No matter which movements you do throughout the day – walking, running, or picking up a pencil from the floor – the muscles in your body constantly have to work to keep you steady and prevent you from losing your balance. The muscles of the core – particularly the abdominal and back muscles – are responsible for providing this stability and balance as we go about our daily activities. Given that these muscles play a part in every movement, it is essential that you work on strengthening them each time you workout. Aside from the fact that you’ll improve your stability, you’ll get plenty of other benefits when you improve your core strength:

1. Core exercises simultaneously tone your ab and back muscles, which means you save time in your workout routine. There’s no need to dedicate time to working each muscle group individually.
2. Most core exercises don’t require special equipment, and as such you can do them at home or in a hotel room while travelling. No more excuses about not being able to exercise because you don’t have a gym membership or expensive equipment in your house.
3. Strengthening your core will significantly improve your posture and that means you’ll be less likely to suffer from back problems. In addition, good posture equates to you standing up straight and having a longer, leaner frame which in turns makes you appear slimmer. Who’s going to turn down an opportunity to look a few pounds lighter simply by standing up straight?

Now that you’ve got the reasons why you should strengthen your ab and back muscles, let’s take a look at how you go about it with a few key exercises:

Bridge: Lie on your back with bent knees and feet flat on the floor. Get your back into a neutral position – lower back isn’t arched nor is it pressed against the floor. Pull in or tighten your lower abdominal muscles as you raise your buttocks off the floor until your knees, hips, and shoulders are on the same plane. Stay in the raised position for a count of 10 then lower and repeat. Depending on your strength level, you may only be able to raise your buttocks a few inches off the floor. No problem. Keep working on this move until your strength increases.

Quadruped: Start on your hands and knees (also known as Table position). Your hands should be directly underneath your shoulders and your head should be on the same plane as your back. Raise opposite arms and legs i.e. raise left hand and right leg. Hold for a count of three, then switch sides and raise the right hand/left leg. Repeat, alternating arms and legs each time.

Modified Forearm Plank: Start by lying on your stomach. Raise yourself up so that your knees are on the floor and you are resting on your forearms with your elbows just directly underneath your shoulders. Keep your back and head in a neutral position. Pull in your abdominal muscles. Make sure not to shrug your shoulders up towards your ears. Hold the move for 3 counts then return to the starting position and repeat.

Full Plank: If the modified plank is too easy for you then try the full plank position. You start on your stomach as with the modified plank, but when you raise yourself up to rest on your forearms, straighten your legs so that the knees are off the ground and your toes are on the floor.

The plank is an incredibly versatile and effective back and ab strengthener that you can do in a variety of ways. For example, for an added challenge in the modified or full plank, you can raise one leg or arm a few inches off the ground. To push the challenge even further, you can also raise alternate arms and legs off the ground (in a similar fashion to the quadruped exercise). And when you get tired of being on your forearms, you can simply get into a traditional pushup position and hold the move for a few seconds. While in the pushup position feel free to lift your arms and legs off the ground as well. The sky’s the limit!

The goal is to change your center of gravity and shift your weight distribution – basically, doing whatever you can to make yourself unstable and then, working on stabilizing yourself. Since the back and abs are involved in stability it stands to reason that every time you put them through a destabilizing movement, they have to work that much harder and as a result become stronger.

At this point there’s no disputing the fact that each and every one of us has to exercise on a regular basis in order to prevent diseases, lose weight, or even maintain our ideal weight. Traditionally we’ve been told to do 60 minutes of physical activity 3 to 5 times a week. However, carving out that hour can prove to be quite difficult for some. On the other hand those who can spare the time often find themselves bored as they spend an hour going through the same movements at the gym, day after day. As a result of these two factors, many of us never start an exercise routine, and if we do start, we tend to give up shortly afterwards. But there is another option that can help put both of these excuses to rest: HIT or High-Intensity Interval Training.

The basic idea behind HIT is to include short and frequent high intensity bursts in your routine so that you ultimately get all the health benefits you want in a short amount of time. So, rather than spend 45 minutes on the treadmill, walking at a steady incline and speed, you spend 25 minutes and kick up the intensity during regular intervals.

