Cardio Exercise Motivation

When I'm pushing myself during my runs, I think back to when I was much heavier and trying to figure out how I pushed myself so much back then without giving up. Well here are three of the biggest factors that kept me motivated back then:

Music- I remember I had tried to run long before I had lost any weight and all I could concentrate on was my choking and trouble breathing. I thought it was impossible and I gave up. The day I started the journey where I actually lost all the weight I had set out to, I brought along a CD player and listened to music. The CD player ended up skipping the whole time, so I threw it in the bushes and came back for it later.

That night, I went out and spent $10.00 on am/fm radio headphones at Wal Mart. I used these for a good year before I even got an iPod and they worked great. I know it sounds stupid, but I owe a lot of my progress to my $10.00 Wal Mart radio headphones!

Take yourself out of your body- Another big thing that I still do to this day when I'm running is to take myself out of my body. I concentrate on anything but the run. I use the time to think and day dream. It usually takes about 2-3 minutes into the run before I get to this point, but once I'm there, it's 10 time easier to run. It really helps to have zero distractions. Putting the music up loud really helps this because I cannot hear my foot steps and breathing. Running outside at night also helps because it's almost like I'm not even there. I wouldn't recommend running outside at night to everyone though.

Look at yourself go- Think about when you're looking at someone else doing intense cardio at the gym. What do you think to yourself? Wow, they are working their ass off! Well no matter how good of shape they are in, if they're working their ass off and sweating, they are probably feeling just like you feel when you workout, but they keep going. They might be in great shape, but they're running 8 or 9 miles an hour and that's hard for anyone.

Now when you're working out and feeling like crap, look in the mirror or just picture what you look like. You look just like them. You are working your ass off and you should be proud. This makes it a little harder to give up because you want to be proud of yourself and the more you see how hard you're working, the more proud you are!

Healthy New Years Resolutions!

Does anyone really keep their New Year's Resolutions? Ok, that wasn't the right question. The right question is: how long do they keep them? Most of the time, it's not very long. What is a New Year's Resolution anyways? I think it's just an excuse to set a goal with a solid start date which makes it easy to measure. I also think it's a joke. It is universally understood that New Year's Resolutions are hardly kept for very long.

This year, let's change that! Lets make some realistic goals and surpass them! The following are a couple of goals that are easy to keep and will greatly affect your weight loss! The first one I saw in Fitness Magazine.

Make your New Year's Resolution to make healthier shopping lists!

This is fantastic advice! Think about it- how hard would it be to mess that one up? If you make a resolution to eat healthier and you're sitting at home looking in the cupboards and have nothing but unhealthy choices, it will be very easy to throw your New Year's Resolution out the window.

Now when making your grocery list or shopping without one, you have healthy and unhealthy choices side by side, so there is NO EXCUSE not to buy healthy food! As everyone knows, excuses kill goals, resolutions, and diets more than anything.

Set cardio exercise goals that you KNOW you will be able to accomplish EVERY TIME you perform a particular cardio exercise.

It takes repetitive bad eating and lack of exercise to put on weight and it takes repetitive good eating and exercise to take it off. Pushing yourself during exercise after exercise until you reach your goal is great; but you know what is better? Pushing yourself each exercise and reaching your goal every time! To do this, set time or distance goals. This way, you know you can't fail. Let's say your goal is one mile. If you can only run for 10 feet this time, walk the rest as fast as you can, but keep moving until you reach one mile. Even if you are out of breath and walking slow with your hands above your head, if that's the best you can do, you're pushing your body! The next time you run, increase efficiency by running a little longer or a little faster and reducing your time.

This can also be done with time goals (which is actually a better option). Set a goal of 20 minutes of your particular cardio exercise. So what you can only run for 2 minutes. Keep moving as fast as you can for 20 minutes. If you keep at it, it's only a matter of time before you will be running the whole time.

