead of adding it? For the answers to these and other questions, I recommend a personal trainer!

That’s right! The Miserable 7 can mostly be prevented by exercise. They are: cardiovascular disease, type II diabetes, hypertension, stroke, high cholesterol, lung and breathing problems.

Years of carrying around extra body fat, combined with improper dietary habits create these problems more often than not. Even with many who already have developed some of the Miserable 7, much of it can be reversed by reducing sugar and white flour intake, a simple daily resistance and walking program, and adequate nutritional factors. It’s not rocket science, but it will save your life.

Why just live? Why not enjoy an active and quality lifestyle until you’re called home? To put off the health factors mentioned above will simply put you one step closer to a rendezvous with the Miserable 7!

If I were to ask 10 people what the biggest factor in weight loss is, and in raising their metabolism (BMR), at least 5 would correctly identify diet. However, given the task of identifying the next biggest factor between weight or resistance training and cardio, what percentage of importance would you rate them? If you said cardio is the next 30 to 40%, you are not alone…but you are wrong!

Weight training is by far the most critical factor after diet - weighing in at 40%! Cardio is only a 10% factor. Why? It’s very simple - for every pound of muscle you gain, you will burn an additional 50 calories a day. Gain ten pounds of muscle, and imagine being able to burn an additional 500 calories a day! That’s called raising your basal metabolic rate or BMR, and you do this by adding muscle.

Women need not fear - you won’t get “big and bulky.” It would take a lot of testosterone pills for most women to do this, and most women could easily use an extra ten pounds of muscle, which will help us in their every day lives lifting, bending, twisting, balancing, jumping, enduring!

If you’re reading this and aren’t lifting weights at least three times per week, please get going on a program! I’ll help you. Here are some options - 1) Come and let me train you at Gold’s Gym on 800 North in Orem; 2) Download my FitTransition.com program; or 3) email me about the KeyChain trainer! (professionaladvantage@yahoo.com)

Final thought: Don’t abandon cardio, but unless you’re training for distance running or triathlon or other endurance training, be more prudent with the hours per week so you don’t cannibalize your muscle. Add an extra day or two (or three if you’re not doing it) of a planned resistance training program to your regimen.

Seems like a dumb question, doesn’t it, but here are some specifics taken from the Expert Rating organization, in which I’m currently enrolled:

Muscular strength – It is the amount of force that a muscle can exert with a single maximum effort. Adequate muscular strength is important for body alignment and also for the performance of daily tasks. An increase in muscular strength means increased fat-free mass and therefore a higher rate of metabolism. Maintaining strength and muscle mass is also vital for healthy aging.

There are three critical components there which I will summarize:

1. Body Alignment: Less trips to the chiropractor and free and unobstructed functionality of organs and skeletal structure.
2. BMI: A more muscular body means higher fat metabolism and less stored fat.
3. Aging: Delay and even halt and reversal of bone density loss and osteoporosis, along with dozens of other issues such as Type II Diabetes, heart disease, and more.

Perhaps a summary here is this - if you’re not lifting weights or doing the appropriate calisthenic-type or load-bearing exercises at least twice a week, consider the above-mentioned benefits. If you’re a cardio-only guy or gal, consider the benefits of adding strength training to your regimen at least once or twice a week!