Walking up and down stairs is a great, healthy exercise that has a lot of positive impact on your body and your life. When you get to work in the morning, take the stairs instead of the elevator. If you have a few extra minutes to spare at home, walk up and down the stairs a few times. You can find stairs anywhere – use them to your advantage, and you’ll start to lose weight, feel healthy and get a new perspective on life.
I like working out on a treadmill. It is soft on my joints and easy for me to keep track of my heart rate and keep me in the zone. When I try to loose weight, I find different kinds of treadmill exercises help me keep them going. I share 2 tricks I use to vary my routine. I hope others share.
1. I record an entire one hour TV show with commercials and move that to my IPad or I’ll watch a regular TV on the treadmill. I do a nice walk during the show but when commercials are on, I rev it up to a run at about 80 percent of my max for all the commercials. I find this gives me a great workout.
2. I take some weights with me on the treadmill and I’ll do 25 bicep curls, 25 triceps extensions, 25 shoulder presses, 25 arm raises. I do this at every 10 minute area. So, I do it the first time at 10, then 20, 30, 40, and 50. 
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There are may ways other than stepping on a scale every week to measure your weight loss success. Often the scale gives you a number that may or may not be a true indicator of your weight loss success for the week. You may have gained muscle which is heavier than fat and thus the scale is higher than expected. There are also water retention issues and hormone issues.
I learned a long time ago that the scale is not the best way for me to measure my success. There are many other ways to measure success on your journey.
A Tape Measure – Yes, a tape measure is a great way to measure success. I will use it to take measurements of my neck, chest, stomach, hips, biceps, thigh and calf each week. This is a really great indication of my success that a typical scale result doesn’t show. I write these down each week and I watch the inches fly off.
A Camara – Taking a selfie every week is another great way to measure your success. If you look in the mirror each day, you often do not notice the changes that are happening to your body. But, if you take a weekly selfie, then you will be able to flip through those images and gain a more accurate understanding of just how far you have come.
Clothes – Most of us have our old clothes that we were once able to fit in laying around somewhere. If you outgrew something and now you are able to get into it again comfortably, you are headed in the right direction. Just last week, I wore my favorite pair of shorts again for the first time in a year and it felt great and while the scale didn’t show me a great deal of improvement that week, the shorts made me fell like a million bucks!
Activity Monitors – there are some things that I just could not do when I was so overweight and the more in shape I got the more comfortable I got as well. I remember once when I was in Los Angeles, I was walking every week up a sand dune. That dune was tall! The first week I was only able to do it 4 times. Then, then next week I got a bit better and faster. By the end of 2 months, in the same time frame, I was able to walk up the hill 14 times in one hour. However, you don’t need a sand dune in your back yard. Pick out a hiking train and time yourself. Or, take the stairs in your apartment building and see if your time improves. Come up with something creative that you enjoy and get out our stopwatch and watch yourself get in better shape each week.
Training Logs – Training logs are very important and if you keep up with them, they will be a great indicator of what you do each day. I often take a photo of my meals. I write down every physical fitness active and I keep track of every calorie. This really does tell me a great deal at the end of the week.
In the end, the scale is great but it is not the only way to keep track of how much weight you loose!
cc spacritic.com 2014
