RIO Fitness Chicago® Exercise & Nutrition Blog

RIO Fitness Chicago® Tip:

Late night info-mercials promise their product will give you those sexy abs you've always wanted. Bottomline, no machine or doing 1000s of crunches a day will help you see that "six-pack" if your body fat % is not low. How do we get our body fat % low:

1) Have a quality health & fitness professional calculate your daily calorie limit and start staying within it. Body fat loss = buring more calories than you consume; but not to the point where you're starving yourself, because that will have the opposite effect (your body will start storing fat).

2) Do cardio properly to burn majority calories from fat not energy/muscle. Doing cardio for more than 30mins burns majority energy calories (glycogen) & NOT fat. You need to do you cardio in high-low intensity intervals every 60sec for just 25mins if you want to begin burning body fat quickly. Getting your cardio in as soon as you wake up before consuming any calories will speed up the fat loss even more.

3) Strength train. Resistance training burns 4x more calories than cardio. And keeps you metabolism (how fast you burn calories) high for 24-36hrs, cardio is only 2hrs.

4) Limit high glycemic carbs (bread/pasta/rice/oats) to ONLY after exercise. These are carbs which digest quickly so if you're eating them all day long, they're not being burned and turned into body fat. Fruits/veggies are low glycemic and are the carbs that are ok to eat throughout the day.

5) Limit alcohol consumption. Overconsuming calories, stress, and alcohol, are the three quickest ways to gain body fat. Alcohol triggers the body fat production hormone cortisol to begin storing body fat.