500 Calorie Challenge – The Results!
One of the biggest lessons this challenge taught me was the discipline of doing something every day. One of the many reasons so many people find a training programme doesn’t work is because they cannot commit to the regular exercise required, and they cannot give 100% – particularly if they are “too tired” or just not up for it. I learned that by managing my state and pushing myself to do something that I wouldn’t normally do, I could achieve a far better result than if I had just exercised inconsistently for the past 30 days.
I hope you’ll give me a bit of grace on this one, but during Easter I put on a fair bit of weight. I gave myself the excuse that I was stressed and I needed to work hard, and that this meant I had no time to stick to regular exercise. As you can see in the picture below, I did not look good! That is both the effect of a bad diet and stress which I placed upon myself:
Tired, stressed out, poor diet (I was still eating good nutritional food but I was snacking a lot on top of it), finding any excuse to avoid exercise. Even when I was exercising I was barely giving 50%.
That’s one of the great things about this challenge. It forced me to give 100%. If I were to beat my times each day then I had to give 100%.
My first time was pretty bad. I burned 500 calories in 00:28:29. With each day I gave it my all to beat the previous days time. Check out my times below:
Day | Time
1 00:28:29
2 00:24:58
3 00:24:13
4 00:21:02
5 00:21:13
6 00:21:29
7 00:21:12
8 00:21:35
9 00:20:56
10 00:20:53
11 00:20:30
12 00:21:31
13 00:20:49
14 00:21:49
15 00:21:44
16 00:19:55
17 00:19:49
18 00:21:49
19 00:20:24
20 00:20:01
21 REST
22 REST
23 00:19:26
24 00:20:01
25 00:19:39
26 00:20:08
27 00:19:50
28 00:21:01
29 00:19:57
30 00:19:58
My best time was 00:19:26. I knew that if I were to get a good time I had to burn at least 25 calories a minute, so this is what I aimed for. This is not at all easy, and I can tell you that you are left absolutely gasping for air and water once you reach 500 calories! But 20 minutes is not long and you equally recover quickly. It’s manageable and it’s something you can do every day.
So what did it to my body over the coming weeks? Take a look at the Gallery at the top of this post!
Not bad going for 30 days training for just twenty minutes. I did do this on top of my usual workout, but my usual workout (weights, calisthenics) did suffer. On some days I felt very tired, others I felt my muscles had nothing to give. But I still pushed through!
Do I think this is sustainable every single day? No, only as a 30 day challenge. Is it effective as part of your workout? Yes, this is a great way to burn fat in a short amount of time, and you can add it to the end of a workout. I wouldn’t do this without recovery days (unless I were to do the 30 day challenge, which to be honest I would still recommend 1 rest day a week).
What do you think? Would you like the training programme to build up to burning 500 calories a day? Would you like to take on the challenge? Drop me a message and I’ll send you the details (all for free!)
All in all this has been a great amount of fun, and I am going to continue utilising this particular exercise and add it into my own training.
