Samuel Liew’s Blog

News, events, and other interesting finds

Short, sharp bursts of activity have proven to be more effective than long, drawn-out exercise. exercise that most people choose is long slow cardio exercise such as jogging, swimming or hours on the treadmill, bike, or elliptical trainer.

This kind of exercise burns mostly fat during the exercise. Which seems like a good idea, but actually INCREASES the chances of your body storing fat in the long run. In general, the body considers long, slow activity the same as “being lost in the jungle” which means it is best to store AS MUCH fat as possible to stay alive!

Lots of bad stuff happens inside you when you do excess amounts of long distance cardio. After all, look at the people at a marathon. Many of them are fat and have average or unimpressive physiques despite hours and hours of cardio exercise.

Here are three main reasons why:

1) Cardio increases the amount of stress hormones you produce
2) Cardio decreases the amount of muscle building hormones you have
3) Your body actually burns lots of amino acids when doing cardio

What kind of exercises should you do then? Read more at:

Fit to Post Blog – Yahoo! Singapore’s blog » Blog Archive – Why slow, long workouts may be counter-productive «

Okay, so I was trying out this hundred pushups program (hundredpushups.com) for the last month, and using the pushups logger (pushupslogger.com) to record my progress, which also posts updates to Twitter automatically. So far I’m at week 5 out of 6, and doing about 85 pushups per workout (5 sets of about 17). Here is my page on PLU: http://www.pushupslogger.com/plog/show_user/118564

Currently it seems that the logger website has broken down and I’m not able to add new entries, and I find it a pity not to do so. However I will complete the hundred pushups program, and then try out my own exercise program:

Mon/Wed/Fri pushups, Tue/Thurs/Sat situps
5 sets of 20 each
one minute rest between sets

[Update]
06/09 – 30
09/09 – 30 (5/1)
11/09 – 25|100 (5/2)
13/09 – 30|100 (5/2)
16/09 – 25|100 (5/2)
18/09 – 30|120 (5/3)
21/09 – 30|120 (5/3)
24/09 – 35
25/09 – 30/120 (5/3)
30/09 – 30/120 (5/3)

Today I participated in the AHM 21km run at Marina Bay/East Coast park.