Toning Up Body - Belly and Ass

Triton

I'm looking to tone up my body, particularly my belly and ass. I've been going to the gym a good while now and was doing plenty of weights but, while I'm getting bigger shoulders, I'm not losing weight like I wanted.

I've started doing more cardio now. I used to do ten minutes on the treadmill, ten minutes on the cross trainer and ten minutes on the stepper.

Now I've upped that to a half hour on the treadmill, fifteen minutes on the cross trainer and ten minutes on the stepper, with a few weights in between.

Is this the right way to be going about achieving what I want?

My half hour on the treadmill starts at me walking at level 5 and then I work my way up until I'm at about level 10 around 17.5 mins, then I do cooldown for minute 25 to 30. Is this effective?

I've also upped how much I go from 3 times a week to 4 to 5 and have started doing more of the hydro pool and sauna/ steam room. Is this correct?

ronbyrne2005

Triton wrote:

I'm looking to tone up my body, particularly my belly and ass. I've been going to the gym a good while now and was doing plenty of weights but, while I'm getting bigger shoulders, I'm not losing weight like I wanted.

I've started doing more cardio now. I used to do ten minutes on the treadmill, ten minutes on the cross trainer and ten minutes on the stepper.

Now I've upped that to a half hour on the treadmill, fifteen minutes on the cross trainer and ten minutes on the stepper, with a few weights in between.

Is this the right way to be going about achieving what I want?

My half hour on the treadmill starts at me walking at level 5 and then I work my way up until I'm at about level 10 around 17.5 mins, then I do cooldown for minute 25 to 30. Is this effective?

I've also upped how much I go from 3 times a week to 4 to 5 and have started doing more of the hydro pool and sauna/ steam room. Is this correct?

Cut back on calorie intake and/or up your cardio more. Toning your belly and ass can be accomplished by losing body fat(Less calories or more weight training and cardio on same calories), are you squatting ? Or doing core work for belly/core? I'd split cardio sessions from your weights sessions.

ZENER

Agreed, you've answered your own question here, you want to "lose" the belly and ass therefore you need to lose fat i.e. reduce body fat. Weights increase lean muscle but don't burn much fat per say.

Have you spoken to the instructor at your gym ? Do an assessment and get advice from the instructor who's job it is to judge what's best for you based on your performance.

When I started 3 and a half years ago I was almost 17 stones with a big belly and ass and extremely unfit (just quit a 60 a day smoke habit at the time) - the instructor made me do a 70%/30% cardio/weight programme for the first 6 months with a strict go/nogo diet which I was determined to stick to. Now I'm 13 and a half stones with about 12% b/f down from 21% - diet has played the biggest part in this. You are what you eat.

ZEN

Triton

Ah yeah I have cut out a lot of crap that I used to eat. For example, I've stopped eating take aways (used to eat maybe one a week) and now I eat 3 Weetabix for breakfast and then a large bio yoghurt as my mid morning snack.

I'm staying healthy with my lunch and dinner too.

cavanmaniac

I have the same sort of problem Triton. I was doing three 30 minute cardio sessions per week for about two months, keeping at below 75% heart rate, but it was doing absolutely NOTHING to shift body fat, in fact I'd say I was putting it back on. I was advised to shift to this sort of cardio because the previous stuff I was doing was in effect running off body fat ok but also alkot of muscle as well. Hard to strike a happy medium.

So now I'm doing intervals on a crosstrainer, 3/4 x per week, 1 minute slow pace low resistance followed by 1 minute flat out pace at high resistance. I manage about 8/9 'sets' so far having started this new regime last week. My diet is following all the rules so I'm hoping this can start to shift the belly and maintain the muscle I can already see developing on shoulders and arms. I am genuinely fit to keel over by the end of workout but recover fairly quickly afterwards so here's hoping.

FAO: The other respondents here - if I don't see results with this, you'd recommend lowering calories, do you basically mean eating less/smaller portions?

