Weight loss and energy balance

 The energy balance equation refers to energy intake and energy output.

Energy In

Energy is available from the food and liquids we consume.

Energy is described in kilojoules or calories.

Energy Out

Energy out is the amount of energy we expend.

Energy required for maintenance at rest, physical activity, and for food digestion. 

Weight Loss

In order to lose weight you need to burn more calories than you consume. If you keep using more energy than you put in overtime you will lose weight. Some of the strategies you can apply to  lose weight is to exercise regularly and eat high quality food that is low in calories and high in nutrients.

Weight loss still needs to be controlled. Severe weight loss can lead to a declined metabolism, decreased bone mass, an inability to concentrate and reduced energy levels. 

The relationship between the amount of food we eat and the amount of energy we use determines our body weight and overall health.

Sizwe Gumede is a full time Personal trainer and a yoga teacher with over 15 years of experience. He works virtually with males and females over 50 who want to manage stress, stay fit as they age, have less or no musculoskeletal pain, have good quality sleep, improve the quality of their lives and feel great about themselves 

Proven Strategies for Weight Reduction

Last month I studied a continuing professional development course about proven strategies for weight reduction

One of the strategies that have consistently proven to be effective in losing weight and maintaining the loss is to self-weigh often and record your progress.

When self-weighing often and keeping record of your weight you reduce the overall effort associated with losing weight.

" WHAT GETS MEASURED GETS ACCOMPLISHED"

Studies investigating self-weighing as a weight control strategy have demonstrated that the more you weigh yourself the greater the weight loss, maintenance of the loss and prevention of weight gain.

Research also validate the reverse: the less frequently subjects weighed in, the lower their chance of success.

Presumably by the time they would weigh themselves, if ever, It was too late to undo the damage without a significant lifestyle change, hence they continued to gain weight.

Figure 1 captures the significant results of regular weighing.
More significant is the fact that as time went on the subject who consistently weighed themselves continued to reduce their body max index (BMI)

Subjects weighing multiple times a week reported that any time weight was not trending in a desired direction they would make a simple adjustment. Sometimes eating slightly less or an alteration in exercise would allow them to maintain an easy, steady course to the goal. Additionally, the fact that one has to weigh most days influenced people to think twice about consuming something that might give them an undesirable weigh in.



So weigh yourself often if you want to lose weight, maintain the loss and prevent weight gain.

Sizwe Gumede is a full time Personal trainer, yoga teacher and a health coach with over 15 years of experience. He works with males and females over 50 who want to manage stress, stay fit as they age, have less or no musculoskeletal pain, have good quality sleep, improve the quality of their lives and feel great about themselves 

How to keep fit during lockdown

This week I got a question bout how to keep fit during lockdown?

The first thing one needs to do in order to keep fit during lockdown is to set  fitness goals.

Write down your fitness goals, read them daily and work towards achieving them.

You can use house work as part of your strategy for keeping fit during lockdown. Clean your house and wash your own car for example.  Next thing you need to do is to find fitness programs that are in line with your goals that you can do at home during lockdown. You can have  look at my youtube channel for more exercise you can do at home.UCy2z6Te4Y8fhqiPujHbiqGw

You need to shop for food and drinks that are going to support your goal of keeping fit during lockdown. So stock up your house with healthy high quality foods and do not keep unhealthy food at home. 

Find a virtual fitness community that you can belong to, this will help support and keep you accountable with your fitness goals as you are not able to go to a gym or fitness clubs during lock down.

Take some time off to rest and recover between your house work and training.

Enjoy spending time with family and stay positive. This is my advice for keeping fit during lockdown.

Remember lockdown is only a season, it will pass 

Sizwe Gumede is a full time Personal trainer and a yoga teacher with over 15 years of experience. He works with males and females over 50 who want to manage stress, stay fit as they age, have less or no musculoskeletal pain, have good quality sleep, improve the quality of their lives and feel great about themselves 

Body transformation

Today I want to talk about body transformation and the approach that I follow when helping a client with a body transformation goal.

I started my career as certified Personal Trainer with basic nutrition education that I learned as part of my personal training qualification. So when ever I helped a client with body transformation  I would focus on training a client  and just talk with a client casually about making healthy food choice when we were busy training. 

I never really followed up if the client was making healthy eating choices on a regular basis or not. I had no structure of supporting clients  and keeping them accountable when I came to their eating habits. 

All I did was keeping clients accountable when it came to their training appointments and supported them while we were training.

When it came to assessments which is what I do to track  progress some clients were progressing towards their body transformation goals other were not.

So I knew this method of helping clients transform their bodies was not the best approach because of its success rate.

I started investigating why some clients are not getting the results.

What I discovered is that lack of support when it came to nutrition, stress , not enough accountability and lack of rest and recovery was what was lacking from my body transformation approach.

This is how I discovered the 100 % method.

What is a 100 % method?

