The Holidays are upon us with their abundance of stress and food. Here are 11 tips that will help get you successfully through the holidays without sacrificing your healthy lifestyle.
1. Don’t skip meals. Skipping meals leads to hunger, low energy and improper food choices. 2. Don’t pass up favorite foods or deprive yourself completely. Moderate consumption is the key. 3. Don’t go to the party starving. Before you leave home, eat something light or drink a meal replacement shake. Also, drink a lot of water the day of the party. 4. When you are at the party, don’t park yourself near the food table. Make a clear-cut decision to distance yourself from all the goodies. 5. Alcoholic beverages pack on the calories, so if you are drinking try a little moderation. Watch out for eggnog, it is incredibly high in calories and fat. 6. Just because it is the holidays doesn’t mean you should eat everything that passes by. Factor in the little extras into your daily intake. 7. Set limits on your sweet tooth. Then the next day just move a little more. 8. If you are staying with friends or family keep foods on hand to snack on like lean deli meats, low fat cottage cheese and meal replacement bars. 9. If you tend to overeat during family gathering, plan and visualize what and how much you will eat before you go. Plan additional daily activities for that day and the following. 10. Eat whatever you want on the main holiday feast. If you over-do it just go back to your regular plan the next day and move a little more. 11. Enjoy the season, not just the food!
Don't through away your hard work just because its the holiday's. Stay committed to being fit and if you have a bad meal or two get back on track the next day.
This might be the best knee dominant (leg) exercises I have ever done. For your next workout challenge yourself with this very effective exercise.
Start position • Keep your back in neutral alignment, ie not arched or rounded; • Maintain the weight centrally across your shoulders, ie at the top of an imaginary line drawn through the middle of your shoulders and hips; • Focus on maintaining the loading of the exercise on your front leg while pressing through the heel. • Place back on a box or bench.
Action (see below) • Bend your knees and hips, dropping your buttocks towards the ground to lower the weight (action 2); • Keep going until you reach a 60-90° angle of knee flexion with the front leg; • Extend the knee and hip of your front leg to push yourself back up to the start position.
Ok here it is, we have a couple really big months coming up. It's "HOLIDAY SEASON!" If your goals are weight and body fat loss I want you to do your best to loose 3-5 pounds by Nov. 25th. Yes, you can do it. Watch your calories in and calories burned very closely. Get an app for your Itouch or Iphone if you need a way to track them. you NEED to know that you are burning more then you are consuming! As for your workouts it time to kick them into high gear. Add big compound movements (squat press, squat row, reverse lunge row, step up curl press etc.) into a circut training workout to really increase your "afterburn". Two days before Thanksgiving and two days after try dropping your calories to around 1200 per day. This will help compensate for the influx of calories on Thanksgiving. Use this strategy for any other holiday parties or events. It's important to still get a good workout in during the low calorie day, event though you may not feel like it. The bottom line is don't be a victim of the holidays. Make it about enjoying time with your friends and family and not about the food.
Back in the old days, moms used to give their kids a spoon of cod liver oil for good health. Turns out moms were right: Generations later, fish oil is still high on the list of healthy supplements.
Fish oil may help reduce chronic inflammation in the body, a condition that contributes to a range of diseases. Whether you dine on baked salmon, snack on sardines, or take a fish-oil supplement, you’re providing your body with omega-3 fatty acids.
What is inflammation, and why is it so uncool? We’ve all experienced local inflammation: redness, swelling, pain, and heat. Think of a fingertip you’ve just accidentally hit with a hammer, an arthritic knee, or a cut that gets infected. A little inflammation in one small spot usually doesn’t do much harm, but a chronic inflammatory state throughout your entire body is trouble. In addition to upping your risk for physical problems, it can even affect your mood, aggravating mood disorders or mental illness.
Extra pounds, particularly around your middle, increase your risk of chronic, all-over inflammation. A big belly actually releases inflammatory molecules into your bloodstream where they travel from the lungs to the joints to the central nervous system, sparking inflammation wherever they go. And, along the way, they set the stage for plaque build-up on the walls of the blood vessels. Not cool at all.
Another risk factor is consuming the typical American diet, overloaded with processed foods, sugar, and unhealthy fats. These foods weaken your individual cells’ defenses against the inflammatory molecules. Over time, whole organs—and entire organ systems—can be affected.
Yet some healthy fats—oil from flax seeds and certain fish, for example—contain essential fatty acids (such as omega-3s) that may help defend your organs against inflammation by shoring up the walls of your cells, crowding out the harmful inflammatory molecules. Omega-3s may be helpful in supporting the health of your blood vessels, reducing your risk of stroke and certain types of heart disease.
Your body needs omega-3s but can’t make them on its own—if you want them, you must eat them. If lots of fish and flax seeds aren’t part of your daily diet, you may consider adding an omega-3 supplement. And lucky for you, you don’t have to take the oil by spoon anymore. It’s actually healthier to take omega-3s in the form of enteric-coated capsules, which break down in your super-absorbent intestines and help you avoid the dreaded fish-flavored burps.
