Tag: fitness

High-Intensity Regimens and Older Exercisers – NYTimes.com

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Thanks to reader Thane, again, for bringing a great piece to my attention (and yours, by extension).

Kudos to the NYT. As seems to be their pattern, they publish an outstanding piece following an embarrassingly bad one.

Below is a really GOOD article published in the NYT about the benefits of high intensity training (with some caveats) for older adults; 60+ years old up to 75! The same advice could be given to just about anyone, at any age. Intensity is king when it comes to physical training. And high intensity is relative to the current condition, and age, of the trainor. In other words, stop futzing around. Click the link below

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/business/retirementspecial/high-intensity-regimens-and-older-exercisers.html?_r=2&ref=health

“ Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see. ” – Arthur Schopenhauer

The Shoulder

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20120729-193553.jpg

There is something special about shoulders, that place them almost on par with breasts and butts for women, and pecs and biceps, for men. How we define nice shoulders may vary from person to person, but when you get down to it, it’s only a discussion of degrees. Shapely defined shoulders are attractive to most everyone, on everyone. It’s even a recurring female fashion trend to add shoulder padding in blouses and blazers.

20120729-194418.jpg

Some interesting facts about the shoulder. It is the most mobile joint in the the human body, able to move the most degrees in ever single plane of motion. The “shoulder girdle” is involved in almost every possible torso exercise. This creates the opportunity for a great variety of possible exercises, but this comes with increased ***joint laxity***, compared to your other joints, creating greater risk of injury do to accidental hyperextension leading to muscular and connective tissue damage. The fact of its extreme mobility puts it at the most risk of accidental injury, and it’s necessary involvement in all torso exercises put it at risk of over use injuries.
Click this for a detailed overview of the shoulder joint: shoulder anatomy, in detail

The number of possible shoulder exercises/movements can be overwhelming, and trying to do every possible variation in every possible movement pattern would be an all day, monotonous, and dangerous, mess.

Here’s a rundown of the most frequently used shoulder exercises seen in a typical health club:

1. Dumbbell Military Press (standing)
2. Dumbbell Seated shoulder press
3. Dumbbell Lateral raises
4. Dumbbell front raise
5. Dumbbell bent over reverse fly’s
6. Barbell Military Press (standing)
7. Smith machine seated shoulder press
8. Nautilus (or other manufacturer) shoulder press machine
9. Nautilus (or other) lateral raise machine
10. Pec Fly/**rear delt** machine
11. Cable front raise
12. Cable lateral raise
13. Cable rear deltoid
14. Cable overhead press
You can look all these up on the invaluable website:
ExRx.net

And these are just the most common ones. I could probably expand this list for pages if I wanted, but I don’t want to and most of you don’t want me to, either. These are just deltoid specific exercises. Then there are all the other major muscle exercises of the torso that put tremendous stress of the deltoids. For example, all of the following chest exercises work the anterior (front) deltoid intensely:
*Push ups, Olympic bench press, dumbbell bench press, incline bench press, decline bench press, dumbbell pec fly, cable pec fly’s, machine pec fly*.

All of the next group work the posterior (rear) deltoids and other muscles of the back shoulder girdle:

*Pull ups, Lat pull downs, long pulls, dumbbell bent over rows, barbell rows, cable rows, machine rows (nautilus or other) *.

With so many exercises hitting anterior and posterior deltoids heavily, one aught to wonder why some exercisers insist on spending so much time on trying to target those areas specifically. For the vast majority of gym goers lifting weights, overhead presses and lateral raises are all that are needed to develop well shaped and strong shoulders, as all the other exercises you should be doing for your upper body are taking care of the other two regions of the deltoids.

Given the over importance shoulder training seems to take on with serious weight lifters of both sexes, it shouldn’t be surprising that shoulder pain is one of the three most frequently sited gym associated injuries (lower back and knees being the other two).

If you’re not a competitive bodybuilder, or someone who wants to look like one, my advice is to cut down on shoulder training, and focus on lateral raise and/or shoulder press, while making sure that your chest (pushing exercise=anterior deltoid) and back (pulling exercises=posterior deltoid) exercises are truly challenging.