A 100 %  method is an integrated system of 5 disciplines which are:

20 % what we put in our bodies ( food and drinks)

20 % movement ( physical activities and exercise)

20 % stress management 

20 % accountability and support 

20 % rest and recovery 

I will be explaining the 100 % method in more details in future blogs 
you can also visit my youtube channel UCy2z6Te4Y8fhqiPujHbiqGw

Sizwe Gumede is a full time Personal trainer and a yoga teacher with over 15 years of experience. He works with males and females over 50 who want to manage stress, stay fit as they age, have less or no musculoskeletal pain, have good quality sleep, improve the quality of their lives and feel great about themselves 

How to lose weight

Should I Stop Eating Carbohydrates?

I got a question from a client who wants to lose weight. The question was should I stop eating carbohydrates if I want to lose excess body fat? My answer is no. You don't have to stop eating carbohydrate in order to lose weight. If you want to lose weight and maintain your ideal body weight for the rest of your life you have to incorporate all the macro nutrients in your eating plan. Macro nutrients are carbohydrates, protein and heathy fats. The reason why we need carbohydrates in our eating plan is because carbohydrates provides our body with energy. So if you want to live a healthy active lifestyle you should be eating healthy carbohydrates to fuel your body so that you always have energy and feel great all the time. Sizwe Gumede is a full time Personal trainer and a yoga teacher with over 15 years of experience. He works with males and females over 50 who want to manage stress, stay fit as they age, have less or no musculoskeletal pain, have good quality sleep, improve the quality of their lives and feel great about themselves

Manage office stress

tone your shoulders

Tone your arms

Tone your stomach

Posture correction

Stress management

Stress management

Stress is a feeling of being too much under emotional or physical pressure.
Pressure turns into stress when you feel unable to cope. It can occur in specific situation or even over a period of time. Stress is inevitable. We all experience it. Our stressors are different, as are our techniques for dealing with it. Most people deal with stress without thinking of it. They may talk a problem out or go for a jog.

Stress is a part of life and can be a component of our success. If you are too complacent about a situation, it may never  drive you to change it. However, most can be detrimental to your health and quality of life.
" Stress is very often a root of many people's problems, whether they recognize it or not," according to Paul Chek.

If you look at the Figure below, you can see how stress can lead to not just a problem in one organ, but how it can manifest itself through the entire body.

Relaxation technique for stress management

> Lie down on your back with your legs slightly apart and your arm a few centimeters away from your body.
> Softly close your eyes.
> Focus your attention on your breathing.
> Take several deep breaths, calming your body with each breath.
> Breathe in deeply and then let your breath out fully, exhaling until you cannot exhale any more.
> Count your breaths and say the number of the breath mentally as you let it out ( this helps you stay in the moment)
> Perform this breathing technique until you feel calm and relaxed

Sizwe Gumede is a full time Personal Trainer and a yoga teacher with over 10 years of experience. He works with males and females over the age of 45 who want to manage stress levels, stay fit as they age, have less or no musculoskeletal pain, have good quality sleep, improve the quality of their lives and feel great about themselves.  

Herbalife Nutrition

How I got involved with Herbalife Nutrition

I was introduced by a friend and a colleague who is also a certified Personal Trainer. Amy Da Silva became a herbalife nutrition member to help her clients with nutrition after realizing that exercise alone is not enough for clients who want to lose weight and transform their bodies.

At the time when she introduced me I was using other nutrition programs. Nutrition programs that are South African and convenient.

What caught my attention is how the company started and operates.
 Herbalife was started by Mark Hughes who lost his mother at the age of 18 from diet pills. He started the company to assist people with safe nutritional programmes to help them avoid taking the unsafe route that his mother had taken.

When I started drinking herbalife formula1 shake my stomach felt better compared to when I was using other shakes. I am never bloated anymore and feel great overall

                       

Herbalife is all about quality.It started a year before I was born ( 1980) and they are one of the biggest nutrition companies in the world. They control the ingredients from where they are farmed, packaging  and transportation of the products from California to over 90 countries in the world.

I don't just feel great from using Herbalife nutritional products but I also get to live my purposewhich is to help people with nutrition, health, fitness and better quality of life. I am experiencing better results with clients and my personal health and fitness since I have incorporated Herbalife Nutrition to my Yoga and fitness programs.

 

Sizwe Gumede is a fulltime Personal Trainer and a yoga teacher with over 10 years of experience. He works with males and females over the age of 45 who want to  manage stress, stay fit as they age, have less or no musculoskeletal pain, have good quality sleep, improve the quality of their lives and feel great about themselves.  

office fitness

SIZWE GUMEDE STORY

As a runner at school I became slightly under weight and lost my self-confidence. That is when I decided to join the gym and build some muscles. After 2 year of gym I became a completely different person and I had more self-confidence. When I started college I automatically became 1 of the popular kids in college because of the self confidence that I had build. My plan was to get a degree in Marketing and business management.

I passed my first year and got my Diploma. When I was busy with my second year, I was approached to enter a Mr and Miss Damelin by the organizers of the contest. I did very well and made the top 5.That is just something that I would have never even considered doing when I was in high school. After the competition, I looked back to what had gotten me there and it was gym with a help of a personal trainer. I was inspired to become a personal trainer, so I stopped studying marketing and study Personal training course. My main goal was to help people who were in a similar position that I was in before I started exercising (low self-confidence) because of body image issues.

