Fitness Destinations

This is a great push-up movement for developing upper body strength as well as core stability!

Be sure to visit Fitness Generator to get access to almost 2,000 exercise graphics as well as instructions on using bodyweight, dumbbells, kettlebells, resistance bands, and more!

Dive Bomber Push-ups

Unlike other push ups where many of your core muscles are held static throughout the movement, in the Dive Bomber Push up, many different muscles are taken through various degrees of both extension and flexion. This does a great job of strengthening not just the muscles, but the tendons and ligaments as well. The trick to doing this exercise effectively is to use a nice, slow, controlled cadence both as you descend towards the floor, as well as when you reverse the repetition. Also, be sure to use the same path of movement in both the downward as well as the upward arch, and try to get as close as possible to the floor with your entire body.

Click here to see more exercises that use bodyweight only.

If you could focus on 2 ultra-productive weight loss methods that would consistently help you to lose the maximum amount of bodyfat, would you do so?

There are numerous ways of helping your body to use its natural systems in order to burn through bodyfat, and a good diet and exercise program is a great place to start. However, you can turn your body into a hot, 24-hour per day fat burning engine by practicing two very simple techniques!

Use Your Legs

The lower half of your body contains a higher percentage of muscle tissue than the upper body, and since it is muscles that are the calorie-burning centers of the body, it just makes sense that the more you use your legs, the more calories you will burn.

However, the benefit to getting regular leg exercise does not stop with simple calorie burning. The muscles of the body are also directly responsible for your overall metabolic rate, which, in simple terms, means the rate at which your body uses energy.

Bodyfat is nothing more than energy that has been stored by the body for later use, so if you increase your metabolic rate, you will also increase the amount of bodyfat that your body burns each and every day, even when you are not actively exercising.

Whenever you are working out, yes, you are actively burning through calories, and that is certainly something that you should do on a daily basis. However, by frequently targeting the large muscles of your legs – the quadriceps, hamstrings, and gluteals (butt muscles), you will cause your body to need a constant supply of energy in order to feed the large metabolic needs of those muscles.

For general weight loss, you should be doing resistance exercises for your legs at least twice a week, if not three times each week. Remember that as I covered in the third installment of the Health, Diet, and Weight Loss Checklist, resistance exercise is different than cardiovascular training. I will cover the leg-specific cardiovascular system of losing bodyfat in the section below.

For now, here is a list of 4 of the most effective resistance training exercises for your legs, each of which has numerous variations:

• Squats
• Lunges
• Deadlifts
• Step-ups

Early Morning Cardiovascular Training

Another way to burn through massive amounts of bodyfat is to do cardiovascular training early in the morning before you eat breakfast. The longer and more intensely you workout, the more bodyfat you will use.

This is due to the fact that your body is in a state of carbohydrate depletion whenever you first wake up. Most people sleep for 6 to 8 hours, and they also usually stop eating 2 to 4 hours before they go to bed. Add that up to discover that when you wake up, it will have been between 8 and 12 hours since you ingested any carbohydrates.

Since carbohydrates and bodyfat are the two primary sources of fuel that your body uses during cardiovascular training, it is simple physics that if there are no carbs available, your body will be forced to use stored bodyfat for energy during your cardiovascular training session.

Referring once again to the fact that the muscles in the legs are the largest muscles in the body, they will need the highest amount of energy in order to complete that cardiovascular activity. Since cardiovascular training itself is already a high calorie burning activity, you will rapidly deplete your body’s supply of energy (bodyfat) by doing your cardiovascular training while in a carbohydrate-depleted state.

There is one caveat to this method, however. It is possible for your body to attempt to break down muscle tissue for energy during cardiovascular training, and that is the last thing that you want! In order to eliminate that possibility, it is best to keep pre-breakfast cardiovascular training in the moderate intensity range.

You can use a heart rate measuring formula or device in order to keep your heart rate at around 75% of your maximum, or you can just listen to your body. While you are doing pre-breakfast cardio, it is not unusual to start getting hungry, which is natural and means that you are using bodyfat for energy. However, if you start to get really hungry and/or if you start to feel faint or light-headed, that means that your body is not able to break down bodyfat quickly enough to fuel your training session. If that happens, crank down your intensity level far enough to lessen those types of feelings.

Also, as is always the case when exercising, if you have any strong feelings of dizziness, being light-headed, faint, or just generally feeling ill, you should make a judgment call about stopping that exercise session completely, and possibly taking a visit to your doctor for a check up.

Conclusion

Regardless of what your personal goals are for your exercise and nutrition program, everyone should have the goal of getting to and maintaining a reasonable level of bodyfat. Even if you aren’t concerned about your physical appearance, excess bodyfat is simply unhealthy on many levels, so keeping it under control should always be a priority.

By following the two simple guidelines that were given above, you can now maximize the time and the effort that you spend exercising by engaging in methods that will give you the most benefit for every minute that you spend working out!

The Split Lunge with a Medicine Ball is a GREAT exercise for maximizing the time that you spend exercising because it will work many different muscle groups all at the same time.

Even though I could write about whatever I wanted to on each of my blogs, I choose to only write about concepts that will empower people, entertain them, or help them with their health, diet, and weight loss efforts.

That being the case, I am constantly being exposed to people's beliefs about what is effective and what is not, especially when it comes to weight loss.

As is always the case, I lean on my experience in controlling my own weight, as well as my training and experience as a personal trainer in order to balance out the scales when it comes to deciding which methods are going to help people to actually see sustainable results.

