I’m going to reveal some things about cardiovascular training that may change the way you think about it. Below are some workout plans that will help you shed abdominal flab and those extra pounds. You’re going to save time and get more results if you’ll pay attention to these. Cardiovascular routine number one: moving slowly.

This one reflects outdated thinking about cardio workouts. The endless exercise sessions that are supposed to help burn fat but never seem to make a difference.

While all the reasons for this not working are hard to understand, one thing’s for sure: it doesn’t work. There’s still another study that shows that females exercising for an hour of this kind of reduced intensity effort has no effect on belly fat, even after months of persistence.

Cardiovascular routine number two: intense exercise.

You’ve got to move fast and hard until you get at least a four hundred calorie burn done. This should take about a forty minute period. This is good, but it’s still not the best way to lose fat.

Cardiovascular routine number three: training with intervals.

An Australian study showed that doing intervals was superior to slower cardiovascular routines when it came to shedding stomach fat. Intervals are a preferred choice when trying to lose fat..

The way you do this is by alternating hard, intense work with easy recovery work.

Here’s a sample of a cardio-interval training session that can help you design your own.

Begin with a good warming up period and then exercise at an intense level that is around one-fifth more intense than usual. Do this for one minute. Next exercise at a light, cooling pace for a minute before returning to high intensity again.

This should be done for at least five cylces followed by a five minute cool down to close.

One of the most appealing machines in the gym right now is the elliptical trainer. You’ll find out though, that the elliptical is not very beneficial for calorie consumption and fat loss. A well respected magazine, Men’s Health, has come out very critically about the popular ellipticals, but there still isn’t much reason except for having bad knees for using one. Assuming each knee on your body is doing pretty well, you need to stay away from the ellipticals. Here are a few points about ellipticals that should change your mind.

To begin with, check out the results you are getting with your elliptical training: if it was so great, you’d get some reults after a while, wouldn’t you? The bottom like is that they can’t be trusted. Sure, they tell you all those calories were burned, but somehow your body always stays the same or gets worse.

Does it surprise you that the calorie count on the machines are inflated by about one-third? Another reason to eschew ellipticals is that they are too easy and you don’t feel like you’re doing anything. In fact, one Biggest Loser participant talked about how they are useless.

My rule of thumb is that if you’re not feeling like you’re working out, you’re not working out.

Right there you’ll find the 3rd reason to stay away from the ellipticals: the way people are. What I mean is that people are always looking for the easiest way to get what they want, and that’s why ellipticals are so popular.

Just think about what happens when there are an equal number of treadmills and elliptical machines: people gravitate to the ellipticals because they are easy.

The truth is that it’s going to take work to get that fat off your body and to keep it off. Looking for easy routes to your goals are going to disappoint you all the time.

Some people just need to get honest about what they’ve been doing. Even though you know that your exercise plan is doing you absolutely no good at all. Why do you keep up your aerobic routine even though you know you won’t lose weight or fat? There is an evil feature of cardiovascular exercise that causes people to go over the deep end.

I was thinking about these people while I finished my intervals and watching them going non-stop on the machines. One thing I discovered is that some cardio freaks have some bizarre habbits.

This was the basis for my list of indicators that you’re doing too much cardio.

1.You know you’re doing too much cardio if you need a five minute period before your workout to choose your reading material.

2. You do do much cardio if the person on the machine next to yours is better acquainted with you than your family members are.

3. You know you are doing way too much cardio when you’re aware of your calorie count by the minute for all the machines.

4. Cardio has gotten out of hand in your life if it makes you miserable and you’re rather have a limb sawed of without anesthesia, but you do it anyway.

5. You’re at the fitness center to lose, but rather than weight you’re only losing time and patience.

6. When all your television shows are on when you are on the cardio machines, you know that you’ve overdone it.

7. When you’ve got injured muscles from repeated use and you have to see specialists and perhaps even have surgery, you know that you’ve taken the cardio route a little bit too far.

OK, so I have been a little bit sarcastic, but do you get the point?

Cardio isn’t going to help you lose weight and it’s not going to help you be happy, and it’s not going to do anything but disappoint you in the end.

Whether or not you are trying to save cash in a tight economy or if you just don’t like those huge fitness clubs, you have some good news. It might also be that you’re tired of those self-infatuated men who won’t let you have a turn on the machine or the scantily clad women who think they’re hot and bully you around. You don’t have to go to the gym anyway: you can get great results and a great body at home. I know that some of you are skeptical about losing the cardio for the new wide world of body mass workouts.

I’ve recently helped one of my clients this way who thought she’d never make any progress after leaving the cardio world. She was aghast at the lack of machinery in my exercise section.

After a schedule of three weekly half-hour workouts, her questions were all answered. Each session included some lower body movements and some upper body manipulation.