When I became a Personal Trainer, one of my colleagues (Tanse Leisher) who was in his late fifties and an experienced Personal Trainer, who became a friend and a mentor to me. “He told me I look great but my posture was terrible." Throughout my training career I focused mainly on training the front muscles which is what 1 sees when standing in front of the mirror. I neglected most of the back muscles that is how I ended up with a round spine. I started doing research on exercises for posture correction and discovered yoga.  I started practicing yoga mainly for my posture correction. After practicing yoga for few months I started noticing the difference; I was calm and had improved posture.

Exercise had helped me with self-confidence, it had also made me short tempered and aggressive which I did not like. After a few months of yoga that changed. I was not aggressive anymore, more tolerant and a better person. I decided to study a Yoga course and started teaching it.

This is how I became a Personal Trainer and a Yoga teacher.

Over the years' I have evolved into working  with male and female over the age of 45;  helping them with stress management, stay fit as they age, have less or no musculoskeletal pain, have good quality sleep, improve their quality of life and feel great about themselves.

My Current Goal

Is to impact 1000000 lives, get all your friends and family who might benefit from my knowledge to have a look at my youtube channel UCy2z6Te4Y8fhqiPujHbiqGw

Blog at - www.sizwepersonaltraining.blogspot.co.za

HYDRATION

HYDRATION

Why is it so important to stay hydrated?

Water is your body's principal chemical component and makes up about 60 percent of your body weight. Every system in your body depends on water.

Whether you’re a serious athlete or a recreational exerciser, it’s important to make sure you get the right amount of water before, during, and after exercise. Water regulates your body temperature and lubricates your joints. It also helps transport nutrients to give you energy and keep you healthy. If you’re not properly hydrated, your body can’t perform at its highest level. You may experience fatigue, muscle cramps, dizziness, or more serious symptoms.

A simple way to make sure you’re staying properly hydrated is to check your urine. If your urine is consistently colourless or light yellow, you are most likely staying well hydrated. Dark yellow urine is a sign of dehydration.

How much water do you need?

Every day you lose water through your breath, perspiration, urine and bowel movements. For your body to function properly, you must replenish its water supply by consuming beverages and foods that contain water.

I drink 3 % of my body weight in litres

My body weight is 65 KG

Calculation- 65 X 3% = 1.95 litres

Water needs also depend on many factors, including your health, how active you and where you live.



Sizwe Gumede is a full-time Personal Trainer and a yoga teacher with over 10 years of experience. He works with males and females over the age of 45 who want to manage stress levels, Stay  fit as they age, have less or no musculoskeletal pain, have good quality sleep, improve the quality of their lives and feel great about themselves.

LOWER BACK PAIN

LOWER BACK PAIN

If you have tight hamstring muscles (the hamstring is the muscle that run through the back of each thigh), you could wind up suffering from lower back pain.

Tight hamstrings reduce the mobility of your pelvis, which in turn may increase strain and pressure on your lower back. Your hamstring muscles will better support your back and pelvis while you move if the muscles are strong and flexible.

Investing a few seconds of your life every day strengthening and stretching your hamstring will save your from lower back pain or may help you relive lower back pain if you are already suffering from it.

How to perform: sit up as straight as you can on a stable chair, bending from your hips reach forward with your hands for your knees, shins or tones. Keep a straight back, point your feet up and relax your shoulders. Breathe through your nostrils while you hold the potion for 20 to 30 seconds.

Flexible hamstring muscles can benefit the overall health of your body.

Remember the more your practice the more you will enjoy the benefits.

Dedicated to you fitness,

Sizwe

www.sizwepersonaltraining.com/shop.

Sizwe Gumede is a full time Personal Trainer and a yoga teacher with over 10 years of experience. He works with males and females over the age of 45 who want to manage stress levels, stay fit as they age, have less or no musculoskeletal pain, have good quality sleep, improve the quality of their lives and feel great about themselves. 

Tone your arms

 TONE YOUR ARMS 

Do you have a busy schedule and cannot get to gym. Here is a tip of how to get and stay fit in the comfort of your home or hotel room.

Note: Please consult with your doctor before starting a new exercise program

RESISTANCE BAND -TRICEPS PULL DOWN

Purpose: Tone and strengthen triceps

How to perform: Start with elbows at a 90 degree angle, breathe in and as you breathe out pull the band and make your elbows straight. Return back to the starting position and repeat the movement 10 times 

EXERCISE TIPS

Drink water to stay hydrated while exercising

You can do less than 10 repetitions if you are not fit enough to do 10

You may progress to doing each exercise 2 to 3 times once you are fit enough

Exercise first thing in the morning if possible

Do not continue with an exercise if you feel pain

Enjoy and get fit                            

To purchase a complete resistance band fitness program go to-www.sizwepersonaltraining.com/shop

Sizwe Gumede is a full time Personal Trainer and a yoga teacher with over 10 years of experience. He works with males and females over the age of 45 who want to manage stress levels, stay fit as they age, have less or no musculoskeletal pain, have good quality sleep, improve the quality of their lives and feel great about themselves. 

stomach exercise