The Virgin Diet (20 page)

I understand that exercise of any kind might seem overwhelming at this moment. I get that. But we’ll start slowly. If you start from where you are and commit to self-care and self-improvement, I really believe that you will get hooked on exercise. You will say, “What was I thinking to even
try
to live without this wonderful activity?” You’ll turn into one of those people who, like me, gets a little crabby when they don’t exercise. You’ll discover this whole new world of feeling energized and capable and fit.

A pedometer is a great gadget that has the potential to motivate you to increase your daily activity by counting the steps you take throughout the day. A pedometer makes it easy for you to work up to your goal of 1 hour of moving each day. The great news here is that everything counts, so your resistance training, your burst training and your daily movement
all contribute to your daily hour of movement. Some days you may just get in this hour through your daily life, by taking the stairs, parking farther away, running errands on foot or taking a nice, long walk. Other days you may do so much exercise that you don’t even need to take the stairs or park farther away (but I encourage you to do so anyway, as it is a habit that will serve you well).

I am assuming that your average walking pace is about 3 mph which means that 10 minutes of walking equals 1,000 steps. Since I want you to do 60 minutes of total movement daily, that means you need to accumulate 6,000 steps. Again, everything counts!

Remember to track your steps and your walking time in your daily journal because what you measure, you can improve.

Note:
The steps you collect on your pedometer count into your daily hour of movement but are not part of your daily exercise program. I still want you to do burst-style training and then add some resistance training. Your daily exercise counts toward your daily hour of movement, but you can’t
just
walk. You also have to burst and do resistance! But even if you’re exercising a few times a week, I also want you to move more—and the pedometer is a great way to make sure you do it. I confess, my pedometer is the only reason I ever park farther away than I need to. I can’t wait for you to get motivated, too!

I want you to move more, but that doesn’t really count as exercise in my book. In order for something to be exercise, you have to get hot and sweaty, and it should hurt a little bit. Otherwise, you will have enormous difficulty staying at your ideal weight. The two types of exercise that will work best for keeping you fit and slim are burst-style training and resistance training.

Burst exercise has you working out in short intense bursts of 30 to 60 seconds coupled with 1 to 2 minutes of active recovery, or moving at a low intensity that allows you to catch your breath and lower your heart rate. Two easy examples of this are sprinting to burst and then walking to recover, and running up stairs to burst and then walking down them to recover. You’ll do this for a total of 4 to 8 total minutes of high-intensity bursts. This will take you 20 to 30 minutes, and if you are still upright at that point, you are
not
doing this hard enough.

With bursting, you do raise stress hormones, but you raise anabolic-building hormones alongside them, counteracting the negative effects of the stress hormones. The short bursts train your body how to handle stress and recover. The repeated intense bursts raise lactic acid, which in turn raises growth hormones and supports fat burning.
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The research is clear that the more intense the exercise, the bigger metabolic cost after you are done, which causes you to burn more calories after exercise, especially calories from fat. In fact, researchers Pacheco-Sánchez and Grunwald showed more pronounced fat loss in rats that exercised at a high intensity as compared with rats that exercised at a low intensity despite both groups performing an equivalent amount of work.
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So, how do you get started? Grab your cross trainers or running shoes and let’s go. Warm up for a few minutes and then go all out with your workout of choice for 30 to 60 seconds. If you can go past 60 seconds, you aren’t doing it hard enough. Take twice as much time to recover (1 minute of recovery if you went all out for 30 seconds, or 2 minutes of recovery if you went for 1 minute) by doing a lower intensity version of the same move or walking around. Then, repeat until you accumulate between 4 and 8 minutes of high-intensity interval bursts. If you can get to 8 minutes total, I am impressed, and if you can get past that, you probably aren’t doing it hard enough. Intensity is
everything
when it comes to burst-style training.

The best way to monitor your exertion here is not by using a heart rate monitor because you will be done before the device registers how high your heart rate is. Instead, pay attention to your body. You should feel your lungs and thighs burning, and you should literally feel like you have to stop. Do this every other day and watch yourself get leaner, stronger and more energetic practically overnight!

My top ways to burst are:

• Run up the stairs.
  
• Sprint or run.
  
• Bike.
  
• Rollerblade like the Olympic speed skaters.
  
• Swim the butterfly stroke in the pool.
  
• Crank up the StairMaster.
  
• Jump rope.
  

Putting on muscle mass is the most amazing thing that you can do for your metabolism. It holds everything in tighter, making you look firmer and leaner. And muscle requires more energy to exist on your body, so it raises your metabolic rate all day long. Resistance training can help improve insulin sensitivity, which aids with fat burning as well.

Sometimes I feel like I should put blinders on when I go to the gym because I see people doing the craziest things. Some are just plain ineffective and inefficient, and others are downright dangerous. I have created a basic video of the most common exercises and how to do them correctly that you can view at www.thevirgindiet.com/resistance.

I have divided the body into four functional groups: upper body pushing (chest, shoulders and triceps), upper body pulling (latissumus dorsi, upper back and biceps), hips and thighs and core/trunk.

Below are my core principles for getting the most from every workout. Just to clarify some of the common gym lingo, a set is when you repeat an exercise consistently for a certain amount of repetitions, or reps. For example, if I have you lift a weight once, that is 1 repetition. If I have you lift it twice, that is 2 repetitions. I might give you a set of 8 repetitions, ask you to recover for 60 seconds and then ask you to do another set of 8 reps. The principles below should help you design your own workouts, showing you how to get the most from each set, how to vary your sets and how to take breaks between your sets.

• Lift the heaviest weight you can safely handle in good form.
  
• Work between 8 and 12 repetitions per set. If you can’t get to 8, lighten your load. If you get to 12 and feel like you could do another, add some additional weight.
  