Of course, always follow strict good form. The first really bad rep performed should be the last rep of the set.

Happy training.

Work Out Posts

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Everyone is looking for the magic routine or the magic exercise, as if there is some secret that will transform your body better, quicker, easier, than any other.  Sorry.   That doesn’t work.  People always assume that the advice they can get from some super trainer of celebrities is going to work better than they could get from their neighborhood gym trainer.  Uh-uh. The advice you get from any trainer is going to be the same crap shoot you’d get from any other trainer.  You have no way of knowing if the advice is good or bad unless you have good knowledge to know better yourself, and the average gym goer simply doesn’t.

This brings me to one of my personal issues with training blogs, in general. Most of the blog posts out there (and I subscribe to more than a few) seem to focus on describing killer routines or Best Butt Busting exercises (or any other body part you might want to develop).  They can’t all be the best, can they?  This is sensationalism at it’s most idiotic.There is no magic and there are no shortcuts.  There is knowledge and evidence based training, and there is bullshit.  Every exercise is a tool, but not every tool is appropriate for every job.

The problem I have with these posts is that there seems to be an assumption that the reader will understand how to do these workouts and exercises properly, and be able to integrate them into their existing workouts effectively.  Inevitably, someone writes in how following so and so’s advice led to a major knee, lower back or other musculoskeletal injury and that so and so doesn’t know what they’re talking about and is a horrible trainer.  Most of my readers are not fitness professionals or professional athletes, and I have no way of knowing if any specific advice I give will be followed properly, but I will be held responsible by that person if anything goes wrong.  It almost never seems to occur to these complainers that perhaps they did the exercises badly, or improperly implemented the advice.  All the same, I fault the Fitness expert writing for not properly qualifying their advice.  I also blame them for giving too much of this kind of advice.  Every other post seems to tout this or that exercise as the best for a specific muscle group, and the posts in-between talk about this or that routine as being the greatest.  As these bloggers and professional writers are far and away the most popular, I suppose I can’t totally condemn them.

That said, people still want to know:  what is the best exercise routine a person can follow for overall fitness?  So here it is, a routine that will absolutely get you in great shape if you do it fervently every other day till the day you die,  assuming you follow all the rules of intensity that I’ve laid out innumerable times and you are otherwise physically healthy with no major pre-existing injuries:

  1.  Walking Lunges with dumbbells: perform up to 7 sets, with rep ranges between 12 steps and 30 steps, so long as the last 3 steps of every set are exhausting.
  2. Pull ups/Lat Pulldowns: perform up to 7 sets, with rep ranges between 6 and 15 reps, making sure the last rep of every set is almost impossible to complete.

    A US Marine Doing Pull-ups.
    A US Marine Doing Pull-ups. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
  3. Push Ups (toes or knees): perform up to 7 sets, as many reps as you can with good form on every set (even if it’s 50 reps on the 1st and 2 reps on the last).

    English: an exercise of chest
    English: an exercise of chest (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Make sure you know how to do every exercise correctly, or get a trainer to show you.  Just doing these three exercises, in the routine I’ve laid out for you, is the most perfect and magical workout ever devised by mortal man.  Do this every other day, throw in cardio on in-between days.   Don’t forget to eat like a champion athlete and sleep like a 10-year-old, and you will get into unbelievably great shape practically overnight (ok, in 6-12 months).

The Intermediate Exercise Enthusiast

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The intermediate exerciser has learned at least 3 of the 5 important things in order to progress to this level, and it shows. Most serious health club exercisers fall into this category, though my personal observation is that no more than 20% of gym members ever make it to this level, and instead remain novices despite the amount of time they spend in the gym going from one activity to another. The Intermediate Exerciserhas lost significant body fat and has gained some real muscle, either in the form of size and bulk or muscular definition, or both, depending on their goal. The 5 critical things that the intermediate exerciser understands and conforms to:

  1. Consistency
  2. Intensity
  3. broad knowledge of muscle function
  4. Nutrition
  5. Rest

Lets take these 5 in order.

