It’s important to establish your goal, or exact set of goals, for your health and fitness program. Research shows that it’s those people who don’t know exactly what they’re aiming for that are the most likely to abandon their training regimen. Let’s take a look at health goal setting, and how you can tailor your activities to best suit your chosen goals with these quick fitness tips for health.
Weight loss is one of the health goals which most people set; very few of us have so little body fat that we wouldn’t like to lose some of it, and the benefits are twofold: increased self-confidence, and a much healthier body which has a lower risk of a number of conditions, including heart disease and various forms of cancer.
But how do you actually lose weight? It’s something which has proven to be so difficult that it’s got to be the all time most asked for health and fitness tip! The problem with weight loss is that it’s complicated. We’re talking about reducing fat stores in the body, and fat is energy-dense matter: one pound of human body fat contains about 3,500 calories! If you want your body to burn that fat, you need to use up more calories than you eat, thereby creating a calorie deficit. So, if you create a deficit of 7,000 calories over a week, you’ll have burned about 2lbs of fat. Very few authorities recommend that you create as large a deficit as this by just eating less because it can have harmful effects on your body, rather you should reduce the amount you eat by a small measure and combine this with regular exercise. That’s the heart of weight loss, it requires patience, and it’s rarely ‘easy’. The weight loss industry takes advantage of this fact by making outlandish promises to raise unrealistic hopes in people; when these hopes are dashed, people are often deterred from their goals. Top health fitness tip coming your way: any product or program that says you will lose 20lbs or so a month with it is either a scam or very unhealthy (these promises are scattered all over the internet, but please don’t fall for such manipulative drivel!).
Another common goal is to gain muscle mass. This is connected to losing body fat, as the more muscle you have the higher your resting metabolic rate is, meaning you’re using up more calories all the time, making it easier for you to burn fat. To add muscle mass, you need to work your muscles to hypertrophy and eat more calories than your body’s using so that those extra calories are stored as muscle fibers. If you have goals of both gaining muscle and losing fat, then you should eat more calories than you need in the first 3 or 4 hours after training than your body needs during that time, while creating a deficit in calorie consumption over the week as a whole. This is a lot easier to achieve than it sounds, but a lot of health fitness tips out there don’t alert you to this conflict of objectives.
Finally, if your goal is just to increase your fitness levels for overall health, or sports competition, then be sure to train in a scientifically accurate manner, and keep track of your progress. Two easy ways of doing this are to use a heart rate monitor to measure your resting heart rate and recovery time after exertion, and asking your doctor to check your lung capacity, then re-checking it after a few weeks of training. For more on scientifically proven fitness practices, please click here.
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