The Business Woman Athlete
June 19, 2008 by Chelsea Boissonneault
Most of us are not professional athletes or national level figure competitors. So can you keep in top shape like they do while working a full time, non-physical job? The answer is yes, you can. You don’t have to work out twice a day to get into the best shape you can be in and to maintain that as well.
Desk Job= No Excuse!
If you can commit to training with weights four days a week and sticking to a clean nutrition plan 95% of the time, you can get super fit and lean and stay there. Eating clean 95% of the time sounds like a lot but that actually gives you 2 cheat meals every week. If you eat 5 meals/day, 7 days a week, 2 meals out of 35 can be cheat meals. The best way to eat your 2 cheat meals is to make them into 1 big cheat meal.
Clean Eating
The reason for combining the cheat meals into 1 larger meal is that this way your insulin is only spiked very high once, allowing your body to recover and move on. The more often you spike your insulin, the less effective you will be a lowering your body fat. Also, 1 larger cheat meal will give your metabolism a boost.
As far as cardio goes, I am not a believer in much cardio and do not do any myself except for maybe 10 weeks leading up to a show to get from 12% to 10% body fat. You can’t do cardio all the time, at the same intensity and length, and expect to keep benefiting from it. Our bodies are smart and adjust to cardio and after a while, the cardio that you are doing stops benefiting you and you need to keep doing that much just to maintain. Are you going to just keep increasing the amount of cardio you do to keep getting results? Do you not have better things to fill your time with?
Cardio Bunny
When I get new clients who do a lot of cardio, I get them to slowly decrease the amount of cardio they are doing until they are doing none at all, other than a warm-up or a minimal amount if they are one of those individuals who prefers doing some.
Training Hard
As long as you are training hard during your weight training sessions and you are eating clean, you can get and stay lean while working 9-5 sitting on your behind. Those who do not believe and say that they do this and are not at their ideal leanness are doing 1 of 2 things wrong (or both); they are lying when they say they are eating clean 95% of the time, or they are not pushing themselves hard enough when training. They may not know they are even lying about eating clean since people have different concepts of what eating clean really is. If you are unsure about this, perhaps you need the help of a nutrition advisor.
What eating clean means to me is no packaged food, organic when possible, little to no dairy, a lot of meats and veggies, and enough natural healthy fats. That means no sweeteners or products containing sweeteners like sugar free jello, diet soda or other crap like that. If a sweetener is needed, then I recommend trying stevia. It is natural and is pretty good. Some people take a while to get used to it and say at first it has an aftertaste but it really depends on the brand.
Once you know what to do, you will realize that yes you can get and stay fit and lean even if you spend most of your day sitting down, so stop lying to yourself and get to work!
About the Author
Chelsea is a figure competitor, certified personal trainer and nutritional advisor and the co-owner of Free Form Fitness (www.freeformfitness.ca). Free Form Fitness is no bull - just results personal training center in Ottawa, Ontario Canada.