  1. Consistency is just what it says. You are committed to your workouts and have a schedule you will not deviate from when possible. You have set aside a certain number of days; typically 4-6; and a set amount of time; typically 60-90 minutes; and you train. This isn’t something you try to fit into your day. It is one of your highest priorities that you work the rest of your day around. When doing cardiovascular/aerobic training you have a protocol you follow and stick to it. When weight lifting, you typically follow some version of a split routine for your body parts, the classic example being Chest/Shoulders/Triceps on day one, Back/Biceps on day two, and Lower Body on day three. Then repeating that pattern for a six-day workout with one day off for complete rest. You will stick to this pattern till doomsday comes or until you change goals. Additionally, you understand the importance of your exercise routine; variation is not your friend in this regard. You need to stick to a routine that you can make comparative assessments on. That means the same, or extremely similar, exercises for each body part every time you train that body part. If your goal is to be the best marathon runner you can be, you don’t spend hours a week ridding a lifecycle or taking spin classes; you run miles, period! If your goal is to improve your overall muscular strength, or build muscle, you pick your exercises and do them repetitively for months on end, the only variables being that you will continuously push yourself to lift heavier weights every week or even every workout!
  2. Intensity is all about understanding your goal. It is the most important factor that will determine whether you actually achieve any measurable progress, whether it’s increasing you distance on a bike ride, speed in the 400 meter run, or your 1 rep max doing an olympic bench press. Trying to lose weight requires a certain intensity. Building muscle requires its own level of intensity. Improving athletic performance…has its own special intensity demands. Not understanding what intensity you need to achieve will undermine everything you try to accomplish. Too much high intensity training will undermine a marathoner, and too little will be futile for the sprinter or weight lifter. If you haven’t read my posts on intensity, or want to refresh your memory click here and here.
  3. Broad knowledge of muscle function means you really understand how all the major skeletal muscles move and work, and know a pretty broad range of exercises for each of them. It’s like having a large vocabulary of exercises to draw on. Since you also understand how the muscles work, it allows you to choose complimentary exercises when doing multiples per body part. You understand why you might want to do pec flys after olympic bench press, not before, or why doing lat pull downs after pull ups might be redundant, so doing dumbbell rows is the better choice to follow-up with in most cases. (Yes, there might be a valid reason to do both pull ups and lat pull downs in the same workout, but that wouldn’t be the most common combo or even the norm). You understand which exercises will enhance your athletic activities or hinder them, and train accordingly.
  4. Nutrition is simply the understanding that what you consume is both the fuel that moves you and the building blocks of what your body is made of. The cliche´ “You are what you eat” is precisely true. Trying to build a powerful body on a diet of McDonald’s, Pepsi, and Twizzlers, is akin to building a battleship hull out of corroded iron. If you can’t get serious about what you eat, get out of the gym. I follow the 80/20 rule. I eat extremely healthful 80% of the time, and don’t worry about the other 20%. The less fit you start, the more dedicated yo have to be. If you’re very overweight and extremely unfit, you need to follow the 100% rule; all healthy, all the time. Period. Don’t cry about fairness, it won’t help. As a fuel, the foods you eat (solid and liquid) all have their specific purposes, and understanding them is critical. Even the most wholesome foods misused can have a