I want you to give a simple bodyweight routine a chance to help you attain the body you want with just a few exercises.

When the warming up time is used up, we moved on to some strenghening exercises that helped her do complete pushups after just a couple weeks. The variation push-ups that we added in such as closed-grip and decline continued to build her strength and burned off the fatty area hanging from her tricep.

Once the strengh drills were finished I had my client move into some interval exercises that would be the main focus of the fat loss plan.

You see, I’ve had lots of experience with female fat loss clients and that’s why I understand what it takes for a woman to get a lean body. The intervals that need to be done are selected from a list of side-staddle-hops, prison squatting, splitting squats, lunges and even stationary running.

Television for years has produced many pieces of exercise equipment. There is an endless supply of gear that has promised that it will teach you how to lose weight fast, or how to get rid of inches around your waist, or how to drop pounds while you sleep at night, the list goes on and on.

People have made small fortunes selling the latest and greatest new fad diet or equipment. But as the years have passed, the amount of things that a person has bought keeps building, and the piles of equipment gathering dust in the garage keeps growing. Eventually it is time for a person to decide what to do with that pile of unused stuff.

Some things are easier than others to figure out what to do. If you tried some type of medicine, or a powdered diet that has an expiration date, the best place for it might be the trash. But that is not always the best place for the machine that does the six pack ab exercises for you that you paid four easy payments of $29.95 for that you would rather find another use for other than filling up the local landfill. Dealing with things like that takes a little more thought.

Every weekend garage sales are filled with the equipment and videos and books that people have bought but no longer have any use for. That is one way that people try to get some return on their investment. Another good way to get rid of it is through the different kind of recycling programs that have popped up on the internet lately.

Many organizations such as freecycle let you post the things that you no longer want and hopefully find someone who will have a use for it that can come and take it off you hands. There are also many charities that would love the donation of the equipment and can off a tax break to the person donating. Some of the equipment that has been bought could be worth a large deduction on your income taxes and is a worthwhile way to get rid of the clutter. Some of the charities will also pick up the equipment from your house.

Perhaps the best thing that can be done with the things that have been bought is to use them yourselves. There had to be some motivation behind buying the equipment in the first place, so maybe now is the time to rediscover that motivation. There are chat rooms on the internet such as the biggest loser forum where people discuss the issues surrounding weight loss and where a person can talk about how to use equipment and diets that have been forgotten about in the past.

Talking to others can help provide the motivation that was lacking in the past when the things fell into disuse. By getting the equipment out of the garage or by opening up the book and studying the diet a person can begin to achieve what they had sought when they first purchased the things. People bought this stuff to help them lose weight and get fit and that is something that is usually still present.

So now is the time to decide what to do with the exercise equipment, books,videos and other things that are hiding in the house. They are not doing anybody any good if they sit there unused, so it is important to find a way to use them. If it is not going to be used by yourself then pass it along to another who can find a use for it. Along the way you might find some benefits from it.

You can think of cardiovascular exercise as equivalent to legislation passed by Congress: you can hope for it to work, but it’s really a gigantic waste. Do you have any idea about how things were prior to the cardio-aerobics fad? There was a lot more outside activity in sport and games. People walked a lot more and rode bikes as part of normal routine: now they drive over for aerobic workouts at the club.

Now, let me tell you my reasoning when I say that cardio wastes time. 1. It’s a hated activity.

Who has ever looked at you smilling as they said, “I get to do some cardiovascular routines now?” Sure, some people enjoy running and that’s fine with me, but some people hate all of cardio with a passion.

2. Folks think that half an hour spent on a cardio machine is going to burn fat: they’re wrong.

3. That cardiovascular routines are necessary for good health is a myth. As long as you are active, and are eating healthy foods, you are going to be in good shape without any machines.

4. Cardio routines do little to help boost sports performance.

Mechanical cardio workouts don’t condition you for sports movements and serve to drain your energy rather than build it up. In fact, a reliance on cardio routines is going to set you up for higher injury risk.

5. Cardio is a bad use of your time. It’s inefficient and powerless, and most people do it because other people are doing it.

Just imagine what aliens from outer space would think if they saw the average cardio section of the gym: they’d think that earth had some serious issues.

A more realistic test is to see how folks read magazines, watch television, surf the Net and answer e-mail while they exercise.

I hope you’re tired of the aerobic-cardio equipment that you’ve been using at the gym, because I have something else for you to do. For a very long time, people have been dutifully tied to cardio equipment in spite of the fact that they haven’t been getting the results they’re looking for. We now know that interval training is best for fat loss: it’s interesting, quick, and it works. Many folks use exercise machines for their interval training making it expensive and hard to do, but I have some alternatives for you.

When you do intervals at home, you have to deal with problems such as the weather, so you’ll be stuck inside sometimes with nothing to do. Until now. The way to do your training is by using your body’s weight rather than any equipment.