Zener: Awesome results there, well done. I can only dream!

siochain

ZENER wrote:

When I started 3 and a half years ago I was almost 17 stones with a big belly and ass and extremely unfit (just quit a 60 a day smoke habit at the time) - the instructor made me do a 70%/30% cardio/weight programme for the first 6 months with a strict go/nogo diet which I was determined to stick to. Now I'm 13 and a half stones with about 12% b/f down from 21% - diet has played the biggest part in this. You are what you eat.

ZEN

Well done Zen, these are the type of stories I like to hear, no yo-yo diet scam just committed long term lifestyle changes. Would you care to share with the boardsters here how these changes have effected your general well been and health?

ZENER

The health benefits are obvious as we all know - a lot of people don't realise that much of the body fat is around their internal organs and that this area is a major risk. For me I was just unhappy with having failed three times to stay of the fags each time giving in after up to 18 months off them. So I asked myself what could I do to make going back on the smokes less of an option.

IMO people fail because they don't think of what happens after they've kicked the habit say 4 or 5 months later. If their lifestyle hasn't changed much from the smoking days then it's easy for them to creep back in. So my plan was to make my lifestyle so drastically different that there was simply no room for the cigarettes any more and the very idea of smoking again would mean giving up everything I had achieved without them.

The weight loss for me was secondary at the time, at 60 a day and dreadful lifestyle - take-away, telly, no activity - I was a prime candidate for stroke/heart disease. Faced with that, the decision was easy .

I quit the fags on the day it became illegal to smoke in the workplace - I had quit cold turkey before so this part was easy - my plan was that by the August of that year I would start going to the gym and seek advice on better diet and improved fitness.

This was the biggest step, from childhood I was never really a sporty/competitive kind of person so walking into a gym filled with healthy toned people frightened the hell out of me - at least that's what I though it would be like.

I was wrong and the instructor - Scotty - was brilliant. He put me on a program that was easy knowing that I'd be able to up it myself without problems giving me more confidence each time I went. For the first 3 months I went 5 or 6 days a week for 2 hours each day. My diet was completely changed and I walked everywhere, cycled to work, and preached the faith. When the first stone went I was over the moon, I bought new clothes for the first time outside of Dunnes and was more determined than ever to lose another stone. Nowadays I go every second day and do 30/70 cardio/weights, I still walk as much as I can and go swimming and cycling with my daughter, and it's become so integrated into my lifestyle that everything is organised around gym as much as it is around work or sleep - food is no longer a battle, I eat well and am careful to include as much fresh fruit and veg and good fish (without batter ) like Tuna. I only eat whole-grain bread and I now take protein shakes and creatine as well. But importantly it's not unusual any more, it's as normal as it was eating a take-away or a breakfast roll and takes no longer to prepare.

I had completely quit the drink I no longer drank 5 or 6 .5 lt cokes every day, no more breakfast rolls or fry-ups, gave up coffee, white bread and anything with hydrogenated fats in it - which is quite a lot of things. I replaced these with - Water, green tea, lots of fruit (make sure there's plenty around), fish (Tuna, and other oily types), lean meat like chicken, lots of vegetables - especially greens like spinach instead of lettuce - rocket - broccoli - tomatoes , Benacol instead of butter and olive oil instead of vegetable oils or butter, some supplement vitamins and things like Omega 3, Acetyl L. Cearnatine (sp.) and a few other things to clear out my system like milk thistle etc.

The second stone and third stone were harder to lose as most here will already know and this is where diet is important. At this stage the ground rules for losing weight are set and you are already on the way to achieve this. Any drastic reductions in calorie intake must be reviewed and the extra training you are doing accounted for in your daily allowance. Losing weight in a calorie controlled diet without excercise is based on reducing intake while keeping output as it was, when you start training though your calorie requirements change and your body needs fuel to supply the new muscles and stronger heart you've developed. Now I don't mean start eating crap again but a couple of hundred extra "good" calories per day to account for increased metabolism will help - at least it did for me. My weight started to drop a little quicker with these adjustments. Eating to little puts you into starvation mode and the body "eats" muscle rather than stored fat, along with that I was now building lean muscle which is denser than fat therefore heavier so b/f measurements were the real way to show how much fat you are losing and to the OP - take this into account when you weigh yourself next time.

