Notice the low stances and the aerial maneuvers.  The average wushu practitioner can only stay in a low stance for about 3 minutes and can only execute series of aerial maneuvers for about 1 minute before experiencing dangerous levels of muscle fatigue that leaves him vulnerable to ankle sprains or knee injuries.  Because modern wushu routines are so physically demanding, I do not recommend practicing them as cardio routines, ie…executing routines for a non-stop 30 minutes.

Also, modern wushu is also a finesse sport, where every move should be picture perfect.  If you are practicing wushu moves at 65% to 80% of your maximum heart rate for 30 minutes, your moves will be very sloppy.

If you use the Calorie Calculator found on this home page, you can determine the number of calories you burn while jogging.

Basically, the way to burn fat calories during exercise is to keep your heart rate at 60% to 80% of your maximum heart rate (MHR = 220 – age).   So for example, a 30 year old’s lower and upper heart rate thresholds would be 114 beats per minute to 152 beats per minute.

The best way to monitor your heart rate during exercise is to use a heart rate monitor.  But if you don’t have one, you can periodically stop your work out and count your heart beats for 5 seconds.  Then multiply the number of beats by 12 to obtain your heart rate (aka, heart beats per minute, aka heart rate).   You don’t want to wait any long than 5 seconds because your body will quickly return to resting state, making your work out less effective at burning fat.

These athletes train and study at least 4 hours per day.  Some of them do this on top of a full time job.  Here’s a typical schedule they follow, which normally begins at 6 pm and finishes at 12 am:

Monday
1 hour – punching the bag
0.5 hour – 3 mile jog
1 hour – holding focus pads for other boxing club members
0.5 hours – sparring
1+ hour – watching and studying fight videos for the rest of the night

Tuesday
0.5 hours – shadow boxing
1 hour – slipping ball, speed bag, double ended bag
0.5 hours – weight training
1 hour – holding focus pads for other boxing club members
1+ hour – watching and studying fight videos for the rest of the night

Wednesday
1 hour – punching the bag
0.5 hour – 3 mile jog
1 hour – holding focus pads for other boxing club members
0.5 hours – sparring
1+ hour – watching and studying fight videos for the rest of the night

Thursday
0.5 hours – shadow boxing
1 hour – slipping ball, speed bag, double ended bag
0.5 hours – weight training
1 hour – holding focus pads for other boxing club members
1+ hour – watching and studying fight videos for the rest of the night

Friday
1 hour – punching the bag
0.5 hour – 3 mile jog
1 hour – holding focus pads for other boxing club members
0.5 hours – sparring
1+ hour – watching and studying fight videos for the rest of the night

Saturday
0.5 hours – sparring
1+ hr – watching and studying videos the rest of the night

Sunday
Day off for relaxation
The schedule is flexible. For example, sometimes they may move the weight training slot to another day, or they may change up jogging with skipping rope, or they may add additional sparring time etc…  But every day, they spend a lot of time watching and studying fight videos with their coaches and other team members.

Take a look at professional boxing for example. Boxing has weight classes such as feather weight (limit 126 lb), light weight (limit 135 lb), welter weight (limit 147 lb) etc… Boxers train 7 hours a day 6 days a week for many months to lose weight so that they can fight at a lower weight classes. If there were an easier way to do this, don’t you think these multi-million dollar athletes would be doing it?

In a nut shell, you can lose up to 1 pound of fat per week by eating well. If you exercise as well, you can lose up to 2 pounds of fat per week.

Eat Well

Eating well is the most important thing for losing weight. People gain weight when they eat more calories than their body can burn. There’s 3500 calories in one pound of body fat. Now consider the following cases:

• A Big Mac combo from Mcdonalds is 1300 calories. Eat three combos and you’ve got yourself enough calories to create one pound of body fat.
• A mediterranean salad, baked apple pie and cup of water from McDonalds is 500 calories. Eat seven meals and you’ve got yourself enough calories to create one pound of body fat.

As you can see, just by substituting a Big Mac combo with a Salad meal, you can speed up your weight loss by half the time!

By substituting calorie rich meals with more vegetables, balanced portions of lean meat and grain products, you can create a calorie deficit of 500 to 1000 per day, which means losing about 1 to 2 pounds of fat per week.

Exercise

Exercise can help speed up your weight loss by about 30%. If you do aerobic exercise and keep your heart rate at 65% to 75% of your maximum heart rate for 60 minutes, you can burn 400 to 600 calories. So that means 5 to 6 hours of cardio work out is enough to burn one pound of human body fat.

When exercising, make sure you drink plenty of water!