Body Beautiful
Maintaining a healthy body ensures you can enjoy a great quality of life. Iris Rossner expert personal trainer gives us her tips on how to attain and keep a great figure
Are you happy with yourself? Do you jump energetically out of bed in the morning? Happy with what you see reflecting back in the mirror? Do you consider your bathroom scales to be your friend or foe? Are you mentally and physically as fit as you used to be?
Time to change something! Don’t you think?
After all, your body is your best investment property! Accept the challenge and invest in yourself. Long-term, for your whole life. However, the decision to change something ultimately has to be made by each person individually. This is the only way to change old, and unhealthy eating and living habits permanently and successfully.
What is the secret of success?
The secret of a beautiful, healthy, slim and dynamic body is …. no witchcraft. The formula to success is: keenness to change, mixed
with passion and purposefulness, consistency and motivation. The willingness to do something, and a lot of discipline: in other words no pain, no gain. If you want to be as fit as a fiddle, and enjoy a healthy and beautiful body, you will have to exercise daily – do you brush your teeth only once a week?
Here are my top 10 tips, to get your body into shape:
1. Nobody is perfect!
Even well-paid top models will have answers if you ask them to name their problem areas, or what they don’t like about their body, and they will complain about one flaw or the other.
Look at your body and write down the parts that you like, and those, which are your personal no-go areas. But don’t be too harsh on yourself, rather leave that to a professional. Your trainer will see the whole picture, which proportions don’t fit well with the others, and he or she will tell you what is possible, recommended, and what is not necessary at all. For example, there is no way to decrease the size of a broad pelvis through a work-out; however, the proportion shoulders/waist/hip can be optimized. Reduction of body fat, targeted strength training for the shoulders and molding of the waist and the abdominals can change the body’s symmetry.
The female body seems very attractive, harmonic and lovely to the human eye if the waist-hip-ratio is about 0.7. In order to calculate your personal ratio, divide your waist circumference by your hip circumference. For men, just deduct the belly circumference from the breast circumference. The result is acceptable if it is 10 or higher.
2. Move your body! Everyday…
Train your stamina and build up reserves to get your metabolism going. Burn fat and strengthen your most important muscle, the heart. Buy yourself a pulse rate calculator today and run, walk, step at least 30 minutes a day at your optimal exercise pulse rate. This depends on your age and will be explained in the instructions of the watch. Whatever you do – the more the better.
3. Strength training, nothing goes without resistance training
Strength training is the best way to challenge your body in a healthy manner. Specifically target the big core muscles (your middle), back, trunk, stomach and bottom, which are weakened by a wrong posture or physical inactivity. Three to four times a week, under professional supervision, would be a good beginning.
After the strain we get to the pleasure. Fine tune your small muscles daily. Training tubes with handles, ideally in two different intensities, a medicine ball, light boxing gloves and small dumbbells of one to three kilos are the perfect training tools. With those, you will be able to beautifully elaborate, form and tighten your shoulder and arm muscles.
4. Powerfood
Whenever possible, eat fish because of the omega 3 fatty acids, and lots of new vitamins, which are contained in tomatoes, black olives and soy. Also help yourself to nuts and dried fruit. No sugar! No white flour. No baked or fried stuff. No animal fats. If you bear up, you will not only seem 10 years younger in just 28 days, but you will also lose all those pounds, which have accompanied you loyally over the last few years.
5. Lose weight while you are sleeping
Skip meals after 5 pm twice a week. If you don’t eat in the evening, this will produce a light hypoglycemia, which in turn stimulates the creation of the hormones somatropin and melantonin. They facilitate the regeneration of the body cells, stimulate the muscle growth and reduce fat storage. The body functions are slowed down while you are sleeping, and so is the aging process.
6. Get off that sweetener
Sweetener gets the metabolism going, as the body is expecting an intake of calories. Since sweetener does not contain any calories, the body is deceived. The brain demands real sugar, carbohydrates or similar. The danger consists in giving in to this craving and eating superfluous calories. Result: at first avoided 100 calories, then rolled in 400 additional ones. Moreover, sweeteners are used to feed up animals, especially pigs – to multiply their appetite…
7. Quit smoking
Smoking increases the risk to get osteoporosis. Not only do cigarettes weaken your lung and heart, they also decrease your bone’s density. After appealing to your health, I will now appeal to your vanity: especially with women, I generally don’t even have to ask if a client smokes: the white of their eyes, the colour and texture of the skin, their wrinkles, especially around the mouth, the depth of their pores and the colour of the tongue speak for themselves.
8. Head up, breast out – show some backbone and keep yourself up
Small change with big effect. Stand and sit upright. Show your size. Breast out, shoulder back/down, slightly lower your chin and draw the cervical spine upwards. Tighten your belly and bottom. Body language shows confidence. The body seems slim, tall and graceful.
9. Relax
All people suffer from shortened muscles. This results in tensions, headaches and reduced mobility. Here, yoga or pilates can help. Dynamic stretching and movement training under professional supervision does not only improve your mobility and coordination, but also trains your brain. The more complex the movement, the more brain areas are activated and supplied with blood. Get into the habit of systematically stretching your muscles each day for 10 minutes.
10. Self-control. Confidence is good, a diary is better
Feeling and fact are seldom the same. Honest control is needed in order to keep up the training, control your alimentation and meet your goals. After defining your analysis, your training programme and your ideal weight – preferable with professional help – writing is the best help. Without control, you will get nowhere. If you rely solely on your feelings, you have already lost. Only a complete bookkeeping will help you advance with your goal. Thus, small drawbacks can be explained and won’t discourage you. Progress matches your notes. This method will help and motivate you, and it’s transparent. Only those who don’t want to succeed rely on their feelings, and thus always have a good excuse for their failure.
Good luck!
