Four Weeks to a Fitter You - Part 5: Your Results are in the Details

Now that you've started easing into your fitness program, it's time to give you a few more tips. These hints should push your weight loss results to the next level.

Sometimes you may get into a groove and your exercises begin to feel fairly easy to complete. Once this happens, you're going to want to increase the intensity of your workout routine to keep the results coming.

Too many people wonder why they have stopped seeing results from their exercise program. Most of the time, they have overlooked the exact reason why exercising worked so well for them in the first place.

When you add a new stimulus to your body, whether it be more weight, reps, or new exercises, you force your body to change and keep up with the new demand. This simply means that once your weights begin to feel a little light, you're going to want to increase the resistance. The same applies for your walks or cardiovascular work. You may want to increase the time of each session, or up your intensity while still keeping the length of your workout the same.

Here is a list of 5 great ways to challenge and shock your body into increasing your metabolic rate, toning and defining your muscles, and shrinking your waist line:

1. Compete most of your exercises standing:
You've probably been sitting most of the day and by getting up on your feet you will burn more calories and work far more muscle fiber while you workout.

2. Stick with multi-joint, compound exercises like presses and pulls: (explained in Part 3)
These exercises work more muscle groups, burn more calories, engage your core, and most of the movements resemble real world activities.

3. Add interval training into your workouts: (demonstrated in Part 4)
Short bursts of intensity will help you to take your workouts to the next level by burning more calories and elevating your metabolism.

4. To force your body to change, you need to give it a reason to:
This means that every time the weights, walks, or any of your exercises begin to feel less challenging, take them up a notch. Add a few more reps, increase the time, or add more weight.

5. Spend less time resting between sets and aim to complete more work in less time:
When you first started working out you probably didn't recover as quickly and your heart rate didn't come down as fast. Now that you are improving your fitness level, you will find that your body is in better shape and needs less time to recover between exercises. Take advantage of that and move more quickly through your fitness routine.

Hopefully this list gives you a better idea of how you can take your results to the next level and keep your weight loss coming!

In Part 6 of the program, I will walk you through exactly what to do when you hit a stumbling block on your road to losing weight and shaping up.