Day 11: Some tips to get your heart rate pumping/burn more calories

Posted on October 15, 2009 by Brendita

Good Morning, New Leaves. It’s Day 11: We’re almost half way through the challenge! For the record, I am not working out to my DVD during our 30 Day Challenge: I can’t do my own workout DVD because I REALLY don’t like hearing my own voice!! I’m sure you can understand. Instead, I am getting back on track and doing my normal workout. I had fallen out of sync and now, thanks to the 30 Day Fitness Challenge, I’m back on track.

Yesterday, I made myself a new schedule, because I have a lot of things to juggle. When I wake up at 4:15, I start filling orders from Brendita’s Body Works. I have allotted myself 45 minutes to do this (I was doing this in the evenings and on weekends). At 5:00, I lift weights (I’ve gone back to a six day spit, working two body parts + abs 6 days a week). I move from one exercise to the next VERY quickly, so this portion of my workout takes me 30 minutes.

Next, I go on my bike (or elliptical machine). Today, instead of reading on the bike, I put my iPod on and it was AWESOME! I was “dancing” while pedaling and my heart rate was in the zone in no time at all. This occurred because my heart had to pump blood to both my legs AND my arms.

When you do my workout DVD* your heart has to pump blood to so many different muscles, so you’re REALLY multi tasking like MAD: burning calories, increasing flexibility, building strength AND firming your muscles…in just 45 minutes. How cool is THAT?

Any hoot, it feels good to have a new schedule to follow. Once I took the time to write everything down, I felt relieved. Seeing all of my “To Do” items written down with a specific time for this and that, gave me a feeling of “power”, for lack of a better word.

As far as eating goes, I’ve been pretty good about cooking dinner every evening and preparing “brown bag” meals for the next day. I was, however, starting to feel a little stressed about serving my family dinner so late. With my new schedule, we will be eating dinner every evening at 7:00.

Next week, I will post two or three daily menus. I hope that some of you will do the same: maybe we can get some ideas for new menu plans? So, hat have YOU been up to??? Holler back, y’all!

*If you’d like a DVD of my workout, please visit our website and use discount code 30DayChallenge to receive 30% off the price of the DVD. Discount promotion expires on 25 October 2009.

Heart Rate Chart & The Myth of “Spot Reduction”

Posted on October 14, 2009 by Brendita

Here’s a heart rate chart you can use to monitor your aerobic workouts:

Age Maximum Heart Rate Target Heart Rate Range

20 – 24 200 130 – 170

25 – 29 195 127 – 166

30 – 34 190 124 – 162

35 – 39 185 120 – 157

40 – 44 180 117 – 153

45 – 49 175 114 – 149

50 – 54 170 111 – 145

55 – 59 165 107 – 140

60 – 64 160 104 – 136

65 – 69 155 101 – 132

70 – 74 150 98 – 128

The Myth of Spot Reducing

As Brendita the exercise instructor or trainer, there was one question that I was asked more than any other question: “What exercises should I do to lose weight from my belly/hips/butt/thighs?”

The truth is there is no way to spot reduce. Despite claims of hundreds, if not thousands of articles, exercise machine manufacturers, etc., there is absolutely no way in the world to reduce the size of any one specific area of the body through exercise and/or diet.

Weight loss occurs when the body burns fat and uses it for energy. This can only happen by burning off calories, ideally through a healthy diet combined with aerobic exercise. Aerobic exercise is defined as any exercise that causes the heart rate to rise to its target heart rate (see chart) and remain there for a minimum of twenty minutes. During this aerobic state, the body begins to burn fat for energy. Aerobic exercise can take the form of aerobic dance, jogging, running, swimming, brisk walking, etc. There are many other benefits of aerobic exercise and these benefits will be covered in future writings.

There is no way to make the body burn fat in one targeted area only. When fat loss occurs, it is genetically predetermined what part of the body the fat will come from.

Day 9: Why it’s important to monitor your heart rate

Posted on October 13, 2009 by Brendita

Good Morning New Leaves! I just finished my cardio workout (I go on my stationary bike or elliptical machine for about 45 minutes) and I used this AWESOME heart rate monitor I bought about…. 2 years ago (?). It’s made by Acumon. If you want more info, please let me know. There’s a band that goes around your chest and then a monitor that looks like a digital watch.

I always check my heart rate periodically when I’m working out because I usually read while on the bike (I watch TV on the elliptical). Sometimes I’m not going as fast as I should if I’m reading, so this new heart rate monitor is awesome. I don’t have to take my pulse reading manually.

