Benefits of my Favorite Workouts
When I was in high school I was a size 00 with a fast metabolism and no need to workout. I had zero body fat and zero body muscle. My senior year in particular I ate out for lunch every single day – burgers, chicken tenders, fries, and gallons of sweet tea. Needless to say when my body started changing I was in for a rude awakening.
I will never call myself fat. There are days I look a little more bloated than others, but I’ve become pretty good at pinpointing why that might be. No, I’ve never been fat but I have been unhealthy. After my freshman year of college I weighed in at around 130. For a girl who’s 5’10” that’s actually considered a healthy weight – but it was all fat. You can read more about that journey here.
I did something stupid a few weeks ago. I weighed myself. The scale is something I really don’t believe in, but for awhile I had been feeling bad about my body. I weighed in at the highest I’ve ever been. (I’ll keep the number to myself for now.) I hated seeing that number, but it lit a fire under my behind to get back to my healthiest self.
I’m starting to fall back in love with fitness and healthy choices. My motto is to do the workouts I really love so that I don’t dread them. I wanted to share some of my current routines that give me great results.
High Intensity Interval Training
High intensity interval training, or HIIT, has been around for quite some time. Let’s clear one thing up, I get kind of nervous every time a HIIT workout comes up on my schedule. It’s a hard workout to complete, and I always finish feeling like I got my butt kicked. But, I still love these routines. They challenge me and not only test my body but my mindset as well. To me, mindset is the difference between a good workout and a bad workout.
We’ve all been there. We don’t feel like working out but we force ourselves to. Sometimes we get over that funk and sweat it out. Other times we keep that negative mindset, give half the effort, and definitely don’t feel accomplished afterwards. That’s all mindset, y’all. My new trick is when those negative thoughts start creeping in: “this is too hard,” “I can’t do this,” I ask myself “am I present?” Personally, the negative thoughts are loudest when I let my mind wander.
Another personal reason I love HIIT, besides all the benefits, is that you don’t need 40 minutes of HIIT. The routines I do from Tone It Up are anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes. Even after the 10 minute routines I’m still dripping sweat and you get all the gorgeous benefits.
Benefits of HIIT
According to Katrina and Karena from Tone It Up, you should only be doing HIIT 2-3 times per week. They also recommend doing strength, yoga, and plenty of stretching or foam rolling throughout the week as well. My favorite benefit of this type of workout is that it sends your metabolism through the roof. It’s called an after-burn effect. When you do bursts of high intensity you put your body into oxygen debt. Even after your workout is complete your body will be burning calories to restore your oxygen.
Another awesome benefit is that it boosts your endurance, and your muscles ability to use oxygen. The bursts of high intensity boost this more than a steady rate of endurance, like running. So, what does this mean? This will improve your athletic performance all around. I can totally vouch for this, any workout feels easier than a HIIT workout. That is credited to building my endurance.
There are many more benefits to HIIT workout like heart health and more scientific studies, but to me these are the most important. When traveling for work it’s easy for me to do body weight HIIT in my room. I’m still getting my sweat on, and I can do it right before I turn in for the night.
Fasted Running & Running in General
It’s no secret I love running. Last year I completed the Disney Princess Half Marathon and to this day it’s one of my proudest moments. My training for that race gave me a new appreciation for runners. I stuck to a very strict training schedule and diet and not to brag but I crushed it. I have never felt more strong, physically or mentally, than when I was prepping for that race.
I promised to myself afterwards that I wouldn’t stop running. But, a rest week turned into 2 and before I knew it I was back Illinois and living at one place during the week and another place on weekends. I didn’t keep running. Until recently that is. I reflected on all the workouts I’ve done in the past and realized that running gave me the best results. It’s a full body workout, it challenges me mentally, & there’s no limit to the success. Today my success might be running 3 miles, but in a couple weeks a success could be running 5. You are your best and only competition when running.
Running really helps with my mental health. It’s the only workout where I get completely out of my head. When I do a workout video from Tone It Up I’m still really focusing on the movements being done. Running feels like second nature and I usually find myself meditating or reflecting on my goals. If I have a crappy day I come home and hop on the treadmill and within 5 minutes I’m not mad or stressed anymore. Even if I didn’t get amazing physical results from running, I’d still do it for the mental health benefits.
Benefits of Running
Not to repeat myself from the above paragraph, but studies have shown that running is a better antidepressant than any pill out there. It also boosts mood, quality of sleep, and concentration. It turns out that the after-burn we talked about during HIIT is still present in running. Basically it happens anytime you’re giving 70% effort. For runner’s that’s more than a light jog, and less than your marathon pace.
Running actually makes your bones stronger. I think it’s a common misconception that runners are wearing and tearing their bones and muscles, knees in particular. During any workout, strength, HIIT, barre, even yoga, you’re tearing apart your muscles. They repair themselves and that’s how we get stronger. The same goes for our bones and cartilage when we run.
Running is a total body workout. Our legs house our biggest muscles and when we run we work all of them: the inner and outer thigh, the glutes, the hamstrings, the calves. We also work our core. Throughout my runs I check in with my body to make sure I have good form. Bad form leads to injuries and we don’t want that. One area in particular I always keep in mind is my core. I want to be sucked in and kind of flexing my core so that I really feel the burn. Even without a small flex, they’re working hard to keep the spine stable and the swinging motion of our arms and legs. Just like the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, our core is the powerhouse of a run.
What is Fasted Running?
This is something I’ve newly incorporated into my routine. During a run we are most often burning carbs. Carbs are stored in your liver and your muscles. I’ll give you 1 guess to which one runners burn. (Answer: muscles.) During my half marathon training, especially during the weeks with longer runs and close to the actual race, I was eating carbs like crazy. I needed the energy to get through those 8, 10, 12 mile runs.
Now that I don’t have a race in the books, I’m focusing more on fat loss. That’s where fasting comes into play. I only do fasted runs on the weekend. I wake up first thing Saturday and Sunday and run for 30 minutes. That’s about all I can handle since I’m slowly introducing this concept to my body. There’s a lot of debate about if this method has metabolic effects, and most of the studies are too scientific for me to understand.
The studies I could understand basically say that your body is burning more stored fat during these runs than the stored carbs. This is because the amount of carbs we have stored is finite. Where on the other hand we have plenty of fat to burn, or at least I know I do. Even without these scientific studies fasted runs fit into my weekends better. I know I’m getting a workout in because it’s the first thing I do when I get up, besides brushing my teeth.
Scientific evidence or not, running in general is a great workout and has tons of mental health benefits as well.
So, these are the workouts that I’ve been loving and seeing results from recently. What workouts are you currently loving? I’m always looking to try something new.
