Great knee information from a well known knee Doctor. Tips to help keep your knees healthy!
http://movement-as-medicine.com/4-hip-mobility-drills-to-improve-your-squat/
Great knee information from a well known knee Doctor. Tips to help keep your knees healthy!
http://movement-as-medicine.com/4-hip-mobility-drills-to-improve-your-squat/
It’s 3:00 in the afternoon and things are going along as usual, when suddenly it hits you…YOU MUST HAVE CHIPS NOW OR A SWEET SNACK!
You are under attack from the dreaded food craving.
Whether it lurks under you desk at work or behind the couch in your living room…it is there and will sneak up on you when you least expect it.
So, how can you control that little beast rather than letting it control you?
Here are a few ideas about how to fight food cravings…
Craving Sweets:
If you are having an intense craving for sweets (carbs), it may actually be because you are tired or haven’t gotten enough sleep. Your body often craves sweets as a way to boost energy.
Solution: If your energy is starting to crash, it can really help to get up and get moving. This doesn’t have to be intense exercise, just get up and take a quick walk to get your blood flowing. Other options are to drink some tea (a calorie free energy boost) or to snack on some fruit (sweet, but much better than a candy bar).
Craving Salt:
Salty food is a pretty typical craving and it may just be the desire for intense flavor. However, the craving for salty food can stem from poor nutrition and is often intensified by dehydration or adrenal fatigue (stress).
Solution: Before you go buy a bag of salty snacks, try drinking a glass or two of water. If you still feel the craving it may be stress that is the culprit. Stop what you’re doing and take a series of 7-10 deep breaths…this will often take the edge off a craving.
Craving Crunch:
This may be a sign that you are feeling angry, frustrated, or irritable. Unfortunately, the seemingly satisfying crunch from that bag of chips will only leave you feeling worse in the long run.
Solution: Consider an endorphin-boosting workout to expend that energy and soothe your nerves (with me of course), or keep healthy crunchy snack options on hand like peanut butter celery sticks or baby carrots, cucumbers and hummus or some other crunchy fav. vegie. Another trick is to put on some relaxing music to help calm your stress.
Craving Comfort:
If comfort foods are your weakness (ice cream, mac n’ cheese, mashed potatoes), this is usually a sign that you are seeking out the good “comforting” feeling that you associate with them. Often this kind of craving comes from depression, loneliness, or boredom.
Solution: One way to handle comfort food cravings is to distract yourself. Make a cup of tea your favorite HERBAL TEA, pick up a good book, take a bath, get outside, clean your house, or call a friend and catch up. Often you will find that the craving passes and it wasn’t actually about hunger at all.
See you in the gym or on the trail.
Shari
You’re pressed for time. You know you shouldn’t blow off your plan to workout today, but you can’t fit in a whole hour. Maybe you can squeeze in 30 minutes. Does this scenario sound familiar? So what’s the best use of your time if improved fitness and maximum calorie burn are your goals: Weight training or cardio?
If you said cardio, guess again. It appears that a weight training circuit packs the strongest punch compared to hopping on a cardio machine for an aerobic workout. A weight training (a.k.a. resistance training) circuit, if you’re new to fitness vernacular, is when you go from one exercise to the next, taking as little time as possible to rest in between. An aerobic (a.k.a. cardio) workout is something you can do at a sustained level for a relatively long time without fatiguing, such as jogging, cycling, swimming, brisk walking, etc. What these aerobic activities have in common is that they use the body’s larger muscles which can perform work longer without fatiguing.
If you’ve been following fitness trends for a while, you’ve probably already heard that the best way to improve your fitness during your cardio workout is by adding intervals, or high intensity bouts to your activity (i.e. alternating between one minute of slow and fast jogging) instead of just staying at a “steady state.” It’s been shown that you can burn a similar amount of calories by doing a shorter workout with intervals as you would in a longer, lower intensity workout.1 (Note to people trying to lose weight: Please stop believing people who tell you that low intensity workouts burn more fat. That’s so wrong!)
