A Changing of Perspective

My perspective on working out has been changing quite a bit as of late.  I have officially had 10 personal training sessions.  With only 2 more sessions left I am kinda sad that I will not be working out with Beth one on one anymore.  I am optimistic that I will be able to continue working out at least 3 days a week and I might even do one of her boot camps that she offers.  What Beth has taught me over these past 5 weeks will stay with me forever.

At the beginning of this whole getting healthy journey of mine (back in August of 2009) I was pretty convinced that I should be going to the gym and just doing as much cardio as possible.  Everything I read said that I should be counting my calories coming in, then burn as many calories as possible at the gym to create a calorie deficit and subsequently loose weight.  While I did this for a couple of weeks and it seemed effective I quickly grew tired of it.

I was too focused on loosing the weight, on changing my external appearance and I eventually stopped making progress and started gaining weight back.  Since the beginning of January I have been going doing full body workouts with every visit to the gym.  My workouts have been dominated by body weight and free weight resistance exercises with a typical warm up of running on the treadmill for at least 20 minutes.  The goal here is to build muscle, strengthen my core, and get my body moving.

The changes I have seen in my body since January 3rd (my first workout of the new year) have been so inspiring and motivating.  I have begun to see definition where there wasn’t any before and the weight is coming off again!  One of the advantages of working out like this is that as I build more muscle my body will automatically burn more calories throughout the day.  The more muscle mass that I have the higher my Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) which is the amount of daily energy expended while at rest.  How cool is that.  Essentially the more muscle I have the more calories I burn while sitting on my but watching a movie.  Plus, after a full body resistance workout (which is what I have been doing) your BMR is elevated for the following couple of hours compared to a cardio workout where it is only elevated for the next 45 minutes or so.

All of this means that if I continue to do these types of workout and continue to build muscle that my body will continue to burn calories at a higher rate.  If I can just control what I am eating and focus on healthful whole foods most of the time the weight will keep coming off and I will continue on the path of being a healthy vegan.