Some people think that weight lifting is going to add weight on, but it actually helps you to lose weight and burn calories at a faster rate than if you were just flabby and had a lot of body fat. However, it is important that you still do cardio as well when you are doing your workout regimen, to maintain the actual calorie burning piece of the workout. The thing with lifting weights is that the actual weight lifting itself doesn’t burn tons of calories in and of itself, like cardio activity does, but when you build muscle mass, you actually burn calories at a higher, faster rate when you are sitting still, and that’s where you get your bang for the buck from weightlifting.

I’ve always wanted sculpted, sinewy, muscular yet still feminine arms, and somehow that has eluded me most of my life, since my fat seems to automatically migrate to my upper arms and my thighs. But that’s what it’s like for most women. The most common places for fat to accumulate on a woman are the thighs, buttocks and the upper arms. It’s just a fact of life, and it’s something that most women have to fight tooth and nail, and can’t let up on during their lives, or else their upper arms will turn flabby again before they can say the words “arm workout hiatus”.

Jogging and running, I am convinced, really does melt off the pounds, and the fat. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found that regular jogging makes my excess calories go up in smoke, so to speak, and it seems like I can eat more without putting on excess weight. When I think about why this might be with jogging and running, more so than when I do my “regular” thing at the gym like getting on the elliptical machine and doing my weights workout, I think it’s because your body is under a real stressor and this accounts for the extra calorie burn and sweating.

One of the huge benefits that we don’t necessarily put to the face of exercise and fitness is the fact that it increases the quality of our blood circulation in our body. Sure, this benefit is lumped in with other benefits like the fact that it helps protect against heart disease and even stroke, both of which are linked to poor circulation and blood flow, but we don’t often think of it as a “standalone” benefit of exercise – particularly cardio exercise, like we should. Circulation is what gets your blood going to the different parts of your body, right down to your finger tips and extremities, which often will get cold if you have poor circulation.

Have you ever found, as so many other people who have made the healthy habit of working out part of their weekly routine, that your workout just doesn’t seem to be getting the same results or challenging you as much as it used to? That’s because with this amazing thing we call the human body that we were blessed with, it was made to reach new heights all the time, to be pushed to newer and better muscle definition, lung capacity, endurance and overall strength and stamina heights.

I’m amazed every time at how quickly I seem to lose muscle tone whenever I’m incapacitated and can’t work out for a few days or a week or so. I can’t work out now for five days due to a procedure I had done, and I already feel like my arm muscles have pretty much atrophied, with my lunch lady fat hanging down off of them again, even though I’ve actually seen the scale go down, probably because I have lost muscle mass, which weighs more than fat.

I’ve been doing the old as dirt Bodies in Motion series, and suddenly my DVR is capturing newer episodes of the Israeli studmuffin (some magazine called him this which I think is hilarious) doing his moves to get your heart pumping. Honestly, Bodies in Motion is a pretty easy workout. It’s only a half hour, not even because of the intro and the commercial breaks, and he seems to go easy on you. Now his other series, Total Body Sculpt is a little harder and I love it because it usually challenges me and shows me moves I’ve never done before that actually work pretty fast to sculpt away problem areas.