As a matter of fact, the harder you do intervals, the greater the benefit to your fitness and the more calories you burn, if you’re not a newbie. Much research has come out in the past decade touting the benefits HIIT (high intensity interval training) has on improving endurance, burning fat and building strength. If you’ve ever done Boot Camp workouts, Indoor Cycling (Spinning) classes or DVDs like “Insanity,” you’ve probably done some HIITs. Some more recent studies have shown that this type of workout can make you lean and mean in less time than steady “state endurance training” (doing cardio at a steady pace for 20 minutes to an hour),2 making HIIT the Holy Grail for us trainers trying to get our clients fitter, faster.
But hold everything! There may be a new bad boy on the block to give you even more bang for you exercise buck. Well, the information isn’t exactly new, but in lieu of all the HIIT hoopla going around the past several years, this research bears repeating, especially since it may be even more calorie torching than doing intervals. I’m referring to good ol’ pumping iron. But not the kind where you do one set, then rest and chat with your buddy, then pick up the weights again. I’m talking circuit weight training where you go from one exercise to the next using resistance that is relatively challenging to downright heavy with minimal rest in between sets. This type of vigorous weight lifting has a positive effect on a little something known as the EPOC. EPOC stands for “excess postexercise oxygen consumption” which is the technical term for what’s commonly called the “after burn.”
Exercise scientists have known for a while that the harder and more intense your workout is, the longer your body will be in an elevated metabolic state. This means for a while after your workout session, your body continues to burn more calories at a higher rate than if you hadn’t gotten off your couch to exercise. The amount of extra calories isn’t a whole lot (approximately 51 – 127 extra calories according to two different studies), but over time it adds up and can help in your weight management plan.
The EPOC, or afterburn, is greatest after high-intensity resistance exercise because the body needs extra energy to restore itself and return to it’s normal state. This energy of course, comes from calories. Most of the studies on this have been on men, butcompelling results were also found in a small study done on women and published in 2000. Researchers studied seven females (average age of 27 years) and had them perform a workout consisting of five supersets (10 exercises) doing 10 – 15 repetitions per set. In case you want to give it a go yourself, the exercises were: bench press and bent-over rows; leg extension and leg curl; military press and sit-ups; biceps curls and triceps extension; and lunges and lateral raises. They were given four minutes to complete the workout.
After the workout the scientists measured the subjects’ EPOC every 30 minutes. Three hours after the workout, they found the EPOC was still 13% higher than their pre-exercise metabolic rate and even 16 hours after the exercise, their metabolisms were still 4.2 percent higher than their pre-workout resting metabolic rates. The authors’ conclusion is that intense resistance training produces a prolonged but modest elevation in post exercise metabolism in women.
The moral to the story is if you’re short on time, is you can still get results by doing short, more intense workouts. If you’re doing cardio, add high intensity intervals to rev up your metabolism. Or better yet, do a circuit of weights heavy enough to be somewhat to very challenging (not comfortable) and you can get an even more after burn. The more intense the workout, the longer and greater the after burn. So, if your still making excuses that you have no time, you can stop now! It’s probably not so much time that’s your issue, it’s probably motivation. How do you get motivated? Well, Spring is upon us and skin will be showing. Pull out your skinny jeans or a picture of yourself (as an adult) when you were in great shape and put it where you will see it regularly. Or, hire a trainer willing to do short sessions with you or who will just write some out workouts you can follow on your own time.
Reference:
1 & 2. Kravitz, Len & Zuhl, Micha, 2012 HIIT vs. Continuous Endurance Training: Battle of the Aerobic Titans. IDEA Fitness Journal, 9 (2) 34-40
New Year! Fit Bits from Balance2bfit!
Happy New Year and welcome to 2013! This year is going to be filled with heart energy and transformation from our minds to our bodies! I look forward to continuing to motivate, educate and share positive energy! Lets start this year with a positive healthier you!
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO KEEP YOUR ENDURANCE, CORE AND STRENGTH TRAINING CONSISTANT during the summer and in season?
To ensure body balance from joints to core to endurance and overall health in addition to maintaining lean muscle mass (our best fat burning source)! LETS NOT FORGET to continuing a good stretching program
To follow are some tips from great coaches around the U.S.
HIIT why this is a great way to add endurance cardio and one of the best fat loss solutions!
