Question about your body getting used to excercise......

[vi5]

I have heard that at a certain point, working out becomes less effective if you don't step it up since your body gets used to it and as a result you burn less calories. Is this true, and to what degree? How soon does your body get used to a workout routine, and to what degree do you need to mix it up for it to be effective.

I do a half hour of cardio every day. I've increased my treadmill speeds but have kind of hit a wall. So now I'm increasing the incline and doing more steep hills.

How concerned should I be with doing this if I want to continue burning calories. Or is your body getting used to it something that takes a while to happen?

[jpgray]

1. It can be very individual

Sometimes if you try to improve too quickly, you will hit a wall and mistake that for just not pushing yourself hard enough--I had a friend who overloaded on lifting weights and actually lost progress as a result. More isn't always better. This is easier to recognize if you feel more drained than energized after a workout, etc. It also depends on what your goals are if you are doing cardio to lose weight, help your heart, or maintain a level of fitness, then it shouldn't be a problem. If you are looking to improve or reach some goal, it may be that you are taking in too little nutritionally to make the gains, not getting enough sleep, that sort of thing. It's hard to just guess. :)

[vi5]

2. I'm just looking to lose weight and stay fit......

I don't have a particular goal, I just would like to continue losing some weight and stay fit.

I almost always feel energized after my cardio workouts. I just want to make sure I'm also being productive with my workouts. I'm 34 years old, 6 feet tall, and 191 lbs. looking to get down to about 185.

[SpaceCatMeetsMars]

3. If you add some weight-lifting to your routine, you will

build muscle, which burns more calories thorughout the day. How much the exercize helps you to burn calories depends a lot on your age, I think. As you get older, it seems like you need to do more to burn calories. You will burn more calories if you add weightlifting, vary your routine by cross-training and add more cardio time.

I had been on a plateau, and have been getting some results with 2 hours of lifting a week and 4-5 hours of a couple of different kinds of cardio a week. I am a 41 year old women, though, so if you are younger and a man, you would probably not need to do that much cardio.

[vi5]

6. I do lift weights as well...

I lift weights for a half hour a day (alternating body areas each day), and then I do a half hour of cardio. I do this routine 5 days a week, with Wednesday being my non-lifting day, although I still do the cardio.

[HuckleB]

4. This depends on your goals.

You're doing a workout routine that has been shown to be wonderful for general heart fitness. If you hope to burn fat, however, you're routine will need to expand to an hour, as you're not going to burn fat in the first half-hour of a workout. Also, speed increase isn't necessarliy going to equal fat burning. Do you go to a gym? Is there a bachelor's or higher qualified trainer there? If so, access that person and talk about your goals and how to get there.

[Gryffindor_Bookworm]

5. I'm a serious gym rat.

The problem you're describing used to happen to me, but not now. I switched plans. I cannot recommend the Body for Life plan highly enough. Visit http://www.bodyforlife.com for some pictures of the results.

I do 20 minutes of cardio three times a week, and it is *extremely* effective if you do it the way that Bill Phillips (the BFL guy) recommends. It's an intensity index like this: on a scale of 1 to 10, with 5 being a steady pace that you could maintain all day if you had to and 10 being an all-out effort where you couldn't go any harder if someone was standing beside you offering you money, you take it one minute at a time. (The first two minutes are number 1 and 2, the third is 3, etc.)


Minute / Intensity
1 5
2 5
3 6
4 7
5 8
6 9
7 6
8 7
9 8
10 9
11 6
12 7
13 8
14 9
15 6
16 7
17 8
18 9
19 10
20 5


If you do this pattern on the treadmill, I guarantee you will be drench with sweat when you get done and will burn fat for hours afterward.

Good luck! :hi:

[vi5]

7. Excellent! Thank you for this....

I've been looking for something along these lines.

[Gryffindor_Bookworm]

10. It WORKS. I lost weight faster doing this three times a week

than I did doing an HOUR a day, EVERY day.

Now that I'm at my goal weight, I use it to keep the good results. And it's FUN, too. I'm not usually comfortable beyond about an 8 on the intensity index, but the 9's only last for one minute. Who can't handle that? Then you're back to 6 to build up again. The minute of all-out effort at level 10 is not terribly bad, because you know as soon as that treadmill clicks over from 18:59 to 19:00 you can kick it down to five and cool off and then you're done. :-)

Also, I am 100% consistent with this - it's TWENTY minutes! No matter how busy you are, you can find twenty minutes!

Body for Life rocks. :thumbsup:

[MissMillie]

8. Changing your calorie intake may help too

If you've been cutting calories, your body may have gone into "starvation mode", which would mean that your metabolism may be slowing down to conserve calories.

For one day... add 200 or 300 calories (protein is your best bet) and see if you don't get a little jolt.

[dsewell]

9. Getting used to is not such a bad thing

There's partial truth to your first sentence. As you continue to do a particular activity, you become more efficient at doing the precise same amount of activity. This is particularly obvious with something like swimming, where the amount of energy an experienced swimmer will expend going a certain distance at a certain speed is much less than what a poor swimmer will expend (because of all the wasted movement). However, the more efficient you become at an activity, the easier it is to increase your speed; and the more fit you are, the easier it is to increase the intensity of workouts. So what's going to happen is eventually you'll hit a plateau where you're burning roughly the same amount of calories each time you do your half-hour workout, but you're not going to start burning fewer calories after that point (relative to body weight, anyway).

Increasing intensity is good for burning calories. As is varying your workout by including sprint intervals (whatever counts as a "sprint" in your workout) of 90 seconds or so followed by 90 seconds of relative rest.

I've also heard that fat-burning really kicks in once you've been doing aerobic activity continuously for 45 minutes, but I don't know if that's really a magic number. It's definitely the case that weight loss is easier if you have the time to spend an hour rather than a half hour a day at aerobic activity.