10 tips for being Summer ready (Tony Paladin – Biokineticist)

As a health professional; I have to engage this topic with all that painful common sense that has been drilled into me over the years and grapple with the underlying tone of whether my advice is going to be like giving a loaded gun to a 3 year old.

In a nutshell, the following tips I am going to offer need to have sufficient sustainable appeal to elicit behavioural change and not end up in the back of the fad-closet like the ab-blaster, thigh-master, crazink and Tae-Bo.

1.     Input vs output: Food is like petrol. Sure we have different octanes that burn at different rates in different engines; but the bottom line is that if you ain’t revving your engine, you ain’t burning the fuel and if the fuel ain’t burning, its getting stored on your butt and gut.

2.     Zero to Hero will result in injury. If you are sedentary; don’t try train like an Olympic Athlete in 1 week. You will get hurt.

3.     Unbalanced training will result in tears. Too much cardio, not enough strength & flexibility equals risk of injury.

4.     Gaining muscle and losing fat are about as different as Helen Zille and Julius Malema. Resistance exercise gains muscle (add functional for strength) and cardio exercise burns fat (and muscle depending on intensity, protein intake and rest). Choose your weapons carefully: Treadmill vs Dumb Bell

5.     Long slow steady state is not the long road to slimming freedom. You need to get the heart rate up regularly through moderated interval training to burn the bingo wings (ignore this if you are a cardiac patient or are on a beta blocker…).

6.     Yoyo’s are for children, not diet & exercise. Being an unhinged, cigarette sucking, binge drinking desk sitter in Winter and an Ironman in Summer is bad for your health. Keep moderate activity and lifestyle management going in the “off months” so you don’t have to double up to catch in the “on months”.

7.     Join a group or get a trainer. You tend to stick to appointments with other people. Training by yourself takes LOTS of motivation.

8.     Measure your improvements. Skinfolds and circumferences are great indices of whether what you are doing is working!

9.     Zombie apocolpyse needs to remain a movie. 8 hours of sleep per night is necessary to tackle any goal. Being tired is going to increase binge tendencies, non compliance and injury risk.

10.  Most animals in nature aren’t fat because they are either chasing their food or running away from being eaten. Try find activities that you enjoy but at the same time result in physical fitness. In human society, such activities are called “sport”.