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Most boot camps are about 60 minutes. If you're doing a 60 minute high intensity workout three
times a week, you're going to be getting those minimal requirements that most fitness professionals
recommend to increase your strength and improve your cardiovascular capacity. If you're not
going to go to a boot camp, you won't have the same experience. You won't have an instructor
guiding you through the workout, offering you modifications and progressions, and you
won't have that feeling of working out with a group. But, you could still take those exercises
and do them on your own.
When you're doing that, just keep in mind that muscles need time in between exercises
to recover, maybe doing your upper body exercises followed by your lower exercises, either 30
minutes of all upper body followed by 30 minutes of all lower body exercises would be a great
approach. It just means you have to give yourself 30 seconds to a minute in between each movement
to recover. Or you could do upper body, lower body, upper body, lower body, back and forth.
That's going to also be a little bit more challenging because you have to bring all
of your energy into your upper extremities and then all of your energy down into your
lower extremities. It can actually bring your heart rate up a little bit more than doing
all lower body and then all upper body.
The important thing is that you're getting cardiovascular work in and you're getting
strength work in. Some people split this. They go to the gym, they go to work out at
home with a DVD and they'll do some sort of cardio routine, and then they'll do a 30 minute
strength routine. That's a great way to do it if you don't want to mix the two together.
The important thing to remember is always vary your workouts. Variability is the key
to having success with exercise. Your body is always adapting. That's how it becomes
more and more efficient. For example, if I do a squat and I've never done a squat before,
my body is going to react. It's going to be thinking, wow, what is this? A lot of muscle
groups are firing. A lot of calories are being expended. But after a certain period of time,
my muscles will adapt. I'll learn how to do this movement more efficiently. I'll learn
how to do this movement with actually burning fewer calories. It's pretty much just a survival
mechanism.
Your body wants to conserve energy and when it comes to working out, we're trying to burn
energy. Once your body learns how to conserve, the workout becomes less effective. So, you
have to change the exercise. You can't just do a squat anymore. Maybe you need to do a
squat jump. Maybe you need to do a single leg squat, which all of a sudden is a very
different movement. Your body reacts again. It's literally about neuromuscular adaptation.
Change the direction, change the speed, some sort of variable that makes your body go,
whoa, what is this? This is different. It's going to be therefore effective again.