One of the reasons why I personally got involved in an exercise program to begin with was so that I could enjoy diet transgressions without feeling guilty, but while still maintaining a high level of overall health, including a low level of bodyfat.

After all, it doesn't matter what type of diet you are on, or what type of exercise program you are using, the formula for success always has been (and always will be), Energy In vs. Energy Out. In other words, if you want to lose weight, you have to burn more calories than you ingest, and if you want to gain weight you have to ingest more calories that you burn.

Given that age-old (and repeatedly proven) fact, you can then plug in that formula in order to come to the conclusion that if you exercised consistently enough and intensely enough in order to burn off enough calories, you could pretty much eat whatever you wanted to.

So, before I get into some more details of how that might work, take a moment to ask yourself: Would you be willing to exercise in the proper manner if it meant that you no longer had to be concerned about what you eat or don't eat?

Personally, I answer that question with a resounding YES! However, there are other considerations, and some of them point to this being a good idea, while others do not.

Nutritional Intake

There are basic nutritional needs that have to be met in order to survive, while at the same time, there are things that people presently ingest (sometimes in large quantities) that the human body could easily live without.

In the realm of things that we must have, your basic supply of protein, carbohydrates, and dietary fat are included in that list, as is maintaining an adequate level of vitamins, minerals, and water. 

In the camp of things that we could easily live without, substances such as processed sugars, chemicals, preservatives, and saturated fats could be dropped from the human diet completely.

The reason why this is important to this particular discussion is because the following question is raised: 

Even if you were exercising enough in order to burn off the calories from a high-calorie diet, would your body be able to also eliminate all or most of the excessive amount of non-natural substances such as those listed above?

That is a question that I will admit to not having a thorough answer for, although I will put up a fact that may shed some more light:

Most people who regularly eat very unhealthy foods do not actually eat that high of a quantity of those foods. The average person who eats at fast food restaurants or who eats a lot of processed foods in their home does so because they do not make the time to eat foods that are more healthy.

For most of those same people, that lack of time means that they only eat 3 times per day, and sometimes even less than that. Unless you have a truly HUGE stomach, which most people don't, it is only physically possible to take in "x" number of calories per day if you only eat 3 times each day.

Given that scenario, if you were to add in a truly intense exercise program – especially one that included working out at 2 different points during the day – I imagine that if the proper intensity, duration, and consistency were applied to the exercise program, that the body could filter out all or most of the harmful ingredients of even the most unhealthy foods.

Exercise Program

By this point you might be thinking that this sounds pretty good. If it were possible to eat all of the unhealthy junk that you love so much, yet offset the harmful side effects – both from a bodyweight perspective as well as a health perspective – then you might be interested in doing so.

In fact, the type of exercise program that would power your ability to eat unhealthy foods would have a host of other benefits as well, not just the burning off of excess calories.

One of the benefits of exercise that fitness junkies are well aware of, but that your average person who wants to lose weight rarely thinks about, is the amazing benefits to both your musculoskeletal system as well as your cardiovascular system. 

From a musculoskeletal standpoint, pushing and pulling on your bones, tendons, ligaments, and muscles is simply a good idea on every conceivable level, not the least of which being the maintenance of normal mobility, even well into the elderly stages of life.

In addition, the body's muscles are the mechanism for powering our metabolism. The more efficient your muscles get from being exercised frequently, the higher your metabolism will be. A higher metabolism means the ability to burn through more calories both during exercise and during rest periods, as well as having a higher level of energy, which is an exercise benefit that many people list as a reason for exercising to begin with.

From a cardiovascular standpoint, frequent intense exercise means a stronger heart, significantly lessened chance of heart disease (the #1 killer in the United States), and the added side benefit of a dramatic lowering of blood pressure.

So, forgetting (just for the moment) about the potential weight loss benefits of exercising intensely, there is a very real chance that the massive health benefits might even outweigh the risks associated with a less-then stellar diet.

All of that being said, what kind of exercise program are we talking about here?

Well, in a word – difficult. Or challenging. Maybe intense would be another good word to describe it. After all, you can't expect to be able to stuff down cheesecake, bacon, potato chips, and candy without have a very strong-handed effort on the other side of the equation in order to balance out the bad nutrition.

For the workouts themselves, you can expect a minimum of 60 minutes per day, although 90 minutes would probably be more like it. You can also expect brutal exercise sessions that leave you drenched with sweat, weak, and seriously in need of shower, and possibly a nap!

In addition, if you really wanted to cover all of the bases, you would divide up that daily workout time into 2 exercise sessions. One that was done early in the morning before breakfast, and another that was done in the evening, approximately 12 hours later.

Conclusion

Now is your chance to chime in. Do you think that a program like this could work? Is it really possible to give up the diet by engaging in a consistent and intense exercise program?

Even if it is possible, do you think it is a good idea? Do you agree that the intensity and the consistency of the workout regimen might be able to eliminate or minimize the health risks associated with eating unhealthy foods on a regular basis?

Share your thoughts! Start or join in the conversation by contributing in the comments section below, or just send me a private email letting me what you think.

I am seriously considering putting together a workout program that this lifestyle would be built on, and I would love to hear your thoughts!

p.s. – In the meantime, you need to eat healthy and exercise everyday. Just thought I'd throw that out there…  

If you want to find a way get more benefit from doing push ups or to make push ups more difficult, adding medicine balls to the equation will do the trick!