Treadmill Recommendations
• Time based. Try 15 seconds on with 45 seconds off at 7 MPH and 5% incline. For safety, decrease speed and increase incline.
• Heart rate based (max HR of 200 used for example). Try a 15 second sprint at 7/5 and simply rest until the heart rate returns to 120 beats per minute. Rest is rest, don’t walk or jog or your heart rate will lower slowly.
Stationary Bike
* Dual action bikes like the Air dyne produces a higher HR. This is due to the combined action of the arms and legs. There is no better affordable option than the Air Dyne. Although they require periodic maintenance they are the perfect interval tool as they do not need any adjustments to belts or knobs when interval training. The fan is an accommodating resistance device. This means that the harder you push the more resistance you get back. If you have large fan Air Dynes (Click here to view) purchase and install windscreens. Most athletes and clients dislike the large fan Air Dynes as they are unable to work up a sweat without a windscreen.
• This is probably the best “safe” tool.
• Requires limited skill.
• Limited potential for overuse injury.
Stationary Bike Recommendations
• Same time recommendations as for the treadmill. For the Air Dyne, set the top display to Level. For a well-conditioned male a 15 second sprint should be level 12-15. Do not go all out as this will seriously undermine the ability to repeat additional intervals. Well-conditioned female athletes will be Level 8-10 for 15 seconds. Levels should be adjusted down for fitness level and up for body size. Larger athletes or clients will find the bike easier. Large fan Air Dynes (older models) will
By Michael Doyle view online http://www.strengthcoach.com/public/1766.cfm
ACL Reduction Strategies
ACL reduction is simple but systematic. We need to work on all of the items listed below. This is not a menu to pick from. It’s more like a recipe. Try to bake a cake and leave out a key ingredient. What happens? Usually a disaster.
– Active Warm-up
– Power and Stability / Eccentric Strength=landing skills
– Strength Development- (emphasis on 1 Leg)
– Change of Direction Concepts- learning how to stop
– Change of Direction Conditioning- developing conditioning
Functional Training
Functional training may be the big key to ACL injury prevention. Although the words function and functional training have been over used the concept is still valid. In order to fully appreciate functional training simply looks at it as the application of functional anatomy to training. The key to understanding functional anatomy is to realize that everything changes when you stand on one leg. From an anatomical standpoint this is undeniable.
ACL Reduction Strategy 1 — Active Warm-up
A good warm-up is the first step in the ACL prevention program. Guess what, a good warm-up is the first step in any program. A proper warm-up develops single leg strength, dynamic flexibility, and increases proprioception. The key to the best active warm-up exercises is that they activate one muscle while elongating another.
High Knee Walk
Leg Cradle
Walking Heel to Butt
Back Lunge
Spiderman
Inchworm
Reduction Strategy 2 – Develop Stability / Eccentric Strength
If active warm-up is the first step, the development of stability and eccentric strength is the most important step. In many of the popular ACL prevention programs this is the major failing. Most programs concentrate too much on jumping and not enough on hopping. Some might again argue semantics but it is critical to understand that a jump and a hop are not the same. As we said above everything changes when you stand on one leg and, everything changes when you LAND on one leg. The key to injury prevention is developing the ability to land on one leg. Eccentric strength is the ability to land properly. Make sure you understand the terminology below.
• Jump- two legs to two legs. This is the basis for many programs but is not the mechanism for ACL Injury.
To view video
http://www.strengthcoach.com/public/1641.cfm?sd=51
Conclusion
• Consider Exercise Selection for Muscle Activation
• Consider Impact of Instability on Muscle Activation
• Consider Training for Strength or Power
• Consider Effect of Stretching on Muscle Force
“They conquer who believe they can” – Emerson
Presented to you by Shari Lesser Personal Trainer at GAC
Cell 720-232-8976 Balance 2b fit.wordpress.com
5/23/2012
I like these movements! They are quick and effective.
http://whole9life.com/2012/04/the-whole9-five-movement-series-part-3/
2 fun core exercises to add in your routine. Check it out – Healthy Lifestyles.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRA0nrvCeCI&feature=colike]