You have to set goals that you can accomplish every time and then make your ultimate measure the efficiency of how quickly you complete your goal distance or how far you go during your goal time. Set internal goals which you hit every workout and then set an external progress goal. For example, if you run/walk 20 minutes every other day. 20 minutes is the internal goal you hit each workout. An external goal may be- "I want to run 2 miles in that 20 minutes" or "I want to be running for 75% of that 20 minutes."

When I started, I was more like- "I want to be able to run a mile." I would run as much as I could and then walk a little bit, but I should have walked until I hit that mile and then increased the distance I was running, compared to walking, with each workout. Doing burns a lot of extra calories and is a great motivator.

As I said before, excuses kill goals, and I doubt anyone could come up with a good excuse why they can't move their body for 20 minutes straight at the fastest pace possible, even if it's just walking or swinging their arms.

One Key to Weight Loss Success

Losing weight requires habits and repetition. Think about a person who is in perfect shape. Eating one ridiculously unhealthy meal may make them bloated for awhile, but once it is digested, there will be no noticeable gains. Now if they make a consistent habit of eating these unhealthy meals and not burning off the calories, within a few months, there will be highly noticeable results. Now turn this around. If you're in bad shape, and you eat healthy and exercise for a day, you may feel better, but you will not see physical results. Make these healthy activities habits, and trust me, you will thank yourself!

I think patience is one key to losing weight successfully. Fortunately, for people without patience, it still can be done easily. I am not very patient and I did it! Here's how: Let's say you were really excited for something that was happening at 6:00 and the current time was 5:00. If you sat in front of a clock and watched the hands move, it would seem like it was never going to be 6:00! Now let's say you didn't occupy yourself with the literal measure of time and instead you went and watched something interesting on TV. Before you knew it, it would be 6:00! Time would pass either way and it would pass at the same rate, but the second option would require a lot less patience and 6:00 would seem to come a lot faster!

Apply this to weight loss now. We are creatures of habit! Bad eating is a habit, so replace it with a habit of good eating. How to form a habit? Repetition! In the beginning, you will have think about it, but eventually it will become a habit. Once you have your habits of good eating and increased physical activity in place, the hard part is over. Your weight or fat percentage is the clock. If you constantly obsess over it, and you're not patient, you will not see results quick enough and will give up easily. If you just forget about it, continue with your habits, and occupy your time with something more interesting, within a short period of time, you will realize you've dropped a pant size! By this time, you will know what is possible and you will have the momentum to continue your healthy habits!

My Weight Loss Book is available for free download...

I have finally got around to making a separate download page for my weight loss book in e-book format. You can download it by clicking the picture above or the link in the links menu. Once you download it, you can read it right in your screen. It sure beats the hassle of going through my archived posts to read the different sections. Feel free to ask any questions you may have or leave comments. Thanks for reading!

Too old to lose weight or get in shape?

I've been surfing a lot of weight loss related discussions over the past few days, trying to see what other people are doing to stay in shape, and I keep coming across something that I've been hearing for too long now! In the past, I have probably made just about every excuse possible to not be more active or change my eating habits. Finally, when I ran out of excuses and did something about my weight problem, I looked back and felt bad about all the lies I told my self.

Why is it that middle aged and older people often tell themselves that they cannot get back to the shape they were in when they were 20? Most of the time an older body= bad knees, bad hearts, bad lungs, slower metabolism, etc.. I won't deny that, but if you lived 5 miles further from work than your younger co-worker, would you stop going? Probably not. It would just take you a little longer to get there. The same thing is true with your health. It may take you a little longer to get back in shape, but once you're there, the benefits (or pay when it comes to work) are just as good, if not better because the older you are, the more important your health becomes.

"Yeah, but I will never be in the shape I was in when I was (insert ideal young age here)!" I have to disagree with that. I come from a busy family. Throughout my childhood, it was pretty much fast food for 3/4 of our meals and restaurants for the rest. Breakfast consisted of Hostess cupcakes and Pop Tarts. Before I lost my weight, my whole family was in terrible shape.