counterproductive effect if not properly applied. Every serious endurance athlete understands the importance of carb loading; where you consume vast quantities of mostly simple carbohydrates like pasta the day before the big race. Serious marathoners are extremely lean, carrying minimal body fat (reserve energy stores) to breakdown as the miles accumulate into the high teens. So they manipulate their diets to maximize the available energy on race day. If you don’t run over 100 miles a week, don’t eat like a marathoner, cause you’ll get fatter than a walrus in a well stocked zoo. 20 years ago everyone said eat all the pasta you want because that’s what skinny marathoners eat, now we say avoid all pasta! Both are stupid statements. The question is: how will eating all this pasta help me in my life’s pursuits! If it won’t, don’t eat so much. The strength athlete eats large amounts of protein because protein is what muscles are made of, and when trying to build bigger and stronger muscles your body needs these proteins to build your muscles into larger ones. If you don’t consume enough protein, your muscles simply cannot get bigger or stronger. It’s not magic. If you’re lifting weights with the correct intensity and not able to get stronger or bigger, it’s a pretty good bet you’re not eating enough protein. The most misunderstood food constituent is fat. Fat is neither good or bad. It is a very dense energy source and a necessary nutrient for a whole host of metabolic processes. Fat isn’t the villain in America’s obesity epidemic; people are the enemy of themselves. When it comes to weight control, what matters at the end of the day is how many calories you ate compared to how many you burned. The average 30-year-old woman burns around 1500 calories per day just staying alive. If her diet consisted of 720 calories of fat (80 g of fat; 1 g = 9 cal) and 600 calories split evenly between protein (60 g; 4 cal/gram) and carbohydrate (60 g; 4 cal/gram) she would be following a successful weight loss program! In 20 days, she will have lost 1 lb. Not the fastest program, but if we replaced all those fat calories (720) with proteins and/or carbs, her weight loss would be exactly the same. Fat doesn’t make you fat…eating too many total calories makes you fat and you not understanding your food makes you fat. Now lets not get into a debate of whether eating so much fat in a day is healthy in other ways, because that’s missing the point I’m trying to make.
  5. Rest is so basic and obvious that it’s absurd how little attention avid gym goers give to it, but the intermediate exerciser understands that the end of the workout is only the end of the beginning of the exercise process. For the endurance enthusiast or the strength training enthusiast sleep is understood as the point in your day when all the hard work is actually transformed into results. The results of your training and proper nutrition can only be realized after a good nights sleep. While asleep your body makes all the cellular and physiological adaptations to your body in response to what you did that day. If you don’t get good sleep, your improvement can be slowed, stalled completely, or even reversed into a negative (over training syndrome), when instead of performance improvements you see lower energy levels, lower endurance, lower strength, and more frequent injuries. Imagine if NFL players were required to play 3 days a week, or if every MLB team were only allowed to have 1 pitcher who had to pitch every single game. That’s obviously ridiculous because these athletes have a hard time going thru a regular season injury free. In my hypothetical, they’d be lucky to last a month before being permanently impaired. To a lesser intensity, that’s exactly what the majority of gym goers are doing to themselves, going from class to class to class, three to five hours a day, 5, 6, 7 days a week. Ms. Intermediate understands that if she gauges her intensity correctly she will be done with her workout in 45-90 minutes (unless a marathoner or other ultra endurance athlete) and she will eat properly and get her 7-9 hours of sleep.

