1) Do full body workouts
Workouts should focus on compound exercises that work as many muscle groups as possible. This leads to a better anabolic hormonal response to training, meaning greater testosterone release, ultimately meaning more muscle. Full body workouts also result in greater energy expenditure per workout.


2) Remember, you can’t out exercise a bad diet!
The foods you eat are going to have the biggest impact on you reaching your training goals. Eat real foods and focus on getting plenty of veggies and fruit onto your plate!

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3) Keep it simple
Don’t over complicate training whether its weights or cardio, focus on quality work over quantity.


4) Perform maintenance on your body
Make foam rolling, mobility drills and stretching part of your routine. These will enhance performance, help prevent injury and make your body feel great.


5) Use weights to improve cardio and burn fat
Perform density-style circuits to improve work capacity, build muscle and torch body fat. Pick an exercise for each of the following movements; lower body, upper push, upper pull and core. Complete as many rounds as you can within 15 minutes working in the 8-12 rep range. This is a great way to train when time is short.


6) Find a training partner
Training partners will help push you harder and add an element of competition to workouts. Being accountable to a friend will improve adherence to any training programme.


7) Develop a pre-bed routine (I don't mean masterbating)
A lot is made of the number of hours you should sleep each night, but most importantly is ensuring the sleep you do get is good quality. Creating a pre-bed routine that involves habits such as reading, taking a hot bath, dimming the lights and including crabs in your evening meal all help to ensure a restful slumber.

There are four hormones that are critical to the success of your weight loss program. Cortisol, insulin, thyroid, and the sex hormones (testosterone in men, and progesterone in women). When kept in balance, these hormones have the largest effect on metabolism. When out of balance, they can prevent you from achieving the fitness results you desire.

Hormones could probably be one of the contributing reasons why you oftentimes don’t see continued results. Increasing caloric expenditure while decreasing caloric intake is a tried and true method for achieving weight loss, but many times that foolproof system fails.

CORTISOL
Cortisol is a glucocorticoid produced in the adrenal glands in response to stress. Mental stress (work), emotional stress (divorce), physical stress (exercise), or environmental stress (toxins) are all forms of stress that cause your body to increase the production of cortisol.

When cortisol levels increase, it stimulates the sympathetic nervous system, aka the “fight or flight” system. This activation tells your body you are in some form of imminent danger and it immediately increases your blood pressure, elevates your heart rate, and releases glucose into the blood stream from your liver. If this happens for an extended period, it will start to affect other hormones and wreak havoc on your metabolism.
Some of the more important symptoms of elevated cortisol include increased insulin resistance, reduced production of thyroid stimulating hormone, blockage of T4 to T3 (thyroid), and depression of testosterone production in men and progesterone production in women2. Left unchecked, chronically elevated cortisol creates an internal environment that becomes very difficult to allow for weight loss.


How exercise can improve cortisol balance:
High intensity exercise done when cortisol levels are elevated above healthy ranges can add more stress to an already stressed system. If you think you may be in a state of chronically, or acutely, elevate cortisol, reducing the intensity of the training will not further increase cortisol. Reducing intensity helps the body to recover sooner, lowering cortisol.

INSULIN
Insulin is produced in the beta cells of the pancreas in response to elevated glucose levels in the blood. In small doses, insulin is very anabolic, but when insulin is secreted over long periods of time, such as when someone is in a state of insulin resistance, then the metabolism does some interesting things.

First, since the muscles are not getting fed, they signal the brain telling it you are hungry, especially for sugar since it is the fastest thing to bring energy levels up. Next it increases inflammation systemically which then increases cortisol. Lastly, when glucose levels rise, your body tries really hard to do anything it can to lower it so it shifts fuel utilization away from fat-burning to carb-burning. Bye-bye fat loss.

How exercise can positively affect insulin:
Since insulin balance and blood glucose regulation go hand-in-hand, and elevated blood glucose has been shown to slow down fat utilization4, maintaining a healthy insulin balance is important for the metabolism. High intensity interval training has been shown to improve insulin sensitivity. However, if cortisol is also suspected as being elevated, HIIT can also increase cortisol, worsening insulin resistance. A proper balance of 1-2 HIIT sessions per week, mixed with lower intensity, and recovery-based activities is a good way to start to positively affect insulin sensitivity, while allowing for long periods of recovery between bouts.

