Here are their top 10 game-changing tips and proven to keep your body safe while burning fat and building muscle.
1. Trade Steady-State Cardio for Interval Training
Fifteen to 20 minutes of interval training performed like this can burn as many calories as an hour of traditional, steady-state cardio. And unlike the slow stuff, intervals can keep your body burning long after the workout ends.
2. Brace Your Core Before Every Exercise
Your core is much more than a six-pack of muscles hiding beneath your gut — it’s a system of muscles that wraps around your entire torso, stabilizing your body, protecting your spine from injury and keeping you upright. Fire these muscles before every exercise to keep your back healthy, steady your balance and maintain a rigid body position.
3. Trade Machine Exercises for Free Weights
Trade your machine exercises for dumbbells, barbells and medicine balls to build strength in ways more specific to your body, while also working all the smaller stabilizing muscles that machines miss.
4. Tuck Your Shoulder Blades Down and Back
By sliding your shoulder blades down and back before an exercise — like you’re tucking them into your back pockets — can improve your results and protect from injury. It helps activate your lats for pulling exercises, work your pecs more completely in pushing exercises, keeps your chest up during a squat and can reduce painful impingement on your rotator cuff during biceps curls.
5. Increase Your Range of Motion
Add more work to each rep and increase the efficiency of your workout by increasing the range of motion — the distance the main motion of the exercise travels to complete the rep. Get more from each move and your body will thank you.
6. Use Multiple Joints With Every Move
Single-joint exercises like biceps curls and triceps extensions will build your muscles, but slowly. Trade these inefficient moves for exercises that work multiple muscles and joints: Squats will build your legs and back, a bent-over row will build your biceps and your back, and a narrow-grip bench press will train your triceps while it sculpts your chest. Think compound.
7. Do Push-Ups
Simple yet effective.Maintain a rigid body line from the top of your head to your heels throughout the push. With this in mind, you won’t sag your hips, hump your back, or bubble up your butt. Keep your elbows tucked in towards your sides as you lower your body, and push back up, strong as steel from head to heels.
8. Run After Your Lifts
If you perform your strength training before your cardio work, you’ll burn more fat while you pound the pavement. In a Japanese study, men who did the workout in this order burned twice as much fat as those who didn’t lift at all.
9. Don’t Stretch; Warm-Up
Static stretching done just before activity can reduce your power output and increase your risk of certain injuries. Instead, perform an active warmup that gets your body ready for exercise with exercise, increasing your heart rate, firing up your nervous system and getting your muscles used to moving
10. Reduce Soreness With Active Recovery
Bed rest is not the best prescription for sore muscles — you’ll actually reduce pain with a little activity. Metabolites in your sore areas that cause pain are dispersed and diffused by activity, and blood flow is increased to the muscle tissue, speeding recovery by up to 40 percent.
