Whether you are starting, continuing, or enhancing your fitness ideal, there is one rule common to all of the above. Go for quality over quantity. Fitness should be treated like a smart investment. Don’t be rash. Be prudent. What is actually beneficial for you can be easily overshadowed by your impatience and yearning to achieve your goal. The result? Injuries, loss of motivation, and ultimately, lack of success.

Choose Your Workout Based On Your Goal

Let’s break it down realistically. Divide that 3500 calorie number by 7 (days in the week) and that means that you have to burn 500 calories a day. Still sound overwhelming? Divide that number by 2, achieving 250. You need to eat 250 fewer calories less than usual AND find an activity that burns 250 calories each day. If you are a woman who weighs 120lb s or a man who weighs 180 lbs, that’s a brisk walk at 3.5 miles an hour for an hours --103 calories and 155 calories respectively; chasing your child (109)/(163); light housecleaning (81)/(122); easy bike-riding (218)/(327), or a hour’s workout at home or in the gym using your own body for resistance exercises like pushups, squats, jumping jacks, abdominal work or pull ups (218)/(327). Combine any of these activities in a day to meet your desired calorie-burning goal.

Reducing your food intake by 250 calories may be as simple as avoiding snacks, drinking less caloric beverages and reducing serving size. Here, too, breaking it down to cutting 80 calories at each meal makes the task more manageable.

If your goal is to build muscle:
To build muscle, your workout should be tailored to taking the body SAFELY, to close to failure of the muscle that you are exercising. As an example in a set of 8 to 10 reps, the last 2 to 3 repetitions should be hard to do, but not hard enough to cause you to lose your form in the exercise that you are doing. Form, or how you do the exercise should always take priority over the weight that you are using. Correct form means the muscles are being stimulated safely, but not so safely that you lift a weight and walk away feeling nothing from the exercise you just completed.

Soreness after a workout is also relative. You’ve made the muscle do something that it’s not used to, and so you will feel some discomfort. This discomfort however, MUST NOT be so severe that you are unable to perform daily tasks. If you are at that point, you’ve trained too hard or done something wrong. We will be discussing how to evaluate your form in another segment, but it is important to get the input of a trained instructor/trainer so you learn the proper way to use machines, how to lift free weights safely and how to use repetition most effectively.