7 Mistakes Women Make Working Out
Many women are disappointed when they make the effort to hit the gym or the jogging trail three or four times a week, but still see no real difference in their weight or their shape. Why does exercise not help you achieve the results that you want? It’s possible that you’re making mistakes or heading in with assumptions that aren’t sound.
Watch What You Eat After Working Out
For many women, the post-workout coffee and pastry is one of the important pleasures of life. The problem is that the average cappuccino and lean muffin can pack between 500 and 600 calories. If you worked out for anything less than a solid hour, you probably didn’t burn off as many calories.
Even if you do work out for an hour to burn off 500 calories, you still don’t make much progress if your treating yourself to plenty of calories afterward. It’s important to skip the high-calorie foods, and switch to sugarless fruit smoothies that you make yourself at home.
You Are Not Burning As Much As You Think
Often, people make the mistake of believing that they’ve probably worked out hard enough if they’ve broken into a sweat. Working up a sweat isn’t a good measure of workout intensity, however. Instead, you need to find out how long you’ve been getting exercise.
If you’re a woman who weighs 160 pounds, low-impact aerobics for an hour is likely to only burn about 365 calories. Swimming for an hour burns a little more. If you are walking on the treadmill, doubling your speed from about two miles per hour to four miles per hour can help you burn an additional 100 calories an hour. It’s important to not overestimate how much you’re burning.
You Are Doing It Wrong
Grabbing on to the handles when you’re on the treadmill, or helping movement on the elliptical by pulling and pushing on the handles, are two common mistakes that women tend to make at the gym. Women often also make the mistake of neglecting to engage their core when working out with weights.
Incorrect technique hurts you in two ways. To begin, it makes it hard for you to burn as many calories as you should. Additionally, it puts you at risk of injury. For instance, if you use incorrect posture on the rowing machine, you risk hurting your back. Something as simple as setting the seat at the wrong height on an exercise bike can hurt your hamstrings.
The solution is to carefully study the right form to use either by asking a coach or by looking at videos online. You need to understand what muscles you should aim for with each exercise, and use them carefully, making sure to not overstress them.
You Don’t Lift Heavy Weights
Women are often less enthusiastic about working out with weights than men tend to be. The fear is that working with weights will make them put on unseemly amounts of muscle mass. In truth, however, it takes plenty of the male hormone testosterone to put on significant amounts of muscle mass. Even men have a hard time gaining muscle mass.
When you turn your back on weight training, you miss out on a great calorie burning opportunity.
You Dont Change it Up
It can be tempting to get on the treadmill every day, and do a slow, steady jog as you watch television. It’s important to remember, however, that when you do the same kind of workout every day, your body gets used to it, and learns how to do it with minimal energy expenditure.
It’s important to try different kinds of exercise each day. From high-intensity interval training to swimming, cycling and dance exercise, there is a wide range of variety to try. You need to keep throwing new routines at your body if you are to work it hard enough to burn calories.
Unless You are A Sprinter Slow and Steady Wins the Race
Aiming to lose twenty pounds to get into your swimsuit by summer when it’s only eight weeks away, or hoping to get in shape well enough to run a half-marathon in a month, is unrealistic. Using exercise as a way to lose weight or boost strength and endurance is a gradual process. If you rush yourself, you’ll probably only succeed in injuring some part of your body. With exercise, you need to be patient.
You Can Build A Better Butt But You Can Spot Reduce Fat
Women often pick a part of the body that they would like to improve, like their abs or their arms, and try to focus only on building those parts up. Often, they’re disappointed by the lack of progress that they see.
The problem is that even when you do work out the right parts of your body with the right technique, the difference usually doesn’t show through the layers of fat that cover those areas. You first need to concentrate on a full body workout that helps you lose fat tissue overall. It’s only then that you can hope to have your newly acquired muscles show through.
Before you begin to work out for a fitness goal, it’s important that you understand how the body works, and do away with incorrect assumptions about how best to go about achieving your aims. It’s important to understand energy expenditure, use the right form, and understand how to train with weights if you are to succeed in making exercise work for you.