How to Squeeze in a Workout, Not Your Jeans

Hi, thanks so much for taking a look at how to squeeze in your workout and not your jeans

My name is Danny hill

I wanted to help educators with Optima Health.

We're gonna get started today by looking at these lovely pieces of equipment

We've seen these probably in gems or in a clubhouse in apartment complex, or even in your home and a lot of these have what they advertise of the fat burning zone on them

Right? We see them on treadmills ellipticals bikes and it's very appealing to a lot of us

We like to use those on these types of exercise equipment

Most of us buy into this belief that lots and lots of cardio means weight loss, but lots and lots of cardio can take lots and lots of time

And that's something that many of us don't have

If you're a member of the gym, or you prescribe to a popular source for workout routines, maybe beach body, or the daily burn or even YouTube, you've probably at least heard the concept of high intensity, interval training or hit for short

And this style of exercise has been incredibly popular over the past a decade or so because it's advertised as a way to spend less time, doing cardio while burning just as much fat

And that sounds very appealing to most of us as with just about everything

There is a science to it

So today we're going to walk through a little bit of that science and give you a better understanding of how you can implement this type of exercise into your current routine, or how you can use it to jump start routine

That may have fallen by the wayside

I'm also going to discuss how healthy weight loss can be attainable

Even if you don't feel like you've got time to incorporate it into your schedule

Okay, so we're gonna start by going back to high school biology really quick and refresh our memory on metabolism

Metabolism is our body's ability to take in macro nutrients carbohydrates in that purple square purple circle with the C in it that and proteins

We take those in through our diet and our body breaks them down into compounds that we can use to perform tasks

These compounds are called phosphate

So our body will take these macro nutrients and break them down

Make them into

And these molecules are what our body uses again for that energy to perform tasks

In essence, or metabolism refers to any activity that requires muscle movement breathing body, temperature regulation, digestion, waste, elimination, blood, circulation, the central nervous system functioning

The list goes on and on but basically any of these activities burn calories

And if we burn calories, that means our body has made to perform that task during exercise, we burn more calories

Right? We're demanding more of our bodies to perform a task

So, we're using more than we would just for our body to to sit and do its basic functions throughout the day

There are two different avenues that our body uses to make

One is anaerobic pathway

Meaning that is created in the presence of oxygen

The other is the anaerobic pathway, meaning that our body is making without oxygen present

Either one of these constitute our metabolism, but here's the big difference

A robot pathways make a lot of energy, but they do it at a slower pace and they use all three of our macro nutrients to make that aerobic pathways make a lot faster

They do it quickly quickly, but they do it for a short period of time and they can only use hardware hydrate again

Doesn't matter which pathway we're using to make

Those constitute our metabolism during a robot metabolism

So, on your left hand, side of your screen, give you an example here, our bodies can create thirty eight molecules from just one glucose, which is the ready to use version of carbohydrates

So, we see, we can make a lot in the presence of oxygen during anaerobic metabolism

Our body can only create two from that glucose molecule again

It's doing it without oxygen present, but it can happen very, very quickly

So you can see that the presence of oxygen during exercise helps us to be the most efficient with our fuel sources

I remember think about back to our aerobic pathway here

We're showing carbohydrates, but we also can make that from fats and we can make it from protein anaerobic

We can only do it through carbohydrates

So, a good way to think about this is a marathon runner versus a sprinter

A marathon runner is likely going to be making most of their to run that marathon through their aerobic pathway in the presence of oxygen they're gonna make a lot of it, but at a slower pace, right just like, as you would run a marathon at a slower pace than you would Sprint a sprinter on the other hand is gonna make a lot faster, but doesn't need it for as long

So they may be calling on their anaerobic pathway

The amazing thing about the human body is that it can decide which pathway it wants to use and which pathway best fits the job and get the job done the, the most efficiently and it can switch back and forth as needed a good way to might consider this is a vehicle of these hybrid vehicles that we have nowadays

So, you know, even just a few years ago, you could have a car that ran only on gasoline or only electric, and then hybrid cars came out

And now you can have a car

That switches from gas to electric and vice versa, depending on how fast you're going your metabolism does the same thing in your body

Now that we kind of understand what pathways we use to make energy

We're gonna talk a little bit how that correlates to our heart rate

We can use heart rate as an indicator of which metabolic system our body is using

And that's gonna become important

Because we'll start to understand towards the end of the presentation, how we might be burning more carbohydrates or fats and how that translates into weight loss if that's our health goal

