Beach Workout – What do you want to lose weight or inches?
Beach Workout – Workout on the beach is one of the best ways to exercise. Sand provides resistance to the body which is more than what is provided by the treadmill. Resistant training is great for weight loss, fitness and toning. Digging the sand, which is one of the favorite childhood activity is basically is a great activity for muscle building.
Almost every issue of magazines on supermarket shelves are filled with front page headlines about diets. If these “diets” worked, why would these magazines be pushing a “new diet” every issue?
If you go on a diet, like everything else you go on, you eventually come off. What happens after you come off a diet? Diet is basically what you eat.
Many people are concerned about losing weight and want to lose it within a specified time. However, wasn’t it over time that the body gradually gained weight? Conversely, it will be over a period to lose the weight.
Time and again, I’m told ‘I only want to loose weight off my stomach.’ Unfortunately, the body doesn’t work like that. There’s no specific formula or exercise to get weight off a specific area of the body. When you loose weight, it is done proportionately.
We’re blessed with good weather, inclines and beaches. Many of us however, never use them. There are those who want to exercise but don’t want people to see them exercising, but the same people are seeing them getting fat!
Before talking about losing weight, one must first be aware of their body types. Basically, we fall into three body types; Ectomorph—basically skinny. They have a faster metabolism which burns up calories quickly. Mesomorph—they have a large bone structure and find it easy to gain and loose weight and then there’s the Endomorph—this body type is usually solid and generally soft. They are prone to gaining weight very easily.
A pound of fat contains 3500 calories. We gain weight simply because we are in a positive energy balance—consuming more calories that we are burning off. In essence, there’s no physical activity.
We lose or maintain weight by being in a negative energy balance—burning off more calories than we are consuming—in essence one is working out.
Time and again, I see many people coming to the track to walk. However, at the track there’s nothing to challenge you—no inclines as walking over a small hill—not Joe’s Hill or Great Mountain. You need something to increase the heart rate.
We underutilize one of our most effective exercising apparatus available to us—the beach. Walking in lose sand without shoes—which makes the toes grab and you get a deeper muscle contraction—is overlooked because it’s perceived as being “too hard” but it’s most effective. Walking on the hard sand is equitable to walking on the road or track—it doesn’t make you work like the loose sand does.
I recall during a loose sand workout, I met someone who was walking on the hard sand. I suggested she work the loose sand instead. A few weeks later, someone hailed me and I had this dumfounded look.
“You don’t remember me don’t you?” she asked, then immediately rescued me from the embarrassment. “It’s the girl from the beach! I did as you suggested.”
It was like l was seeing a new person. She had the discipline and determination to complete the task despite the challenges of speed walking and running in loose sand.
Walking or running in the water just above the knee is also effective.
Exercising—getting those impurities out the system through movement and sweating—makes you feel good. It keeps your body toned and helps retard the onset of aging.
Many worry about losing weight and not inches. Muscle weighs more than fat therefore don’t be discouraged if you are exercising gaining muscle and not losing weight. Concentrate on the inches you are losing because you’re burning off the fat!