Thursday, March 01, 2012

BIGGEST LOSER "15" -- WEEK EIGHT

With another week down, the Biggest Losers now have two months under their belt, and hopefully, fewer inches. They took measurements on the first night, and then again after one month, so it’s time for more measurements. I’m guessing they’ll really have some good numbers to report and I’ll have more on that for you next week.

As for retention, it’s looking very good, perhaps the best ever. Typically, we end up with about half the participants. You might recall we started with 32, and then dropped to 30 due to one moving, and a schedule conflict.

This week we had 22 people make the weigh-in and workout. So eight missed the weigh-in, and of those, I know at least three are still going strong. That means we might be down to 25 out of 32, which is still up over 75% participation!

The weekly workout was another barn-burner, and the same one I gave the 5:30 group. Now these people chew up and spit out tough workouts, so it’s quite an accomplishment for our Biggest Losers to be doing that hard a workout after only two months! Here’s what they did:

10 Dumbbell (DB) Deadlift-Curl-Presses, 15 Mountain-Climbers, and 20 Sit-ups, 10x.

This type of workout starts easily enough, but by the time you get halfway, you know you’re in trouble. In fact, you might wonder if you’ve got what it takes to finish. But by the time you get to round seven or eight, you’ll realize you only have a couple rounds left, so you just buckle down and press on. The trick is to just focus on one round at a time.

For accomplished athletes, the goal is to do the workout for time—as quickly as possible. Of course, if you’re just getting started, it would be much wiser to pace yourself until you know you can make it through.

Make sure you’ve eaten something before the workout. You’ll need some carbs to carry you through. Otherwise, you’ll burn through all the glycogen (carbs + water) in your muscles and all your free-fatty acids in the blood, and you’ll be left without any immediate energy to go on.

At that point, you’re burning fat for fuel, but you can’t produce it quickly enough to meet the demands of the workout (if you’re pushing hard). When that happens, you’re caught between energy systems, so you bonk out.

That’s when you start feeling sick to your stomach, light-headed and possibly even dizzy. If that happens, you need to take a little break and get something in you, like half a bottle of Gatorade. You’ll feel better within a few minutes. You’ll also probably never start a workout like that again without fueling up first!

This week’s winner was Angie Adams, who lost 2.3% of her body weight and 3.2 lbs. Second place went to Nancy Vono, who lost 1.8% and 3.4 lbs. Jodi Theirl was third, losing 1.7% and 2.6 lbs.

As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me through Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/tomdolanfitness !

No comments: