Best Workouts To Burn Fat For Women Over 40

(Marlize Venter is one of my clients and has been helping me write my blog posts. She is a forty plus lady on a health and fitness journey and understands the passion that I have for functional train-ing and enabling my clients to live full and fit lives well into their more mature years. Here is her take on the workouts that I design for calorie burning.)

When I started training with Steve one of the very first things I said to him was, “I DO NOT run. I love weights, but hate treadmills.” It is not that I am averse to cardio, but after being a competitive cyclist for many years, I honestly have had my fill of long and tedious cardio sessions.  Plus, my husband tells me that it looks as if I am strapped to a torture machine when I do attempt to do the shuffle that I call running.

And Steve said, “You know that ‘fat burning zone’ thing on the machines? That is absolute rubbish. We’ll do a couple of proper calorie burning sessions of not more than 30 minutes.”

I knew then that this bloke was my sort of personal trainer!

The fat burning zone, in my opinion, is for days when you do not want to exercise, you arrive at the gym and you have to make a decision, “Do I go home, or do I at least walk 20 minutes on the treadmill?” The fat burning zone is my zone out time, when I had a killer work out the day before, and I am getting ready for a whopper of a session the next day. But it is not something I do be-cause I particularly enjoy doing it.

Steve is a master when it comes to designing calorie burning sessions. They are short and pack a punch, and they make you walk out of the gym feeling like a sweaty million dollars!

This is what he regularly has me do:

High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)

It is 30 seconds full out and a minute or so to catch my breath. This torture session he ends off with the sledge. Yes, there is a bit of running involved, but pushing the sledge does turn my shuffle into something more.

30 minutes of this and I am ready to hit the floor! Which we do with a bit of relaxing exercises.
 
Tempo Training

Because I love weight training so much, Steve has incorporated 10 minute tabata sessions. Working at a high intensity short burst ensures that I can get to what I really enjoy doing. I know that I have something to look forward to, and give it my all for ten minutes.  What are ten minutes in the big-ger scheme of things, right?

Split training

There are days when I miss my cycling. Not many, but they do happen though. Those days I get on a spinning bike and go all out for five minutes and recover on the elliptical. Get off the elliptical when I have recovered and then get on the bike again, remembering my glory days of crossing the finish line.

I must admit that I do not absolutely love these sessions, but I do not hate them either. I know they are important and have a role to play in getting fat percentages down. I know that calories burnt are very important in this weight loss journey. I will rather burn more calories during exercise than eat too few calories. I ate too few calories once, had an intense training session and I thought I was at death’s door!

Later, when Steve developed his online training program he uploaded my training plans onto the Trainerize app (www.thrivefitnessonline.trainerize.com) and I could follow his guidance even on days where I would not be training with him. It was almost like he was in fact there while I was working out, and I could upload my session to the app immediately, and as soon as I was finished I completed the session and it was sent, with my feedback, to his email address. Just knowing that he was receiving notification that I was indeed keeping to the program was incentive enough.

After each training session my words, even though they may be a bit out of breath are, “Thank you Steve, I enjoyed the session.” It is the truth, though I may not have enjoyed it while it was hap-pening! calories have been torched, and my body feels better.

(Contact me for pricing information on my online training programs. You can also visit: www.thrivefitnessonline.trainerize.com and click the ‘learn more’ button under the title ‘How does online training work?’)

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