In conclusion, you must master and implement at least 3 of these factors in order to achieve any real results, and 4 of them to be able to move on to the next level. Think about what I’ve said. If you’ve been spinning your wheels in beginner land for more than 6 months, you need to implement the steps above to get to the next level. Good luck.

Tired? Watch What You Eat: Scientific American

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Interesting research on the nutrition front.  As always, a study does not make a fact, but properly done and viewed in its proper context can lead to some important clues on the way to true understanding.  Health and Fitness professionals have known for a long time that people who sleep less (not including cocaine and methamphetamine abusers) tend to be more overweight than the general population.  There are probably a host of contributing factors that play into this observation.

I’ve always argued that, biochemically, food is the fuel for your body.  Everything you do requires energy, even the things you don’t consciously control.  Breathing, heart beating, twitching, thinking, are all energy-consuming activities.  Even the act of being awake is more energy-consuming than being asleep.  While this might sound like a perfect complement to a weight loss regimen; stay up as many hours as possible and think a lot; the reality is that the human machine never wants to run in an energy deficit, and it never wants to burn stored energy (fat) if it can help it!  The human body understands fat in a completely different way from your conscious mind.  Every drop of excess body fat is there to save your life, on a cellular level.

“But wait”, you might say, “doesn’t being overweight contribute to early onset cardiovascular diseases and diabetes”?  Yes it does, but only of you live long enough.  Your body, on the cellular level isn’t concerned about your health over 10 year periods.  It’s concerned with keeping you alive one day at a time, and it understands body fat as a protective mechanism to keep you alive as long as possible should you ever run out of food for an extended period of time.  A pound of fat is 3500 calories of energy to keep your heart beating, lungs breathing, and all your neurological functions functioning in the absence of food.  3500 calories can keep you alive for a week, assuming you at least have water.  That’s how your body views fat, and once it stores it away is loath to tap it.  It’s also important to remember that converting fat into usable energy is a metabolically slow process, and the brain, heart, lungs, and cells, need energy now, not in ten minutes.

It only makes sense then that should a person stay awake for overextended periods of time, the body will demand extra, new energy intake (food), to keep itself awake to continue whatever activities your engaged in, even if it’s just sitting in front of the tv,  vegging.  It only makes sense that the food your body will crave is food that will be hi in instant energy (sugar) and long-term dense energy (fat); the perfect combination of late night snacking to keep you up and to keep you alive for the next week or two.  Just don’t worry about the next few years…when you might drop dead.

Anyway, read on:

Tired? Watch What You Eat: Scientific American.

Results Orientated Training: the novice in the gym

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There are many variables for a beginner to think through when deciding how to start a training program in a gym setting.

The first thing a beginner needs to do (in reality, everyone needs to do this) is decide on a clear idea of what they want to accomplish.  Need to lose weight?  Build a little muscle?  Are you training for something specific, like a New Years resolution to run the NYC Marathon this year?  Have you decided to take up a sport or activity like tennis or cycling?  All of these considerations need to be taken into account if you intend on actually accomplishing anything in a reasonable amount of time.

For the teenager and young adult, it tends to be mostly about aesthetics and social mingling…wanting to look better and meet people.  For the 30’s-50’s somethings it tends to be some combination of aesthetics, mingling, specific training for a new hobby like tennis, and physical health.  And once we hit the 60+ category, health tends to take paramountcy, though aesthetics almost always remain in the background.  Humans never seem to stop wanting to look better… Keep in mind that there is constant debate among “experts” as to proper protocols and where to focus your beginning efforts.  The main thing to remember is that as a beginner you need to develop a foundation of general fitness, as I’m assuming you’re starting from scratch, out of shape, and in a state of complete “de-conditioning”.  That means you need to develop a baseline of aerobic fitness (think endurance), and musculoskeletal strength and coordination.

Many trainers will argue that you should start on exercise bikes or elliptical trainers and weight lifting machines, as these pose the lowest risk of accidental injury.  I cannot agree with the latter.  Weight lifting machines are important tools, but they do nothing to train foundational core coordination among all the normal musculoskeletal interactions that occur in real life movements.  They are safer to do in the gym (from the health club’s liability perspective), but many experts (myself included) would argue that learning and depending on machines in the beginning leaves you more vulnerable to injury in real world situations because you don’t learn how to coordinate you body movements and your muscular system when you need to do some actual pushing or pulling.  If you don’t know what your doing, hire a good trainer for a few lessons.  It doesn’t have to be a long-term commitment if your goal is to learn how to do a few exercises correctly.  If you make it a priority, almost anyone can afford 3 or 4 hours of proper instruction.

Also, if you have any pre-existing medical conditions or are starting out in your 40’s or older you should get yourself a good medical check up first. So let me take you through some exercise recommendations for the novice.   Commit to 45 minutes/day, 4 times a week.  And Don’t tell me you can’t fit that in, cause my bullshit detector  will go off.  It doesn’t matter if you’re tired after work, or a have a little muscular soreness from a previous workout at this level.  Just show up and do the best you can.  Any four days will do.  Stick to this order.  Follow this routine for 4-6 weeks.  Don’t get fancy.  Don’t improvise.  And make sure you eat properly with quality proteins, carbs and unsaturated fats.  If you’re trying to lose fat weight, cut down on portion sizes.  If you’re trying to build and gain muscle weight, add 1 or two high quality small meals to your day.  That’s it.  No magic formulas.