To understand why HIT is so effective, let’s take a quick look at the findings from a recent study at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. The study employed seven, 21-year old men and put them through six, 20- to 25-minute sessions on a stationary bike, over a 2-week period. Each session had 8 to 12 one-minute, high-intensity bursts, and 75-second recovery phases at a lower intensity. The final results of the study showed improvements in exercise performance and overall muscle health and strength. The researchers reported that to get these same results with a regular, moderate intensity routine, the study participants would have had to do at least 10 hours of exercise, non-stop. Without a doubt, HIT wins this competition.

So, how do you go about applying the HIT concept to your workouts? You can do interval training with any cardio activity or machine be it the treadmill, elliptical, or a jump rope. Here’s an interval program designed for a treadmill:

Warm-up for 5 minutes at 3.8 mph, 0% incline

Increase the speed to 4.2mph and after every 2 minutes, increase the incline by 2% until you reach the maximum incline. Then reduce the incline by 2%, every 2 minutes, until you’re back to 0%

Cool down for 5 minutes at 3.8 mph, 0% incline

Assuming your treadmill’s maximum incline is 12%, this workout will take 35 minutes to complete..

If you wanted to vary this routine, you could also try a run/walk session:

Warm-up for 5 minutes at a speed of 3.8 to 4.0 mph, 0% incline

Increase the speed to 6.0 – 6.5 mph and run for 2 minutes. Next, reduce your speed to 4.2 mph and walk for 2 minutes. Alternate the cycles for a total of 24 minutes.

Cool down for 5 minutes at a speed of 3.8 – 4.0 mph, 0% incline

To get the benefits of HIT, you don’t have to limit yourself to changing the incline or resistance only. You can also put together a routine where you change the incline, followed by the speed, and so on. The goal is to constantly shock those muscles so they don’t get too comfortable!

HIT isn’t limited to cardio activities either. The concept can be applied to your strength training routines as well. Alternatively, you can do intervals that alternate between cardiovascular and strength training.

Try this on for size:
Run for 5 minutes.
Stop and do bicep curls for 2 minutes (choose a weight that you can sustain for at least a minute)
Run for 5 minutes
Stop and do as many pushups as you can for 2 minutes
Run for 5 minutes
Stop and do squats (with or without holding dumbbells) for 2 minutes
Run for 5 minutes
Stop and do lunges (with or without holding dumbbells) for 2 minutes.

Once again, the focus is on constantly shocking your muscles as you switch from one type of movement into another. The routines in this article are just a few suggestions to get you going on the HIT highway. You can easily apply the concepts presented here to your favorite activities so that you can reduce boredom, reduce the time you spend working out, and improve your physique and overall health.

When it comes to weight loss, you probably don’t spend much time thinking about hidden calories. You may assume that all you have to do to reach your ideal weight is focus on eating whole grain or low-fat foods. Well, not quite. Before you pick up that box of whole grain cereal or bag of low-fat cookies, you need to look at the fine print because you could be taking in hidden calories and essentially preventing yourself from reaching your ideal weight.

So where exactly are those hidden calories? Well let’s break out the magnifying glass and take a look.