If you are just starting, begin with 1 set of 8 to 12 reps of 2 to 3 exercises from each functional group for the first week and then increase to 2 sets.

• You can split your workouts up so you do two functional groups one day and two functional groups the next. It should feel easy to medium to start. It is always better to start slow and see how your body feels the next day. Progress to 2 sets and then begin increasing the resistance (the amount of weight lifted).
  
• Focus on free-weight and cable-style exercises rather than machines.
  
• Create a progressively more unstable environment. Basically, you want to have to work harder and harder to have to keep
  your balance, which means that you will be using more of your core muscles. (Your core muscles are your abdominal muscles and the muscles in your lower back.) For example, you can start by sitting, which requires the least effort from you to stay balanced. Then, do the same exercise standing up. Now you have to work a bit harder to keep standing while you complete the exercise. Next, you could sit on a big exercise ball. The ball will roll around a little, and you’ll have to work hard to keep it stable as you exercise—and that work will involve your core muscles, which is great! Finally, try the same exercise standing on a BOSU ball, which is a ball cut in half with a flat side that rests on the floor and a round side that you stand on. Standing on a BOSU ball means that your core muscles will be working even harder, which will increase the value of your workout, build more muscle, boost your metabolism and greatly speed your weight loss.
  
• Give yourself 60 seconds to recover in between sets. You don’t want to allow your muscles to fully recover between sets, you want to keep them working hard throughout the whole exercise session. But you do need short breaks so you can push yourself as hard as possible when you are doing the sets.
  
• If you’re brand new to exercise, start with 1 set the first week, but after that always do multiple sets. That way, you will recruit more muscle fibers for better hypertrophy (muscle mass development). If you do just a single set, you don’t involve as much of the muscle as when you repeat a set.
  
• Change things ups. Don’t let your workout become routine:
  
  • – Add new exercises at least every month.
    
  • – Superset: Alternate between two exercises of opposing muscle groups. For example, you might alternate between push-ups and pull-ups.
    
  • – Every few weeks, rotate in an endurance day, when you are working with less intensity but for a longer time. For example, lighten your load by 10 to 20 percent, but instead of doing 8 to 12 reps, do 2 sets of 15 to 25 reps for each exercise.
    
  • – Every few weeks, rotate in a super-strength day. For example, increase your load by 10 to 20 percent and do 4 to 6 sets of 3 to 6 reps for each exercise.
    
  • – Add some power exercises, such as burpees, medicine ball throws, kettle bell, squat thrusts and Turkish get-ups (see www.thevirgindiet.com/resistance for instructions).
    
• Your workout should never get easier. You can continue to up the intensity by progressing into a more unstable environment where you have to work harder to keep your balance, by increasing the weight and by adding in some power/plyometric training.
  
• Hit each functional group of muscles (the four groups I identified earlier) at least 2 times per week and ideally 3 times per week with 48 hours of rest in between.
  
• If you feel yourself stagnating or just have trouble getting started, hire a trainer to check your form and uplevel your workout. This is a great way to learn new exercises and get a push.
  
• Listen to your body. If you are sore to the touch or at a joint site, you have overdone it and need to back off and rest to recover. Try soaking in 1 or 2 cups of Epsom salts and warm water for 20 to 30 minutes.
  

DON’T TELL ME YOU DON’T HAVE TIME!

If you absolutely don’t have time to exercise, guess what? You still do! You can click on www.thevirgindiet.com/4x4 and get my free 4x4 Workout, which takes at most 15 minutes—even including some stretching—and which you only have to do 3 times per week. You can do it at home, so no travel time to the gym or park, and it requires very little equipment.

I call this workout “fast, fun and done in 15 minutes or less,” although I will admit the fun is somewhat debatable. It includes burst training that uses your hips and thighs, resistance training for the four functional groups and a bit of stretching. You have time for this. If not, then make time. I won’t take no for an answer, and now you have
no
excuses! You can thank me later.

Once you’ve got a good workout plan going, you need to change it up a little bit every 3 months or so. It is easy to get into a workout rut, but you need to continuously challenge yourself. Otherwise, your body gets used to what you’re doing, and you don’t get the same impact.

There are all kinds of fun ways to create new workouts. Consider cross-fit training or kettle bell workouts. Download workout ideas from online, take a new fitness class or hire a trainer. The best use of a trainer is to have him or her give you a new workout either once a week or once a month. They can kick your butt and show you some new exercises.

I travel all the time, and I use that as an opportunity to mix up my workouts. I try to take advantage of a great new place to hike, some unexpected place I can rollerblade or a gym that I’ve never been to before. You can find your own way of changing things up that fits into your life.

The one thing that you shouldn’t do is get stuck in a rut. If you continue to do the same things, you will continue to get the same results. I look at aging as a big snowball going downhill. If you want to fight the momentum, you have to build some countermomentum—and you can’t do that by sticking with the same thing.

Diets are like dating, but maintenance is like marriage. Each cycle requires different habits because the behaviors that got you thin are not the same as the behaviors that keep you thin. And the rewards of dieting—watching the numbers on that scale go down or buying yourself a bunch of new outfits—are not the same as the rewards of maintenance. So, make sure you find ways to stay committed to your new habits, including the rewards we talked about in the last chapter.

Here’s the most important habit to maintain: your weekly weigh-in. This is one that I personally had to learn the hard way. I used to own a gym, and for some reason, I thought that exempted me from my weekly appointment with a scale. To show my customers the results that they could expect, I wore spandex every day. Then, after a couple of scale-free months, I had to put on my jeans. Oops! I thought,
Did these just come out of the dryer?
Well, guess what? Every pair of jeans I owned felt like they had just come out of the dryer because I had unknowingly gained weight. So now, every week, I get on that scale.