So, we're gonna go back again to high school and we're talking a little bit about heart rate zones

We're gonna do some math here

And if you are exceeding eighty five percent of your max heart rate, you're probably using your anaerobic pathway determining

This is pretty easy

We're just gonna do a little bit of calculation here

If you have a wearable fitness device, it's a little bit easier, but there's still some good information here just to do a little bit of math

So, first, we need to determine what our max heart rate is and what we do to to determine that is to subtract our age from the number two hundred and twenty to keep our mass simple

I gave an example below

That shows what it would be for a twenty year old so we would take two, twenty truck twenty from it

And our max heart rate, on an average estimate would be about two hundred beats per minute

And now we need to figure out what, that eighty five percent threshold is

So, to determine that we're gonna take that Max heart rate and multiply it by eighty five percent

So, as we see in our example here, that means about a hundred and seventy beats per minute for a twenty year old would be the dividing line between using that aerobics pathway using carbohydrates, fats and proteins to break down into, versus exceeding eighty five percent of our max heart rate, and going into our aerobic system anaerobic system to use just carbohydrates

If you perform an exercise and check your pulse count, how many pulses you feel in fifteen seconds and multiply that number by four he's got your estimated beats per minute

So, let's look at our example, again, let's say our twenty year olds counted twenty beats and fifteen seconds

And then we multiply that by four

That would show that there beats per minute

Would be about a hundred and twenty well below the eighty five percent threshold

Mine that we've talked about so this twenty year old is most likely feeling their energy expenditure and most likely creating that through their aerobics pathway

If you're interested in getting a more scientific and precise calculation for your max heart rate, you can get an exercise tolerance test or what's most commonly known as a stress test that can be performed at a hospital or a clinic under a physician's supervision

If you've ever had a cardiac event or know someone that has, you may have heard of a stress test before that's gonna be the most accurate way for you to get the best number for ourself

The other thing is, if you wear a wearable fitness device, a Fitbit, or an Apple Watch, or one of those products, it'll tell you how many beats per minute

A lot of them will tell you how many beats per minute you're operating at through different levels of fitness or different activities

So a little bit of this mouse may not be needed for, you

Now, we have a basic understanding of heart reasons let's put this together and understand how they all relate

So generally speaking lower intensity exercises use mainly fat as a fuel source as our intensity increases

Our bodies tend to switch to glucose again

You may remember that's the ready to use version of carbohydrate as a fuel source and that makes sense

Because one gram of fat usually has about nine kilocalories in it

While one gram of carbohydrates only has four

So, remember how I mentioned before the aerobic pathways tend to make energy slower, but make more over time

That's because that typically has more tack for punching it

Right? You can, you can burn it for a longer period of time

But, overall, you get more out of it

Carbohydrates you get less out of it

So we burn through it a little bit quicker

If we think back to our example of running a marathon versus running a Sprint

Think about marathon hunters that you see on TV, or if you've ever participated in the marathon people that run them all the time

They're typically relatively thin

They have a lower body's body mass index and they typically have a lower body fat percentages

I just mentioned

Because their exercise of choice is endurance based, and as they train, they get more and more efficient at breaking down that fat as their fuel source versus our marathon

Excuse me, our sprinter we talked about, they typically have a lot of muscle mass on them, and that's because they're burning through this carbohydrates quickly

Since most of us don't have time to train for marathons to get that lower body, fat percentage

It makes more sense for us to find styles of exercise that mix the use of carbohydrates and fats as it'll provide us the greatest amount of caloric expenditure

And we do that by messing with our heart rates by playing with our heart rate

Long story short

You might think twenty minutes of a workout and all I can do is walk

Right? What's the point? Well, if you could get a lot out of that, if you were very intentional through that particular work effort, and that intention to build exercises by mixing lower, moderate and high intensity levels of exercise and fluctuating with our heart rate, allows us to call it on our fats in our carbohydrates allows us to use our aerobics pathway and our anaerobic pathway and that is what high intensity animal training is if we refer to this target heart rate, then you see on your screen we can see that aiming to work between eighty or excuse me fifty and eighty five percent of your max heart rate throughout a high interval

Training style workout is the way that you can probably achieve this

Besides the reasons that we've kind of already talked about calling on both of these energy systems calling all these different energy sources, why it's hit such a hit to be very funny, and give you a good time

Well, researches indicated that this exercise style is valuable to improve blood pressure, cardiovascular health, insulin sensitivity, cholesterol, reduce our mid section fat in our body weight while we still maintain muscle mass, all great things