1. Grab a small bag of chips and it says there are 80 calories per serving. Sounds reasonable enough. You’re allowing yourself 1500 calories a day so 80 won’t do much damage. But take a closer look and you’ll see that there are 3 servings in that bag of chips. That’s a total of 240 calories. If you eat the whole pack you’ll only have 1260 calories left for the rest of the day. And it’s only 11 am. And for breakfast you had whole grain granola cereal which you were shocked to discover contains about 400 calories in the little ½ cup serving you poured into your bowl. That’s…that’s a gazillion calories already! As you can see, you need to pay attention to the fine print on supposedly healthy foods. They generally pack a stronger caloric – and fattening – punch than you’d like to admit
2. When it comes to sugar, don’t assume it’s safe to eat something just because the ingredients list doesn’t clearly say “sugar”. There are many forms of sugar and they generally end in” –ose” – dextrose, fructose, or sucrose. And remember that no matter which “–ose” you chose, it’s all the same to your thighs!
3. Just because a food is labeled as low-fat or fat-free, that’s no reason to indulge. Just as your thighs can’t tell the difference between sucrose and fructose, so too they can’t distinguish between 100 calories from regular Oreos or 100 calories from low-fat Oreos. Calories are energy to your body. Take in too much energy and it gets stored in your body as fat. So consume everything – including fat-free cookies – in moderation. In fact, you may want to be extra careful with the fat free varieties because the label fools you into thinking the calories are somehow different and magical. Not so.
4. In the good ol’ days the only thing you had to worry about when drinking coffee was overdosing on caffeine. But we’ve since had the industrial revolution and great technological advances which have allowed the great minds of the coffee industry to put forth creative and tasty new ways for us to consume more coffee and more calories. Nowadays you can turn a boring cup of coffee into a 500+ calorie minefield thanks to all the creamer, sugar, syrup (even more sugar!) and whipped cream that gets added when you order a fancy concoction at your local coffee shop. So, if you’re a coffee shop addict watch out – that cup of coffee could contain more calories than a full meal
5. You spend hours at the gym each week trying to whip your body into shape and during each session you quench your thirst with a sports drink. Someone told you it’s full of electrolytes or positive ions or something. Anyway, someone told you it’ll do you good because you exercise. Why not, you think – athletes drink it and they’re in tip-top shape. Turns out that a serving of a sports drink like Gatorade has 50 calories and 14g of sugar. With 4 servings in each bottle, that’s a total of 200 calories and 56g of sugar. Just as a reference, 4-5 grams of sugar is the equivalent of 1 tablespoon of sugar. That means there are about 11 tablespoons of sugar in that bottle of Gatorade. That’s quite a bit of sugar. You may wonder how professional athletes can consume sports drinks and maintain a perfect physique. Well, don’t forget that they earn a living based on their bodies. They workout for hours per day and burn thousands of calories. They can afford to take in the sports drink. The training you do for next month’s wedding isn’t exactly equivalent to Super Bowl training (although you may beg to differ given how much pain you’re in after doing 30 squats).

In order to gain all of the benefits from intense exercise it is absolutely necessary to get good amounts of quality rest. Rest and sleep is just as important, if not more important than the actual exercise. During resistance training at high intensity levels, muscles will get a large amount of tiny tears. This is the first step in gaining more muscle as the body will respond to this tear by adapting and repairing, creating a stronger and larger muscle. Larger muscles of course lead to a body which burns more fat and becomes leaner with less work.

The repair process won’t take place if the body is not allowed to do its job, and this job occurs during periods of rest. Often people rush back to the gym as we have been taught that “more is better”. People are blown away when they cut back on their workouts and actually get much stronger and grow muscle faster. It is so important for the body to get the proper rest. If we don’t we experience poor results, get demotivated and possibly give up.

If you do not get enough rest or sleep it will be much more difficult to build fat burning lean muscle and reaching your goals of having a fit body. And here is a another secret, when the body is stressed due to lack of sleep or rest, it tends to hang on to fat as a survival method. Over training is a very common problem which people just do not understand. Give your body the time to repair itself and it will reward you! It is even possible to wear your entire immune system down.

The repair process does not happen overnight. It usually takes 2 days or more so make sure to keep between one to three day sof rest between your resistance training workouts. Otherwise you may be short-circuiting your results and chances to burn fat and build muscle. If you do workouts which train larger amounts of the body at once, this is very important. You can sometimes get away with less rest if you focus a resistance workout on a single muscle group per workout.

What is a good amount of sleep to get? Seven and a half hours might be perfect! Research has shown we sleep in cycles of 90 minutes and waking before or after one of these cycles is over can lead to a feeling of grogginess for an entire day! 5 90 minute sleep cycles is 7 and a half hours. Try it out yourself and see if you feel better. You will most likely feel well-rested, energized and you will kick start your Fat Burning Furnace.

People are more confused than ever about how exactly to burn fat.  They just don’t seem to know the best way to achieve the body they want.  What works and what doesn’t and what are the reasons why?  There are countless people frustrated everyday, slaving away inn the gyms and fitness centers around the country right now with very little results for all their hard work.

The tireless working, day in and day out, on the treadmill, elliptical, stair climber to burn calories and lose the fat is not getting the desired results.  They are hopefully also lifting weights several times a week for hours at a time to build strength and muscle.  Who knows, they may even be taking a few aerobics or other fitness classes too.