  • Day one: bike or elliptical for 45 minutes.  At level one, get your rpm (bike) or strides per minute (spm; elliptical) to about 80.  Stay there for 10 minutes, then gradually begin increasing the level of difficulty by one, every 60-120 seconds (resistance or level) while maintaining a steady 80 rpm/spm.  When you start huffing and puffing in order to continue, reduce your resistance down to a more comfortable level (not necessarily all the way down to 1 again) until your breathing becomes almost comfortable and your legs stop burning.  Then repeat the process.  Do this as many times as you can fit in for 30 minutes, then spend the last 5 minutes cooling down at level 1 at a slower speed.  Done.  Please read my blog posts on intensity, before starting this workout, here, and also here.

Animated cartoon on a exercise bike, Svenska: ...
Animated cartoon on a exercise bike, Svenska: Animerad streckgubbe på en motionscykel. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

 

  • Day two:  Hit the weights.  Start with Dumbbell Squats.  You won’t know how heavy to go because you’re a beginner, so do a warm up set of 10 reps and see how hard it is to finish.  If it feels less than a moderately intense effort; 7/10 on a ten point scale; then grab a set of light dumbbells and try again after resting 60-90 seconds.  Keep trying until you determine that correct starting weights to use.  Then do 3 sets of 10 reps with 60-90 seconds rest between each set.  If you don’t know proper form, find a bench or low medium platform and sit on the edge of it while holding your weights.  sit with good posture, then stand up strongly, slowly returning to the sitting position on the edge, without relaxing completely, and repeat.  You are doing a “box” squat and all you need to do is remove the “box” when you get used to the movement pattern.
an exercise of thigh
an exercise of thigh (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
an exercise of thigh
an exercise of thigh (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Push ups come next.  Do a warm up set of 6-10 reps, rest for 60-90 seconds, then try to complete 3 more sets, 10 reps (or as many as you can finish if you can’t finish 10) each, with 60-90 seconds rest in between each set.  Push ups can be done modified (on knees) if proper form cannot be maintained.

an exercise of chest
an exercise of chest (Photo credit: Wikipedia

an exercise of chest

Next up are Lat Pulls .  Since a 1st timer won’t know how much weight they can pull, the first set is an experiment.  If you’re a male, try loading 50% of your body weight; if female try 30%.  Attempt to complete 10 reps.  If you cannot, make it slightly easier and try again after resting 90 seconds.  If you completed 10 reps, and could have continued to do more, make it slightly harder, so that 10 reps becomes a real challenge (see this link on intensity).  Do three fairly intense sets (7/10 perceived exertion), 10 reps each.

an exercise of upper back
an exercise of upper back (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
an exercise of upper back
an exercise of upper back (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Now it’s time for dumbbell shoulder presses.  Like all the others, you first need to determine how heavy your dumbbells need to be.  The same intensity rules apply.  If you’re female, grab a pair of 7.5 or 8 lb. dumbbells, a male should grab a pair of 10-15 lb. dumbbells.  Try to do 10 reps.  match the weight and the reps to the desired 7/10 intensity, and make any weight adjustments (up or down) you need to in order to get the proper workout.  complete 3 sets, 10 reps each, once the correct weight has been determined.  This exercise can be done seated or standing, but avoid supporting you back against anything, if possible.  Doing it without back support will enhance abdominal conditioning as well as the other associated muscles of the core.

an exercise of shoulders
an exercise of shoulders (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
an exercise of shoulders
an exercise of shoulders (Photo credit: Wikipedia

That is the whole weight lifting workout.  Every major muscle of your body has been stimulated to adapt and get stronger.  Once you’ve really learned it it won’t take more than 30 minutes to complete.  If you have energy left at the end, hop on an elliptical, bike, or treadmill and move at a moderate pace for an additional 15 minutes to get a little extra calorie burn and endurance training.

  • Day three repeats day 1
  • Day 4 repeats day two

Always remember to follow the intensity rules I’ve laid out in my previous blog posts (linked above, and here, here and here), for both weight training and cardio/aerobics training during the 4-6 weeks you will follow this beginner routine.

