Bri­an Chin Le­ung

What oth­er peo­ple think about you is none of your busi­ness; what you think about your­self is most def­i­nite­ly your busi­ness.

As adults, we are quite ca­pa­ble of set­ting the bar for our own moral, spir­i­tu­al and phys­i­cal stan­dards, and I firm­ly be­lieve that once you are com­fort­able with the stan­dards you set for your­self, then that's be­tween you and the Almighty.

Think­ing pos­i­tive

In mod­ern times, self-es­teem in women and men seems de­pen­dent on how they think they look. How you see your­self is vi­tal, be­cause this will af­fect your be­hav­iour. I re­mem­ber in my late teens "track­ing" this beau­ti­ful girl, who seemed in­tent on putting me down. Her last blis­ter­ing re­mark to me was: "I on­ly go out with tall, dark and hand­some men!" To which I replied: "You are be­ing a bit hard on me, two out of three is not bad and I am work­ing on my tan."I got a smile and the date. You have got to think pos­i­tive. Hav­ing said that, it is chal­leng­ing for you to think pos­i­tive if your mir­ror re­flects a flab­by, out-of-shape body.

Im­prov­ing body im­age

It's not hard to get in shape, once you un­der­stand ba­sic fit­ness prin­ci­ples. In your quest for a great body, you have got to know the role that weight train­ing and car­dio will play in your fit­ness pro­gramme. Con­trary to pop­u­lar be­lief, you, in fact, burn more fat with weight train­ing than you do with "steady state" car­dio (run­ning, bik­ing etc). If you look at the big­ger pic­ture, it is the af­ter burn or post work­out ef­fect from weight train­ing that turns your body in­to a fat-burn­ing fur­nace. Af­ter an in­tense weight-train­ing work­out, your me­tab­o­lism stays raised for as much as 38 hours and, as you even­tu­al­ly build more mus­cle, the ef­fect on your me­tab­o­lism be­comes per­ma­nent.

How­ev­er, this should not be tak­en out of con­text and in­ter­pret­ed that car­dio is use­less; it is im­por­tant to con­tin­ue car­dio train­ing as part of your fit­ness pro­gramme be­cause it is still the most proven form of ex­er­cise for strength­en­ing your heart. You must strike a nice bal­ance be­tween car­dio ses­sions and weight-train­ing ses­sions. If you wish to im­prove the fat-burn­ing ef­fect of car­dio, you must con­sid­er per­form­ing HI­IT (High In­ten­si­ty In­ter­val Train­ing) at least twice per week. Per­form­ing car­dio in this man­ner caus­es you to build up an "oxy­gen debt" to the tis­sues, which has to be paid back even when you are in post work­out mode–there­by keep­ing your me­tab­o­lism raised. En­hance your body im­age and it will do won­ders for in­creas­ing self-es­teem. Keep train­ing.