Their diet is probably following one of the latest strategies that promises miracle fat burning and weight loss with the smallest amount of effort and least changes in daily life possible.  Their budget for diet supplements has gone through the roof as they spend on the latest pill that aids in weight loss.  And of course, they are watching the scale like a hawk as it has become the tool by which they judge their progress.

If it goes up a pound or two, their behavior becomes quite rash and they may even change up their entire workout or diet program.  Of course many others are doing the same thing!

This kind of stuff, after all, is what so many of the fitness and diet “gurus” recommend to burn fat.  With so many strategies and plans being pushed as the “ultimate” we tend to go overboard and none of it ends up really working.

We lose sight of what really matters in fat burning, fitness and health… the priciples that many people just don’t know about, have forgotten or only a select few actually put to use to achieve life long fitness.  These principles helped me achieve a fat loss of 32 pounds, dropping from 235 to 203 in just 2 months time.  I dropped unwanted body fat, kept it off, and recharged my life.

With any exercise of nutition program, you will probably lose some fat initially but often the progress doesnt continue or slows to the point where a person gets frustrated.  This happens because the person is using a temporary mindset.  They are only focused on a short term and specific goal.  They end up switching to something else over and over again until the cycle repeats itself and confusion becomes the norm.

This is one of the biggest, if not the #1 reson for a lack of success in fat loss, diet, and fitness programs.  Jumping from one fad diet or exercise routine to another and losing site of the goal to be healthy for LIFE just does not work.

Quite simply most people are probably exercising too much, not intensely enough and adhering to unrealistic diet requirements.

If instead we focus on a long term plan, a change in lifestyle and stop worrying about “losing 10 pounds by summer” they would find the weight might just come off a little easier and tend to stay off.

The right things include brief, progressive, intense resistance training, eating a diet full of rich nutritious foods, drinking a LOT of water and getting plenty of rest and sleep.  The students of the Fat Burning Furnace method understand this and reap the benefits… Do You?

The scale can be a useful tool in our constant struggle with losing and keeping the weight off, however all too often I see people checking their weight obsessively.  When they see a pound of weight gained, they freak out and might even stop doing many of the things that they are doing right (weight training).  Just because a pound of weight is gained on the scale, does not mean you are failing in your weight loss goals.  As a matter of fact, most people are judging their progress in their fitness routine entirely wrong.  It should not be our goal to “lose weight” but it should be our goal to “lose fat”.

This does not necessarily correspond with a drop in weight on the scale.  For years most of us were taught to watch these scale carefully and it is a hard habit to get out of.  Our bodies can fluctuate several pounds a day based on what time of day it is and our daily hydration and salt intake.  None of this means you have burned or gained fat.

The big problem with the scale as your judge of progress becomes clear when you start to add lean muscle to your body.  Muscle weighs more than fat, and your body weight may actually increase slightly as you become healthier and drop fat.

Let’s say you have been following a resistance training routine for several months, you’ve gotten stronger and added muscle to your frame.  You might just see an increase of body weight on the scale.  Assuming this weight gain is bad is not the correct thing to do.  It is actually a good thing and we are interested in FAT loss, not weight loss correct?

The more muscle your body has, the more energy and calories it burns while at rest.  It also means your metabolism will increase and you will become more efficient at burning fat.  The measure of success we should be paying attention to is body fat percentage.

Most men are happy  with their bodies when they achieve a body fat percentage of 12-15% and most women are satisfied in the 16-20% range.  An inexpensive skin caliper may be a wise investment to aid you in tracking your body fat percentage.  If it is going down as you measure as the weeks pass, this is a sure sign of success!  Another easy method, what do you look like in the mirror?  Take a picture once a week and compare it to view your progress.

Some of us lose fat and gain muscle easily, some of us don’t.  We are all a product of our genes and have inherited our physical characteristics.  This may take more work for you than for others, you just have to keep on trying.  You can only compare yourself to you, everyone is different.  Are you trying your best?  You have the power to reshape and transform what you were given.  With the combination of the right knowledge and developing new habits, you can burn fat fast and make astounding improvements in your body. The fitness industry often uses the genetically superior to advertise their products and programs and easily deceive you into thinking all you have to do is follow their advice to look like a cover boy or girl.  This is simply just not the case and one of the mis-truths exposed by the Fat Burning Furnace Program.  We highly recommend Fat Burning Furnace here at FitBodyZone, learn more about this amazing program by clicking here.