If you’re doing a cardio workout, you MUST work within your target range for a minimum of 20 minutes, otherwise, it’s not really an aerobic workout and you don’t get the heart healthy, fat burning benefits. So, be sure to check your heart rate when you’re about… 10 minutes into your cardio workout. OK? OK!

Is anyone working out in the mornings? Today is your “off day”, so I am wondering if anyone is going to do the series of exercises I posted yesterday. Please let me know if you do/will. Talk to me/us, please!

Day 3: Turn Over A New Leaf 30 Day Fitness Challenge

Posted on October 7, 2009 by Brendita

How is everyone doing? Fine, I hope! Has ANYONE done the workout DVD? If so, what are your thoughts! Please share, the good, the bad and everything in between.

I received an email yesterday asking how many calories one would burn while doing my 45 Minute workout. Excellent question! The answer is, there is no way of knowing. The number of calories burned at any given time depends on your muscle to fat ratio (body fat percentage), your age, your height, your level of fitness: In other words, so many things factor into how your body uses fat for energy (burns calories) there is no single formula to determine the exact number.

What I would like EVERYONE to focus on is getting and keeping their heart rate in it’s target range ( heart rate chart) for at least 20 minutes. To check your heart rate, find your pulse and count your heart beats for SIX seconds. Put a “0″ at the end of that number and that’s your heart rate. For example, if your heart beats 13 times in 6 seconds, your heart is beating at 130 beats per minute. When you are exercising in your target range, your body is burning fat for energy.

Speaking of which, I need to get my workout started. Please: Let me hear from you! Get your friends, colleagues, family members to join in on the 30 Day Fitness Challenge with you! It’s not too late to start!

Some Information on Eating and Preparation for the Turn Over A New Leaf Fitness Challenge

Posted on October 1, 2009 by Brendita

Good Morning My Future New Leaves!

I have a confession: I HAVE A FREAKIN’ COLD! Yes. It’s true. I woke up with that tell tale tickle in the back of my throat on Sunday and by about 8:00 that same morning, I was hacking, wheezing and dripping. It’s been a while since I’d caught a cold, so I tried the “mind over matter” thing which has yet to work, but I am nothing if not persistent. On Monday, I saw a news clip about the Swine Flu pandemic and of course, as I listened, I felt ALL of the symptoms as the reporter spoke, but in reality, I really have none of the symptoms. Just to be on the safe side, I made an appointment & saw our doctor. Diagnosis: cough & sneeze due to cold. I’m feeling slightly better today.

Any hoot, my body’s alarm clock is still functioning, so I find myself awake at 4:15 every morning, as usual, so here are the next three goals for our challenge:

Decrease your resting heart rate: Your heart is a muscle and like every other muscle, it needs regular exercise to stay healthy. It is in constant motion, even as you sleep, pumping blood to all your organs and cells. When your heart is in peak condition, it will pump the same amount of blood that your body needs but it will do so with fewer beats per minute. That’s a good thing because the fewer times your heart has to beat, the less wear and tear it incurs.

Make healthier food choices through strategic and well planned grocery shopping (BONUS: You’ll save money!): The main reason people have for resorting to fast food is a lack of time. Planning your weekly menu and grocery shopping list will nip this little problem in the bud (or is it butt? I never know which). ANY ONE can cook. I am not going to give you intricate menus and elaborate meals for the challenge, but rather simple, fast and nutritious meals (with vegan and vegetarian options, of course) that reheat wonderfully. I will also advise you of which meals make the best “brown bag” options. I don’t know about you, but I’m not a big fan of sandwiches. I like them well enough, but I just don’t get excited about them. For that reason, I am going to give you lovely non-sandwich take a long lunch ideas.

Eat regularly scheduled healthful meals: Your daily eating schedule will look something like this for the 30 day challenge and hopefully, beyond.

Meal One: Citrus Fruit

Meal Two: Cereal (Hot Or Cold) + Soy, Rice Or Cow’s Milk Or Whole Grain Toast With Peanut Butter

Meal Three: Whole Grain Pasta Salad With Vegetables (Variety) Mixed With Olive Oil & Vinegar Or Non-Creamy, Low Fat Salad Dressing + Shredded Skinless Poultry, Fish Or Vegetable Protein Of Choice.