THYROID
Thyroid hormone is the main metabolic hormone in the body. It is produced by the thyroid gland, located in the throat, in response to thyroid stimulating hormone that comes from the pituitary gland. However, the initial hormone produced by the thyroid, thyroxine4 (T4), is metabolically inactive. It must be converted into T3 in order to affect your metabolism. As previously stated, elevated cortisol can inhibit this conversion.

Many people that have been “diagnosed” with hypothyroid have a functioning thyroid, but their T3 level are low due to other factors. While many doctors will quickly prescribe synthetic thyroid drugs, it is important to identify what could be causing these decreased levels.

How exercise can improve thyroid balance:
Exercise intensity, especially in terms of cardiovascular exercise, has a profound effect on the thyroid hormones. A study on exercise intensity and thyroid hormone levels found that at anaerobic threshold (~70% of MHR) all thyroid hormones were improved from baseline. As intensity continued to increased, TSH also continued to rise.

SEX HORMONES
Testosterone and progesterone are the two main hormones in males and females, respectively. In males, if testosterone levels fall, it causes a loss of energy, limited ability to build and maintain muscle mass, and a loss in libido. In women, lowered progesterone production causes an imbalance in the oestrogen to progesterone ratio resulting in irregular menstrual cycles, an increased risk for PCOS, pre-menopausal symptoms, and an increase of fat storage around the hips and triceps.

Ironically, elevated cortisol (i.e., chronic stress) can lower both testosterone and progesterone production through a phenomenon known as pregnenolone steal. In addition, there are several other causes to lowered sex hormones, including pesticides, xeno-estrogens, and nutrient deficiencies.

How exercise affects sex hormones:
High intensity resistance training has been shown to have the most beneficial effect on testosterone in men, and cardio training and resistance training at a moderate intensity has shown similar results on the sex hormones in women.

We all know leading up to Christmas is a time where we find it hard to resist the temptations of over-indulging, often leading to feelings of guilt, anger and disappointment if we lose the battle of the bulge. So what do many of us do?
We resolve to kick-start the New Year with a plan to trim that added weight. Unfortunately, this act of conceding to the Christmas festivities and waiting until the New Year (termed Waiting List Effect) is nothing short of an excuse to avoid some simple mindful efforts. Efforts we could easily implement to help curb our excesses or weight gain. More importantly, by implementing some mindful strategies, especially this time of the year, we can avoid the discomfort associated with allowing ourselves to fall so far into despair where regaining our true form seems almost impossible, rather than possible or even probable. Consider implementing some of these simple ideas that require only a modest amount of effort and notice the results for yourself!


Self-Awareness: Hunger versus Appetite
Increasing self-awareness of undesirable behaviours (i.e., making us more consciously aware of our actions) can help progress our well-meaning intentions into a formal plan. However, if there is not a means for execution, then any plan (no matter how well-intentioned) will most likely fail.

​One effective strategy for improving self-awareness is to first differentiate hunger from appetite. Appetite appears to be the root of many cases of over-eating. While key differences are presented in the following table, hunger is essentially a biological response reminding us to replenish depleted energy reserves for physiological purposes, whereas appetite is a desire or interest to eat specific foods. Appetite can be triggered by various stimuli (i.e., smell of freshly baked bread, sight of a large dessert buffet) in the absence of hunger that oftentimes results in impulsive consequences. In other words, you may eat due to your appetite even though you are not technically hungry.
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Although we have some conscious awareness to various eating triggers, most influence our sub-conscious mind, frequently driving us to eat mindlessly. Researchers demonstrated this when surveying individuals who believed they only made approximately 15-food related decisions on a daily basis. These researchers determined that we actually make approximately 200 food-related daily decisions, reinforcing the notion of a sub-conscious influence (1, 2). Therefore, improving self-awareness to these stimuli offers a critical opportunity to exercise greater conscious control of eating. The fundamental idea for success is focused around awareness of the triggers in our own lives. Start with your dietary danger zones (e.g., times snacking at your desk, while driving, when bored, at social events or restaurants, etc.) and begin recording a log of any events, experiences or situations that act as a trigger (e.g., meeting with your boss, meeting your friends for happy hour). Over time, this aggregated information should reveal problematic areas that can then be addressed with a plan to control them.


Another effective strategy is to learn to recognise and manage our own hunger levels, preventing unnecessary over-eating that can lead to increased body weight. Although hunger and appetite are quite different, they are often confused when trying to lose weight. Managing and not ignoring hunger is critical to weight loss. The practice of ignoring hunger should always be avoided because it significantly slows the body’s metabolic rate, which can impair any weight loss strategy.
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