Optimizing your workouts

September 12, 5:37 PMNutrition ExaminerCarol Bardelli

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A basic principle of effective exercise is to change your routine often. Embrace varied workouts or you risk hitting a plateau. Your body adapts to exercise rapidly – within weeks or months. Your workout routines, be they aerobic, anaerobic, or an optimal combination of both, will be less effective over time.

Serious bodybuilders and athletes have known about exercise adaption and embraced workout variation for years. Growth demands stimulus. Best results are achieved by varying your program at least every six weeks. Many vary their program as often as every workout.

This is achieved in several ways. In resistance training you can vary the amount of weight lifted, number of repetitions per set, number of sets, changing exercises often for each body part (like trading T-bar back rows for bent over back rows or doing chest flies and presses on an incline) and using training techniques such as HIT, Super Slow, X-Reps, switching from Nautilus or Bowflex to free weights.

A few ways to optimize aerobic workouts are changing intensity (going faster or slower), trying different machines and activities, doing wind sprints during walks or jogs, and taking your workouts outside instead of always doing it in a gym. Just walking uphill and downhill changes the impact of a walk. I rarely do the same aerobics exercise two days in a row. Not only does this prevent boredom and plateaus, cross training constantly stimulates your body to adapt, increasing aerobic conditioning, fat burning, and muscle gain.

I know only a handful of yoyo dieters who do any resistance exercise or weight training. And many dedicated to aerobics exercise only seem to never change their body composition. They may get smaller but remain soft.

You may build a small amount of muscle by cranking up the tension on that exercise bike, elliptical, or stepper, but you could be building optimal amounts of muscle by adding as little as one or two weight or resistance training sessions a week. This includes resistance exercises like push ups, pull ups, squats, calf raises, and isometrics. These exercises require little or no equipment or space.

Not only will resistance training build sleek and strong muscles, the more muscle you have the more fat you burn.  If you're a dieter, after reaching goal you’d be a leaner, more efficient fat burning machine and have an easier time keeping the fat off.

A common mistake of dieters – be they low fat, low carbohydrate, low calorie, - is to rely on the scale to measure results over more accurate methods like fat and lean mass ratios or body measurements.

Often people cut calorie or protein intake too drastically, or ignore weight lifting. They forgo adding muscle mass while losing indiscriminate body weight (fat and muscle.) This can cause impressive, yet deceptive numbers at your weigh ins.

And some ‘plateaus’ are not really plateaus, especially for resistance trainers. The body is changing. You may be losing inches and body fat, and gaining muscle, yet the scale numbers do not change. This is actually good news.

Definition: A plateau is a period of time during which your weight remains at the same level despite dieting and / or exercise.