Meal Four: (Handful, seriously) Raw Nuts + Raisins, Cranberries

Meal Five: Poultry, Fish Or Vegetable Protein Of Choice + Potato/Rice/Yam/Yucca/Pasta Or Plantain + Lightly Steamed Vegetable + BIG, HUGE Colorful Raw Salad

Now, since I’m in a confessing mood, I’ve gotta tell you, I RARELY eat regularly scheduled meals. I do all the cooking for the Familia de Garcia. That’s not a complaint: I LOVE cooking. I do, however, get bored with my own culinary creations, which are pretty awesome, if I do say so myself. I will, however, take one for the team and promise you all that I will eat my meals in the manner that I am advising you all to do. The ONLY exception is, I cannot, will not, no way, no how give up my freshly made morning juice! AND I DARE ANYONE TO TRY AND STOP ME!!!!

I got a Jack LaLanne Juicer a few months ago and I just love that thing! So, my “Meal One” will consist of my regular juice. Mr. LaLanne recently turned 134… OK. He’s not one hundred and thirty four. He celebrated his 95th birthday yesterday and man, oh, man does he look FIT! If you’re even thinking about getting a juicer, you know who to ask! Ask ME! Ask ME!

I will, of course, give you detailed menu plans for the challenge, not as a steadfast, hardened blueprint, but more of a guideline. I certainly don’t want to tell you to eat foods that you hate. I believe that EVERY adult already knows what he or she should be eating. My former students, at the health clubs, gyms and most recently those who attended my lunch time classes, would frequently ask me to write up an eating plan for them. Whenever I did, it’s always been some version of the one I have outlined for you above.

I’ve been on a handful of diets in my nearly 44 years on this planet. The most memorable ones were my pre-body building competition diets. The rest were not necessarily for weight loss, but more experiments: I fancy myself a mad scientist. I eat, of course, I’d just like to enjoy my food more. My tastes in foods run on the boring side. Every now and then, I’ll scarf down nearly half a bag of unsalted pretzels or eat a GIANT bowl of lumpy oatmeal: DELICIOUS! I just don’t get excited about food and sometimes, I’m just too lazy to eat. That’s not a good thing, though. The human body needs to get it’s nutrients from a wide variety of sources, so for that reason, I am going to try to train myself to broaden my horizons and eat on a schedule, and try new things.

One thing I LOVE LOVE LOVE is WATER! Yummy! Can’t get enough of the stuff. Good old fashioned NYC or NJ tap, hold the ice, room temperature, please. I bring my water bottle into the shower with me and chug a quart of this magical elixir right after I exfoliate from head to toe. I’ll down another quart after I lube up with my favorite body butter (soufflé or smoothie!) and as the day goes on, I will usually empty my other 1.5 quart water bottle. I will be advising you to drink one tall glass of water AFTER each meal. I will also advise that you do NOT drink anything along with your meal. Doing so gives your stomach a false sense of fullness and it interferes with the digestive process. I will also advise that you drink as much water as your stomach can hold in between meals. If you enjoy your water cold, there’s an added bonus to increasing your water intake: When you drink cold water, your body has to burn extra energy (read: calories) to warm that water to the temperature of your body, so in a sense, you are burning calories (again, not a lot) just by drinking cold water.

All right, I’m going to get going. If you can remember, when you wake up tomorrow morning, before you throw back the covers and step foot on the floor, check your pulse and make a mental note of it. If you can’t remember to do this, no worries. I’ll remind you again in a few weeks.

Don’t forget to set your alarm back by seven minutes before you go to bed!

Take care and kind regards,

Brendita

Second Day of Preparation for the Turn Over A New Leaf Fitness Challenge!

Posted on September 29, 2009 by Brendita

I had a sneaking feeling that I’d get the most resistance about working out in the morning and by golly, I was right! If you already know that there is no way that you’ll wake up to exercise, who am I to tell you otherwise?

Before my husband and I started Brendita’s Body Works, I was SO not a morning person, it wasn’t even funny. I would wait until the absolute last second to get out of bed and get my day started. If I was awake before 11:30 on a Saturday, I was up early. Now I have to wake up early out of pure necessity, but believe me, it wasn’t easy. These days, though, I am very much a morning person, but believe me, I can relate to not wanting to get up early. If you’re sure that you will not skip your workout then by all means, exercise at whatever time works for you. In this regard, kindly note that exercising too close to bedtime is not recommended.

One of the many benefits of aerobic exercise is that increases the rate at which your heart pumps. While the actual increase in heart rate returns to normal at the end of your workout, the increase in blood circulation continues for several hours. If you do an aerobic workout too close to bedtime, it can interfere and/or disrupt your body’s natural sleep rhythm.

As promised, I will address the first two points of our Turn Over A New Leaf Goals. Actually, I’m going to go ahead and address the first three, because I’m SO unpredictable! I’m like a box of chocolates….. you never know what you’re gonna get.

