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Habits to Improve Your Metabolism

Habits to Improve Your Metabolism

An efficient metabolism is a great way to speed up weight loss and prevent metabolic diseases from occurring. Your metabolism is how your body chemically reacts to everything that you do – from what you eat to how you move, and it also plays a large role in how your body decides to burn calories.

lifting weights

Improving your metabolism through changing small, simple habits one step at a time is a great way to get your body to burn fat more efficiently, and it can be done with little effort over time.

Don’t make the mistake that many do by diving right into all the habit changes at once and getting overwhelmed with too many lifestyle changes. Starting with nutrition. Eating more protein should cause you to feel full throughout the day and help you consume fewer carbs and calories.

It also will help you retain muscle – which burns even more calories throughout the day. Staying properly hydrated by making a goal of drinking one more bottle of water a day per week is a great way to slowly learn to drink more.

This will help you eat less, speed up your metabolism, and help your cells perform more properly. Lowering your stress levels, and trying to sleep more will be the next step once you have begun to eat more protein and drink more water.

Sleeping more often will help your body burn calories much more efficiently compared to those who are sleep deprived. Drinking caffeine more often is another great way to speed up metabolism, but if it begins to interfere with your sleep patterns, try to only drink your coffee or tea in the morning rather than in the afternoon or evening.

More sleep will also help regulate your body’s ability to burn sugars and stabilize hormones as well. By the time you’ve mastered these steps, you should begin to start feeling much better.

A great way to progress your metabolism even further is to lift heavy weights with proper form, and try some higher intensity training. There are many free and helpful workout videos online that help you properly do the exercises, so you can learn high intensity workouts such as HIIT.

If you still feel uncomfortable watching videos and relying on yourself to lift heavy weights, hire a trainer at a local gym to take you through a couple of workouts to learn the exercises so that you can perform them on your own.

Now that you have tweaked your lifestyle habits slowly over time so that you can use your metabolism to work for you rather than against you, weight should start to come off much easier and continue to improve the more that you practice healthier choices.

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Metabolism Workout

Metabolism Workout

treadmill

Just because your metabolism might not be so fast that you can eat everything in sight and not gain a pound, it doesn’t mean that you can’t improve your metabolism through exercise to work properly.

Through metabolic conditioning, you can increase your body’s ability to burn fat – not only through workouts – but your body will begin to burn fat over the course of the day when you aren’t doing anything.

The first step to any fitness program is to know where to start. You can either pay money to have your metabolism tested, or use the bronze method online to find a beginning point.

This assessment will let you know where your body is burning fuel at different heartrate zones that range from zone one being the easiest to five being the hardest. Typically, the body burns fat in the lower zones, while burning food, carbs and sugar at the hardest zones.

Think about how many times you’ve heard about people working as hard as they could in the gym and not losing a single pound. This is because those high zones such as four and five are burning zero fat cells as energy, and instead burning the food that they have eaten.

After their intense workout, these people go home and begin to eat all of the food that they burned off in their workout. Proper metabolic conditioning means you should spend time in all zones, while making sure that a majority of your workout is in lower fat burning zones.

An example would be to spend four minutes in zone two heartrate zones, while spending one minute in zone four or zone five with a higher intensity. Lifting weights is also important because the more muscle that you have, the more calories your body burns to maintain muscle throughout the day.

Lifting weights in repetition ranges of ten to fifteen is a great way to start, and there are tons of online videos on how to lift with proper form. Just make sure you lift with every body part over the course of the workout, and try to resistance train at least twice a week.

Nutrition will go a long way as well when it comes to working out to improve your metabolism – such as proper hydration levels, high fat and fiber foods, and eating enough calories.

If you’re improving your cardiovascular health, building muscle, and eating a little healthier than you did the day before, you metabolism will begin to improve over time and be more efficient at burning fat.

Metabolism and Weight Loss

Metabolism and Weight Loss

How fast or slow your metabolism is can either make weight loss an effortless breeze, or something that work against you. A fast metabolism means that your body is a fat burning machine when resting, and can typically be found in people who are already slimmer or younger.

Metabolism ages and slows down as you grow older, making weight loss more difficult. Luckily there are ways of improving your metabolism, and you can even train your metabolism to be more efficient through metabolic conditioning.

Before you attempt to work out harder to making progress even faster, you need to start by knowing where your heartrate is in each of the cardio zones. There are 5 zones total that range from zone one, which is the easiest level of exertion, to level five being the hardest when your heartrate is at its highest.

In zones one through three, you are burning fat as your fuel source, which mean that zones four and five are primarily burning only carbs and sugar. If you burn carbs and sugar for your workout, you won’t lose much, if any, fat – and you could end up feeling hungry by the end of it

This results in you eating back all of the calories you just burned. To find out what zones your heartrate rest in, use an online calculator for the bronze method for a fairly accurate guess.

You can always invest in an active metabolic assessment for a couple hundred dollars to get your exact heartrate zone numbers at a gym. Now that you have your heartrate zones, spend a majority of your cardio time in zones one through three to build your aerobic base, while spending short amounts of time in the higher zones.

This will help your body switch from burning carbs and sugars quicker, to spending more time in fat burning zones during your workouts and while resting. Nutrition is another great way to work on achieving a better metabolism as well.

Simple tricks such as making sure you’re not under eating, drinking plenty of water, and eating foods with plenty of iron, fiber and protein are all beneficial for metabolism. Cardio, strengthening exercises, and nutrition go hand and hand when it comes to fitness plans.

Each will complement the other when it comes to improving your metabolism. When your body’s metabolism improves, it will improve at burning fat, and even prevent metabolic diseases.

 

Metabolic Testing

Metabolic Testing

Knowing where your metabolism stands is a great place to start when trying to condition it to be faster and more efficient. Having your metabolism tested will allow you to know exactly how many calories you need to eat in order to fuel your body throughout the day, tell you where your body burns calories at specific heartrate zones, and calculate your VO2 max.

metabolic testing

Calorie intake is important because not eating enough will slow down your metabolism resulting in weight gain, and overeating will also result in weight gains as well. Where you’re burning calories in your workouts can be tested through an Active Metabolic Assessment, and will tell you out of the five heartrate zones, where your body burns fat most efficiently with specific numbers tailored to your body.

This way, you can eat a proper amount of food to fuel your workouts, and spend your workout time in your fat burning zones without any guessing when you step on the treadmill or other cardio equipment.

Some people eat way too few calories and over exercise at too high of an intensity – resulting in depleted energy levels, and more resistance to fat loss. Your VO2 max is the amount of oxygen that your body takes in when exercising, and is a good indicator of your level of cardiovascular endurance.

More cardio performed at lower zones will grow your aerobic base, which will result in a better VO2 max, and help train your metabolism to stay in fat burning zones much longer as you exercise.

Retesting your metabolism quarterly is recommended so that you can progress your training and continue to shape your metabolism into a fat burning machine inside and outside of the gym.

When you retest after training, your VO2 max should increase resulting in longer workouts. Your fat burning zones should be achievable for longer amounts of time, and your body will burn more fat throughout the day rather than just burning the carbs and sugars that you consume.

If you’re exercising on a budget, try to see if your insurance or health savings accounts will cover your assessments because it’s medical related. There are other methods to testing your metabolism through free online calculators that, although they’re not perfectly accurate, they do provide a much better educated guess on where to start your training.

Don’t rely on fad diets and extreme exercises to lose weight. Instead train your body to work more efficiently and burn fat for you. Metabolic testing takes all the guesswork out of the equation and gives you a strong foundation on which you can succeed.