Cardiowarriors - Running to Lose Weight Using Weight Training and Cardio

Running is one of the best (and easiest) ways to lose weight and keep your weight down through day to day practices. Relative to a lot of other exercises and workouts, running can be less intensive, but still provide great results in a relatively short amount of time. You wont drop down to five percent body fat overnight, however. Running does take persistence, determination, and several days of hating the activity before you fully start to experience the benefits the exercise has to offer.

In this chapter, we will discuss the three basic guidelines to help you get the most out of your running routine. These guidelines cover things like how to stay positive and willing to run even when it feels awful, how to form a habit to help your running routine become a part of your everyday, how to set a pace for your running to best maximize your efforts, and how to make the most of your progress toward weight lose with simple eating habits.

While the four sections in this chapter all work to a degree individually, they should be combined into your daily routine to really make the most of your time spent exercising.

One of the hardest parts of, well, anything is simply getting up and starting it. Especially when it comes to exercising and running, a wall can stand in your way to get out of bed and start your day with a run.

If you want to lose any amount of weight through running, you will have to push past any excuses to not run. For example, running in the morning is a great way to start any day and will do a heck of a lot more to wake you up than any size cup of coffee. The only challenge is physically getting up, getting prepared, and walking out that door without any help from coffee. This is where determination comes in. You have to want to go running and lose weight. The more you consider running (or any exercise) a chore, the harder it will be to start it, and the easier it will be to procrastinate.

I can tell you now, for any of you readers who are beginning to run routinely for the first time: There will be plenty of days (especially at the beginning) that you wont want to run. In those early days, youll find plenty of excuses not to run and to stay in bed, or to finish watching one more episode of a show.

Simply put, in those early days of running, you wont want to run when it comes time to start your exercise. This isnt a bad thing, its how humans are designed. What is important, however, is that you learn how to push past these feelings of Oh, Ill just do it later. This is easier than it sounds. All it takes is for you to form a habit.

Habits are relatively difficult to form, and incredibly easy to break (unless theyre bad habits, that is). For something like running every morning (or every night), the habit forming process is long and probably one of the most frustrating things you will ever go through.

On average, it takes an individual roughly twenty one days of doing something to form a habit. What that means is, for three weeks of your life, you will have to wake up and get up to run, despite your body telling you that it doesnt want to. These first three weeks are the hardest part of any habit, and will be the worst three weeks of running in your life.

However, once those three weeks are up and you ran every morning for your set amount of time or distance, it only gets easier. Once the habit is formed, you will find your body automatically pumping itself up each morning to go on a run. No longer will you feel sluggish to waking up, youll be up and ready to go.

But, you may be wondering, how can I force myself up when even my body doesnt want to get up and go? Theres a simple solution to this that can be the difference between making and breaking your running habit: Assign the task of waking you up to something else.

No, I dont mean hire one of your friends to come wake you up each and every morning to start your run. What I do mean is, simply, set an alarm to get you going in the morning. If youre like a large percent of people, youll find it all too easy to turn over, hit snooze and fall right back asleep.

This is where yet another habit comes in: Waking up with your alarm. Like running or other exercise, you need to train your body to wake up at a specific time. If your alarm goes off, and your first instinct is to turn it off and return to your warm blankets, you will not find waking up easy. If, however, you train yourself to get up on the first alarm, youll have a much easier time.

How can you become better at setting your wake up schedule? For starters, force yourself to wake up. Thats the first major step. If you can force your legs over the side of your bed as soon as that alarm goes off, youre in good shape. If that continues to be a problem, you may want to set your alarm clock or cell phone way on the other side of the room so youre forced to stand up and walk to it to turn it off.