One weekend while on vacation, my 43 year old dad suffered a terrible pain in his chest and became very ill. A trip to the emergency room and some tests revealed that one of the arteries in his heart was 99% blocked. After his medical procedures were over, he knew he had to get in shape or he wasn't going to live very long. Needless to say, he learned how to eat right, and with regular low impact cardio exercise, he lost over 40 pounds in just a few short months. This brought him down to the weight he was at when he got out of the Navy at age 21, and he's kept it off since. He did all of this with a bad heart, asthma, and a rusty old body that hadn't seen a workout in many years.

Weight Loss Motivation

Now that I have explained all of the eating and exercise techniques and strategies, I used to easily become healthy, I will discuss the one thing that is a spark plug in all of this. That is motivation. Without that tiny spark, your body wont start moving in a healthy direction. Now you don't have to motivate yourself to lose 30, or 60, or 100 pounds. That is a huge task!

You just need to motivate yourself to get started. Once you are giving your body what it needs, it will return that favor ten-fold. I'm not saying that you can get started, then sit back and do nothing; but as you go along, your body will begin to give you all the motivation you need. You just have to act on that motivation. It's all mental.

One of the biggest things you can do to increase your body's natural motivation is to not neglect your sleep requirements. By sleeping on a regular schedule and allowing yourself to get enough sleep, your body will feel more energized throughout the day, encouraging activity and making that activity easier to do. Sometimes, overweight people have problems with not being able to sleep, or sleeping too much. Don't worry about that. Do what you can to sleep when your body requires it. Get on a regular schedule and as your body becomes healthier, you will sleep better and wake up energized.

Another thing that can become a problem is discouragement. Just like losing the unnecessary fat before you can be fully healthy, you must overcome discouragement before you can be fully motivated. There are many things that can discourage you. If you can focus on the goal, most of these things will not be able to get close enough to affect you.

One discouragement that began to have an affect on me was the following: The more weight I had to lose, the faster I lost it. As you get closer to your target weight range, the weight begins to come off slower. This is because, when you have more weight on you, your body has to burn more fuel to move all that weight through all of it's daily activities. As you begin to lose those extra pounds, your body can operate on less fuel. It's kind of like buying a smaller car. Your old SUV is going to burn a lot more fuel, driving the same speed and distance, than your new hatchback.

After seeing such rapid results in the beginning, this can become frustrating, but if you stay patient, eventually you will get to where you want to be. If you do become impatient, you will need to start burning more calories. That is where the flexibility of exercise comes in handy. Because you only need to exercise four to five times per week, for around 15 minutes, increasing your exercise can really speed up your weight loss. When this began to happen to me, I added a weight routine to my workout. Another thing you can so is add a weight vest or ankle weights to your cardio workout. The more energy your body has to use, the more fuel it will burn.

Another thing that can be discouraging is a scale. I actually decided to be healthy because I wanted to feel healthy, not to lose weight. I thought I would always be a really big guy, I just wanted to feel better. As I started to become more healthy, I knew I was starting to look better, but did not know I had actually lost a lot of weight. One day, I went to the doctor and she told me I was 30 pounds lighter than my last visit.

This got me excited and I bought a scale. I checked it 3 of 4 times a day, and my weight fluctuated with every meal. Overall, I was losing about 4 pounds a week, but once it began to slow down, I started to get discouraged.

Scales can be good, but they are mostly bad. If you check them every week or so (at the same time of the day), they can encourage you to continue what you're doing. If you check them daily, the weight loss really starts to not seem as significant. Also, if you hop on a scale and you're a couple pounds lighter, it may encourage you to treat yourself to an unhealthy meal. If you're the same weight, you get discouraged because you aren't losing any. If you are a couple pounds heavier, you are sometimes encouraged to starve yourself. All of these actions are negative to your health.

Other than that, it is up to you to find out what motivates you the best. I like to take other people's discouraging words toward me and prove them wrong. I also like to look at my fellow Americans and realize that just about everyone of them is overweight. What happened to us? This motivates me because I know that I can do something easy to be healthier than the majority of people these days. There are a million things you can do to get motivated. You just need to find out what works for you and thrive on it.

*Follow my posts in order to read the rest of the book. I should have the book posted in it's entirety within the next few days so stay tuned!