Burn Calories - Warming Up

Vionna Jones: Hi, I am Vionna Jones, owner of Fit in DC, LLC and I am showing you how to burn calories during the holidays. Right now we are going to talk about the myths versus realities of how to burn calories and then we will discuss the proper way to warm up for your workout. Most clients that I meet with are concerned about losing weight or losing inches or reducing fat around their mid-section. And many people believe that the best way to do that is by doing crunches or sit-ups. The reality is that in order to lose the weight or the inches, reduce the fat around your mid-section, you have to incorporate your strength training with cardiovascular or aerobic activity. Strength training, alone doing crunches will not actually burn calories or help you to reduce inches in your mid-section; it will only help you to have stronger abs, abdominal muscles. So you may have a nice six pack but you still have the fat over top of it and you won't be able see that you have that six pack.

So in order to reduce the weight, to reduce the inches around your mid-section. You want to work out within your heart rate range. And the way to determine without any fancy equipment if you are working out within your heart rate range is to use what we call the 'Talk Test'. During the talk test you can tell if your heart rate is high enough, if you are able to carry on a conversation, if we can carry on a conversation while you working out you are probably not working out hard enough within your heart rate range. However, if you can answer our questions, give a couple of words at a time, then you are probably at the right level. If you are not able to talk at all and you have to stop working out, stop you exercising in order to answer our question, you are probably working out a little bit too hard. So you want to be somewhere in the middle of being able to sing while you are working out and not being able to talk at all. So in order to get ourselves to this proper heart rate range which is different for every person, we are going to warm up before we start to exercise. The warm up not only put you in the correct heart rate range at the beginning of your workout but it also helps to get the blood flowing, get your muscles warmed and helps to prevent injury while you are working out. So it is a good idea to spend at least five minutes doing some sort of activity to warm up before you actually start working out. You don't want to go directly into your workout. And there are several ways that you can warm up. If you have access to a treadmill, an electric stair climber or a stationary bike, you can use that for five minutes to get yourself into your proper heart rate range. The other way is to do something, if you don't have access to any equipment, you can do some traditional exercises such as jumping rope, jumping jags, walking around the room at a quick pace, walking up and down the stairs or doing step-ups if you have a step in order to get your heart rate where you want it to be .

Another good way to tell whether or not you are working out within your personal heart rate range is to invest in a heart rate monitor. A heart rate monitor can be set for your own personal heart rate range and will beep to let you know whether or not you are working out too far above or too far below your heart rate range. So those are some tips on the myths versus realities of burning calories while you are working out and how to properly warm up for your workout. So now we are ready to set up our calorie burning circuit.