So the structure this type of work out is, where we push to aerobics threshold, that eighty five percent for a short period of time

And then we recover, and we drop down to a lower intensity work effort or recovery effort where we're about fifty percent of our max heart rate

One version of this exercise structures referred to as to it's probably the most name recognition version of hit style activities

But the pattern is essentially the same as high intensity followed by lower intensity, followed by higher intensity, followed by lower intensity

And we have a structure of repeating these alternating work efforts

And the same periods of time

So what you see on your screen here is thirty seconds of work thirty seconds of recover thirty seconds of work thirty seconds of recover

The thing that's really great about it is that you can do time

You can determine how long you want it to be eight to ten minutes long, or is the are as long as sixty minutes long, depending on the types of exercises that you choose an email a time that you have

So again, my sales pitch, why do people love it so much it is because it's adjustable to your age to your fitness level to your weight to your health condition, you can perform it through a range of modalities

So it can be biking, swimming, dancing, walking group exercise, and you get the same the same benefits as you might get from let's say, walking on a treadmill for an hour, but a lot less time

So how do you design hit workout to be an efficient one? Well, there's three things to consider when you're determining what exercises to do and a hits style workout

The first is duration

How much time do you have to dedicate to your workout that may help you to determine how you want to structure it next intensity? Where are you at currently in your fitness level? What restrictions do you have that you need to consider what other types of things are you going to be? Including in your workday, maybe doing a headstart workout is not best suited for a day that you, you know, do a lot of a lot of yard work for example

And then frequency, how many days a week do you plan to exercise in general your intensity again should be around that eighty to eighty five percent of your max heart rate to those higher, perceived, exertion periods of time

So, if we look at our Borg scale here

If we see the, the orange shaded box on our scale of six to twenty is a Borg scale, but you could also consider one to ten

You should be operating in that work effort at between seven to a nine

And then it should so hard should be very hard as the point there and then when you drop down into your lower well, we're exertion periods of time in a hit style, it should feel, you know, middle of the road about fifty percent of your max heart rate feeling somewhere between a five and a six on that work effort

The US physical activity guidelines, tell us that we should be exercising about five days a week for thirty minutes today

And that should be for modern intensity workouts the flip side of that is to do some vigorous intensity workout

And that would mean about seventy five, seventy five minutes total a week or twenty five minutes a day for three days a week

So, in either of these scenarios, you can break up the time

So, for example, if I was aiming towards modern intensity activity for a hundred and fifty minutes a week

So I was gonna try to work out thirty minutes a day, five days a week

I might be able to do fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen minutes in the evening

But if I got that thirty minutes total, that's all

That matters

So, you don't have to work out in thirty minute blocks of time to necessarily reach a goal as long as you're putting in work, even in five minute increments or less throughout the day

And you get that total amount that's recommended you've, you've met that goal

The other guideline coming out of the physical activity guidelines is strength training and that's intended to be at least two days a week and you're performing eight to twelve reps of eight to ten different types of exercise, targeting your main muscle groups

So your big muscles on the front and the back of your body, and guess what you can also get that done with a hit style workout

You can kind of kill two birds with one stone

So to speak

So, let's take a look at some examples, these are literally just suggestive things that you could try out, you know, take that into consideration, but these would all be for a ten minute workout

So, let's look in the pool first

So, in the pool, you might do jogging in the water, maybe at waist height for thirty seconds and then doing a chest press, either meaning to do a push up on the side of the pool, or using a pool noodle and getting down into a little bit deeper water, and pushing that noodle out away from your chest and back in and you do that for thirty seconds, you would alternate those two for ten repetitions and that would equal your ten mintes total workout

The awkward job in this scenario would probably be considered the work effort where you're reaching out to, about that eighty five percent of your max heart rate and then the chest press would be your recovery period where you would be dropping that heart rate back down to fifty percent next let's look at what's title as beginner so this might be walking

Maybe you walk briskly for one minute and then you do walking lunches for one minute and repeat that five times

That's a quick ten minute workout

And the walk would probably be the recovery period of working at fifty percent of your max heart rate

The lunches would probably be the in higher intensity period of your workout where he would be reaching that eighty five percent