This kind of exercise is free but it’s really good too. These exercises can be done in circuits that work your upper and lower body sections and burn fat fast.

To illustrate how this works, begin by doing squatting with your body’s weight.

Follow the squat by doing the push-up, the lunge, the stick-up, the step up, and planks. You should find this easy to understand. Just gauge your degree of conditioning and do five to fifty reps of these.

Once you rise to the next increment of exercise you’ll add a couple more movements to the original 6.

Begin the circuit with jump-jacks and then prison squats, closed-gripped push-ups, squatting splits,body mass rowing, single legged extending of the hips while lying, climbing mountains, and then stationary runs for 20 secs. Do the entire sequence three to five times through to build muscle and to rid yourself of flab.

For the most challenging method of body mass exercise, you’ll want to time each interval period. You’ll want to work for twenty secs and then hold the flexed position for ten secs.

Doing fitness workouts with only yourself as weight is an economical, quick, and powerful method to get rid of fatty composition without doing an cardio work. You can do this kind of exercise anywhere too, whether on the road or at home. These will get you to your target body composition with an inline tummy in no time. Here’s why this kind of exercise works so well: what you what you eat has more to do with losing weight than anything else.

In reality, just about any workout is going to get you good results if you have your diet inline. With the way the economy is these days, a lot of people can’t afford the money for personal trainers and gym memberships, so bodyweight exercises are a perfect solution.

This is why I’m giving you seven exercises to use as one or more circuits that will target your fat deposits and work them off. Here is the list of the seven routines for today:

1. The Jump Jack
2. Wye-Squatting
3. Spider pushups
4. Lunging reverses
5. Plank-2-pushup
6. Prison squats
7. Across-the-body climbers

All the routines on this list require about twelve reps each, but if you’re in good shape already, you’ll have to notch that up to fifteen.

Do the entire cycle of exercises over and over again until you have three or four cycles complete. Be sure to rest for a minute or less at the end of each circuit.

When you’re doing the “Y” squatting, make sure you get you hands in a good Y shape as you contract your shoulder blades. This makes sure that you get your back’s higher areas since there’s no way to row. The spider pushups require that the knees move all the way to your arm before sending your legs to start.

Right now we are going to go over the secrets for that fantastic less than 15 minutes exercise session. You may be skeptical that a person can be fit by working only a few minutes every day, but you will see that it can be vital in your will fat loss efforts. Like usual, you want to warm up with some basic exercises with your body’s weight. For example, you can do some squats putting your hands forward followed by push-ups.

If you’re just getting started, a good choice would be the wall squats or push-ups while kneeling. Get that mega set done with 10 reps on each account.

When the warm-ups are done you should be in good shape for the next set of routines. When you only have 10 minutes or so, to things that should never be left out are DB squats and presses.

The dumbbells help work your top half while the squats do the bottom.

As you get started, be sure to choose a dumbbell that is pretty light for you. Just be sure to get about 15 reps complete.

Once those are done, do some chest pressing according to the same philosophy.

A good thing about pairing your exercises together like this is that the same weights can usually accommodate both the squat and the press. After you go through the mega set one time move up to a harder weight and go through it again with it being much more challenging.

Make sure that your weights are heavy enough that you have to work to get eight reps done.

Go through this over and over again for a ten minute period and you’re done.

Those who stay within the framework outlined here by warming up and choosing effective weights will find that ten minutes is enough time to do great things. You will increase your metabolic rate, eliminate fatty tissue, and develop your muscular system.

You don’t have to do this mess of doing long, boring cardio workouts that don’t accomplish anything. In stead of the same old thing all the time, you’re going to do interval training. You’ll have better results in that intervals are best for improving body composition. There’s scientific evidence that backs this up too.

So how are intervals done and why are they so special? Intervals are doing bursts of intense exercise followed by a short period of easier exercise.

You can use exercise cycles or treadmills for your intervals so you can burn a lot of fat. When you’re done with your normal resistance exercises go ahead and get your intervals done.

This should provide for three complete exercise times every week.

Now that I’ve told you that, start your intervals with an easy warm-up period of a few minutes. When that time is complete work really hard for 45 seconds where you are added at a 90% level of exertion.

Follow that up with a recovery period of a minute and a half we should be done at a 30% rate.

It is important to have your resting rates the very easy so you’ll have the ability to do another an intense burst for your next interval. You need to do it this way for six total cycles.

Another way to do intervals will still require that warmup time, but includes an intense period of sixty seconds instead of forty five. Doing it this way will still require a minute and a half rest time at low intensity.

A general guide for your intensity level is that you have to be able to complete the interval time. If you can’t last that long, you need to ratchet it down just a little bit.

Another thing, always be sure that your recovery is that the same easy level of intensity Always finish at least six of these intervals and end up with a cooling period before you stop.