Results oriented training part 2: In The Beginning

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The most important things you can do to ensure your children grow up with the best chances for future physical fitness are:

1. Let your infants crawl as much as possible. Crawling is one of the most necessary elements to develop neuromuscular coordination and proprioception. Do not try to force your child to walk sooner than necessary. They will get up when they’re good and ready.  Remember, the vast majority of their future life will be spent sitting down, so let them develop those muscles and coordination skills early and innately.

2. Encourage any natural inclinations for athletic activity, matching your level of encouragement to their personal inclination; do not try to enforce your higher enthusiasm or desire beyond their own. This will lead to resentment, rebellion, and eventual refusal to participate.

  • Most children will enjoy sports if given the chance and proper encouragement; minus the unrealistic expectations of adults.  But some will absolutely abhor them, simply because they are so dis-inclined of those natural gifts that make anything we do joyful.  I never liked math, and avoided studying something that seemed so alien to me, while literature and history was engulfed by my mind.  Why is this concept easy to understand while the physical equivalent is somehow so difficult?  I was always a good enough athlete that I enjoyed overcompensating for whatever physical gifts I lacked.  But most children never will like participating.  It will be emotionally painful and physically uncomfortable.  That’s reality, as is occasionally failing at things and not doing well at more things.  Understand that creating the right environment using yourself as an early role model is no different that a child growing up watching their parents read a lot.  Those children are far more likely to become readers themselves, though they are unlikely to ever become Ernest Hemingway.

3. Be as fit as possible, yourself, and be seen enjoying fitness related activities as your children grow up. You want to maximize your chances of having an overweight child who develops adult onset diabetes at 11 years? Be unfit and disdainful of physical activities yourself.

4. You will never be able to eliminate junk food completely, so be wise. “Junk” foods are treats, and should not be allowed in uncontrolled portions. Don’t leave them around in easy access. A treat isn’t a treat if it’s normally accessible.

The next post will take us into the ages most commonly found in gyms and health clubs.

Seasonal Challenge!

fitnessgroan11 Comments
Aerobic In The City
Image by MR MARK BEK via Flickr

It’s easy to get complacent going into the holiday season. Distractions, food, family, friends, and parties all conspire to encourage us to put off making real fitness gains until the new year.

My challenge is this: let’s use the next 6 weeks to get into the best shape of our lives. Here’s my advice. First, if you need to lose weight, don’t focus on denial. Focus on content. Whatever you eat, enjoy. But only eat half of every meal. Only eat half of every desert. Only eat half of every snack. It’s not hard, at least it’s not if you believe you’re worth the effort it takes to pay attention to yourself.

Then follow these instructions regarding working out:

Identify your type:

US Navy 021101-N-5152P-003 Sailor trains aboar...
Image via Wikipedia

Are you an aeroboholic; someone who loves cardio to the virtual exclusion of other activities, even though you know you need weights too?

Are you an aerobophobic; someone who avoids cardiovascular exercise like the plague?

Now that you’ve identified your exercise personality type do this. Commit to 4 days a week minimum.

If you are a aeroboholic by nature, switch to 3 weight training workouts (not classes) and only do 1 cardio workout. If you can make it in more often, add 1 cardio, then 1 weight lifting. When you do your cardio, increase the intensity of your speed, elevation, and resistance, even if it decreases your duration a bit (keep 30 minutes as a bare minimum, however). When doing weight lifting, add an additional set to every exercise, and make that last set much more difficult than you are used too.

If you are a self identified aerobophobic you will, for the next 6 weeks, divide your workouts 50/50. Pick one aerobic activity that you dislike least (class or machine) and really push yourself hard. Continue to lift weights as normal twice/week. If you can add additional days, only add cardiovascular work, but don’t be afraid to do intense intervals. Sprinting can and will develop muscle.

In 6 weeks, both types will see dramatic improvement in terms of appearance and performance, when you eventually return to your normal routines.

Exercise is good for your brain!

fitnessgroanLeave a comment

Another great NY Times health article on the almost un-intended benefits of exercise: improved brain function as you age. Read it here:
http://nyti.ms/vj3Epu

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Location:Austin St,,United States