Again, flipping back and forth for equal amounts time

Five times each, there's your ten minutes necklace next

Let's do a bike and this would mean indoor by on this one

You could increase your resistance up high stand in your pedals and simulate climbing up the hill for one minute and then take some of that resistance off sit back down and Sprint as if you were going down hill, repeat that five times each again, you've got a ten minute workout, the uphill climb would probably be considered the work effort and the Sprint may be considered the recovery, but I can easily see that being flipped the other way around as well

So you could determine which one would be best suited for you, and then lastly advanced this might be a squat jump and the plank that were alternating, just twice for two and a half minutes each. So this gives you an example of, maybe these particular types of exercises are not particularly hard for you, especially someone that you've been working out for a long period of time

But the length of time that you're requiring your body to do, it is gonna make it challenging for two and a half minutes of a squat jump or two and a half minutes of the plank

You really might feel feel the effects of that

You can also find several interval style workout videos on your account

If you are optimum insured, there are many other resources out there

If you want to look for something on your own, make sure that you're going to a trusted source that it's a nationally credentialed

A personal trainer, or it's a certifying body or a reputable site

Regardless of the exercising agenda, did you choose? Ratio is important, many studies point to a one to one ratio as being the most beneficial at calling upon both your fats and your carbohydrates and using your aerobic Andrew anaerobic pathways and there are some variations in this type of ratio

That's typically reserved for people that are doing a high level of training athletes, for example, not typically for the general population, regardless of the amount of time, keep at one to one ratio

So you're seeing examples below

It could be thirty seconds of work

Thirty seconds of recovery or one minute for five minutes it doesn't matter

Just make sure you keep the one to one ratio to get the best benefit

As in any type of exercise, we need to talk through some things to consider before you get started

The first is safety

So whether you're new to exercise or it's just been awhile since you've engaged any type of exercise on a regular basis

I don't want you to go out there and start doing Barbies or squat jumps or anything like that

Please consider your own health precautions before you start a routine make sure that you again talk to a doctor before you engage in this style of exercise

So that it's been official, but mostly most importantly that space

Next is that you want to create a baseline if you wanted to go out and run a five K or a marathon, you wouldn't just show up on race day and start running right? Train

You'd build up your stamina and the same is true for hit style

Workout by creating a baseline you have a strong structure to build upon

Right? So a baseline as as kind of defined by American college sports medicine is that you should be able to perform a workout

So three to five times a week for twenty to sixty minutes

A session for one to two weeks before you increase your intensity again, and that allows your body to make the muscular adaptations to make you more efficient with the types of workouts that you're doing

We all have part of a muscle memory before

We're not gonna get in a situation where we're experiencing muscle memory in that short period of time, but we're also giving our party time to adjust

So, if it's been a long time, since you've exercised, maybe try incorporating just one hit style workout into your routine a week

And then maybe after two weeks of doing that, maybe then bump it up to two times a week

And then after a few weeks, then bump it up to three or the same may be considered for duration those your two days a week

And you're doing twenty minutes today

And then after a few weeks, you're still doing two times a week

But now you're bumping it up to thirty minutes, just give yourself a little bit of a cushion before you transition into the next level of intensity

Next again, as I just let into adjust your intensity, we should be able to meet our own needs

So, if you're working out with a partner, for example, and they're at a different fitness level, then you doesn't mean that you necessarily need to keep up with them or that they need to keep up with you, you should want to push yourself

But listen to your body, certainly, you should feel uncomfortable at times with the work that you're doing, but it shouldn't feel painful when I say uncomfortable

I mean, you should feel a burn in your legs

If you're doing squats, you should feel out of breath when you're doing a anaerobic based cardiovascular based activity, but it shouldn't feel painful

You shouldn't feel like you're putting yourself at risk for doing it

And, lastly, workouts should be slowly introduced into your team

They do take a little bit of time to recover from

So, just as we talked about creating a baseline, the same thing is incorporate them slowly make sure that you're giving yourself space in between workouts throughout the week

And then, if you are doing, you know, several of these panels work out the week, take into consideration what muscle groups you're using the best

If you do it a day, that's heavy with bunches or squats or something like that

Maybe the next time that you do a head start, work out, you focus on your upper body so that you're giving your muscle groups time to recover

So, what's the final message here? Remember that this is a care offer reaching your wellness goals

Exercise is one part of the equation having a healthy balance diet, reducing your stress, getting enough sleep, drinking, enough water

They're all part of what we need to do to reach our best fitness level, but certainly, it's that is all part of a small piece of our overall wellbeing and reaching better health

Thanks

So much for joining us today

We hope that you found this to be a beneficial topic, and if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to us