As many of you know, I began teaching exercise in 1983, while I was attending college. Over the years, I have taught many different forms of exercise ranging from high impact aerobics to Hatha Yoga. I was also a competitive body builder as well as a personal trainer. When I stopped working full time at health clubs and started an office job, I realized how much pleasure I got from teaching exercise. I was happy to be given the privilege of leading a lunch time exercise class for my colleagues. The class was a compilation of everything I learned over the years.

Make exercise a regular part of your life: “Event dieting” is a term I made up when I was teaching exercise. When one of my students would show up to every class (I taught three classes a week) after not coming to class for several weeks or even months, the reason was almost ALWAYS a vacation at a location where she’d be wearing a bathing suit, a wedding (her own or as a bridesmaid or maid of honor), a family reunion, etc. Repeated drastic changes in weight are unhealthy. There have been countless articles on the subject, so I will not restate what most of you already know. Regular exercise (three times a week, minimum) needs to become a regular part of your life if you want to be healthy. Nuff said.

Think of and know that “DIET” is a bad, bad word!!! This is sort of a continuation of my statement above. “Going on a diet” is probably the single biggest way to ensure that any weight loss will not be permanent. The human body is a wonderful work of art. It is engineered with very intricate systems to designed to protect itself. One of these systems safeguards us against starvation. Our body stores fat to insulate vital organs and also to burn for when there is no food in the stomach. Any food eaten in excess of what the body needs to function is stored as fat. When you do not eat the sufficient (minimum) amount of calories your body needs to function, it will hold off on burning/using it’s excess fat stores. It does this because you have, in sense, forced it into “survival mode”. The only thing your body knows is that it is not getting enough calories and it’s not sure when it will. As a survival mechanism, it will actually slow down the rate at which it burns up excess fat stores for energy. That, my friends, is the main reason why starvation diets do not work. The best diet in the world is eating well rounded, healthful, nutritious meals throughout the day. I will try to get you to rethink your definition of a “meal”. Most people need more than three meals a day. Having said that, U.S. Americans standard portion sizes for meals are SO large, it’s kind of scary. Before we begin our 30 day challenge, I will give you all what I believe to be the ideal daily eating plan. It will consist of 5 “meals” a day. You will not have to weigh your food, nor will you have to count calories.

“Teach” your body to burn fat for energy: I touched on this in my statement above. A woman needs to ingest approximately 1550 claries per day. Anything in excess of this will be stored as fat. Aerobic exercise (any exercise that keeps the heart beating in its target range for a minimum of 20 minutes) causes the body to burn excess fat for energy. The wonderful thing about aerobic exercise is that the body continues to burn fat for several hours post workout is over. This amount of fat that is burned after your workout is, of course, not as high as when you are actively exercising, but it is a pretty substantial amount.

I ended my blog entry yesterday with advice to you NOT to weigh yourself and I promised I would explain why: I weigh about 155 pounds: I can’t tell you for sure because I only get weighed at my annual gynecologist appointments. I’m 5’ 6” tall and I wear a size 4 or 6 suit. You may have heard the term “muscle weighs more than fat”. This is a physical impossibility. A pound of bricks and a pound of feathers both weigh the same, but it takes a lot more feathers to equal a pound when compared to a brick. The same is true with muscle vs. fat. Muscle tissue is denser and takes up less room, so as you firm and strengthen your muscles, you may notice that the number on the scale is going up. You might also notice that your clothes are feeling looser. This is because you are burning fat and increasing the density (not size) of your muscle. Another added bonus to increasing lean muscle tissue is your body will burn more calories at rest. The reason is muscles move and require energy to do so. Fat, on the other hand, just hangs around waiting to be called upon for energy.

Brendita’s 45 Minute Body Work Out

This workout is perfect for the 30 Day Fitness Challenge. You can preview the 45 minute workout DVD and if you decide to use it for the Challenge, I am offering a 30% discount off the regular price of the DVD . Just enter 30DayChallenge in the coupon code when you check out. (This coupon code is good through 2 October 2009, midnight, Eastern Standard Time.)

In addition to doing my 45 Minute Workout three days a week, I will be posting various exercises that I will want you to perform on your “off” days (the days in between your DVD workouts). After the 30 day challenge is over, I don’t plan on leaving you on your own. It is my hope that we will all continue to support each other in our new, active and super healthy lifestyles!

Until tomorrow, have a really, really AWESOME DAY! And, for those of you who will be waking up early, please remember to set your alarm clock back by seven MORE minutes.

Kindest regards,