Sorry for droning on, but if I - a 17st - 60-a-day - couldn't walk up a stairs without a snack - can do it then it proves that you only need to make the decision, have the desire, get the advice and go for it. I hope some of what I waffled about makes sense or gives someone the confidence to improve their life in ways you wouldn't believe.

ZEN

Triton

Should I continue taking Pro X Nutriton X while I'm working on losing weight or what?

Does it cause any weight gain or what?

ZENER

I'm no expert on this but I doubt it's a good idea to take protein supplements while dieting to lose weight.

Protein is used to make muscle so unless you're doing weights - and lots of them - I think it'd be an idea to avoid them for a while and concentrate on a good balanced diet and plenty of walking, swiming and other cardio stuff.

Once you've lost some fat and feel well enough to progress to weights then the protein will be beneficial to you.

That's how I'd read it anyway.

ZEN

g'em

ZENER wrote:

I'm no expert on this but I doubt it's a good idea to take protein supplements while dieting to lose weight.

Protein is used to make muscle so unless you're doing weights - and lots of them - I think it'd be an idea to avoid them for a while and concentrate on a good balanced diet and plenty of walking, swiming and other cardio stuff.

Actually keeping your protein high is extremely beneficial when you're trying to lose weight. Protein tends to be more satiating and metabolically beneficial. It also tends to have a thermic effect - it encourages your body to work harder to burn calories, and protein as a food source is harder to break down than carbs so essentially your body works harder and your metabolism goes up just by increasing your protein intake (a gross oversimplification granted, but that's the gist of it).

When you start to create a calorie deficit in your diet your body needs to start to burn its own fuel to feed itself, which it does by using either fat or muscle. Naturally we want it to use the former, and so maintaining a moderate to high protein intake will help spare muscle tissue, allowing the fat to get burned.

Protein supplements are just a way to keep protein intake high - you can get your protein from wholefoods (lean meats, fish, lean dairy, nuts etc) which is preferential as wholefoods are more thermogenic and you can then supplement it with whey or casein protein.

For most people protein powders provide an easy, manageable way to keep protein levels high without having to constantly be cooking and preparing foods and they give you an easily absorbed convenient protein source after exercising.

And for the record, while cardio is a great tool to maitnain cardiovascular health, for fat loss resistance training is virtually always the foolproof way to speed the process up and get you looking great when the fat has gone. Being a metabolically active tissue, by increasing your muscle mas you'll increase your metabolism so that even at rest you'll burn more calories.

g'em

Triton wrote:

Should I continue taking Pro X Nutriton X while I'm working on losing weight or what?

Does it cause any weight gain or what?

It'll only cause weight gain if you're ingesting more calories than you use. If you maintain a calorie deficit alongside a good training program while using the whey it'll encourage fat loss.

davyjose

ZENER wrote:

I'm no expert on this but I doubt it's a good idea to take protein supplements while dieting to lose weight.

Protein is used to make muscle so unless you're doing weights - and lots of them - I think it'd be an idea to avoid them for a while and concentrate on a good balanced diet and plenty of walking, swiming and other cardio stuff.

Once you've lost some fat and feel well enough to progress to weights then the protein will be beneficial to you.

That's how I'd read it anyway.

ZEN

I would have to disagree entirely with this, I'm afraid Zener, because without protein you will not maintain muscle and therefore will effectively curb your bodies ability to burn fat i.e. your metabolism.

I'm not sure, but I suspect some people think that protein is more calorific than Carbs. This is not the case - they are both approx 4 kcals per gram. Carbs are much more readily stored as fat though.