When you’re shopping for an omega-3 supplement, take a close look at how much EPA and DHA it contains. The body cannot make use of the parent omega-3 compound (alpha-linolenic acid) as well as it can use EPA and DHA. The American Heart Association recommends that people without documented coronary heart disease (CHD) eat a variety of fish, preferably oily fish (salmon, tuna, mackerel, herring, and trout), at least twice a week. People with documented CHD are advised to consume about one gram of EPA and DHA per day, preferably from oily fish, although EPA and DHA supplements could be considered in consultation with their physicians. People who have elevated triglycerides may need two to four grams of EPA and DHA per day. If any of these conditions apply to you, consult your physician before using an omega-3 supplement.
Here’s a bonus: Regularly taking an omega-3 supplement may help you reach a healthy weight and size. In a 2006 study at the University of South Australia, researchers found that daily doses of fish oil containing omega-3 fatty acids, when combined with moderate exercise, helped obese people burn off more weight than those who didn’t get the supplement. Researchers believe the omega-3s increased the body's fat-burning ability by improving the flow of blood to muscles during exercise.1
Another more recent study from Japan appeared in the December 2007 issue of the Journal of Nutrition. Researchers reported that omega-3 fish oil reduced weight gain in lab mice by boosting their fat metabolism, and scientists believe it might work the same way for humans. When two groups of obesity-prone mice were fed high-fat diets, the mice that also got fish-oil supplements gained less weight and metabolized more fat than the group receiving no fish-oil supplements.2
If you’re concerned that you’re at risk for inflammation, ask your doctor for a blood test for C-reactive protein, which measures the amount of certain by-products of inflammatory processes in your body. In the meantime, omega-3-rich foods and supplements, plus a healthy diet and exercise, can help you keep your cool when it comes to inflammation. And that can keep you feeling better all over.
2Takuya M, Hidehiko K, Tadashi H, Tokimitsu I, and Takatoshi M. “Dietary fish oil regulates intestinal lipid metabolism and reduces body weight gain in C57BL/6J mice.” Journal of Nutrition. 2007. 137: 2629-2634.
I was out speaking to a couple of different corporate accounts this last week and the issue of time came up. That is not having enough time to come to the gym or to just simply workout.
I have always liked to address this by breaking it down to hours per week and then looking at how people utilize that time.
So 24 X 7 = 168 Hours in a week. No one wants to come in on the weekend because we have family, friends, etc… 168 – 48 (Saturday and Sunday) this leaves 120 hours over five days. Working 10 hours a day takes 50 hours leaving 70. Sleeping 8 hours removes another 40 hours leaving 30. Take 3 hours every day to shop, pick up the kids, cook etc… and you still have 15 hours left.
You only need 3 hours a week of training (30 to 40 minutes resistance and 20 minutes high intensity interval cardio) at the gym or less!!! The most important thing is to have a plan as to what you are going to do once you get to the gym and then executing that plan. OK so there is no way you are ever going to join a gym. If you just walked out your front door and moved for 30 minutes each of the five days we had left that’s only 2.5 hours a week. And you still have all weekend to do whatever you please.
I challenge you to “find the time” because if you are not investing some amount of time in your future health and wellness you will eventually not be as healthy as you would like.
The University of Michigan basketball team used this history lesson to motivate them to win enough games to get into the tournament. I thought it was such a great lesson it relates so well to achieving your fitness goals.
The words - which translates "Burn the Boats" are credited to Cortez, who brought a fleet of ships to the shores of Vera Cruz in 1519.
In order to inspire his men, he told them that once the attack was complete, they would take the enemy's ships. So he ordered his men to burn their own boats, creating an all or nothing mentality.
This may sound a little extreme, but it worked. Now you maybe asking yourself what in the heck does this have to do with fitness?
If you really want something, lose body fat and weight, gain strength or become better at your sport you NEED to have this "burn the boats" mentality. You need to attack it and give all you got. Once you have obtained the results you where looking for then you can think about moderation.
When you give yourself too many outs it is way too easy to lose focus and say "tomorrow I will eat better or exercise harder".
You are important and worth all the effort to become fit and healthy.
Too many people are working out only to become better at storing fat, not burning fat. We like to tell people that there cardio program is on LSD (long, slow, duration).
The more aerobic training you do (LSD), the more your metabolism can slow down, the more efficient your body will be at storing fat, especially if your are looking to gain some size in your stomach and thighs. Performing long bouts on your favorite treadmill, elliptical or even your favorite"aerobics" class day after day puts your body the perfect fat storing effect for the offer 23 hours of the day. This type of workout does nothing for metabolism either. You will burn off muscle which will lower your resting metabolism. Turning your body into the perfect fat storing machine.
So what can you do?
High Intensity Anaerobic Interval Training (HIIT) is your answer. It burns more calories than aerobic training and elevates metabolism significantly more than other forms of cardio. The downside is that it really sucks to do it!
In a study done by Tremblay on interval training;
Tremblay A, Simoneau JA, Bouchard C.
Impact of exercise intensity on body fatness and skeletal muscle metabolism.
Metabolism. 1994 Jul;43(7):814-8
This study pitted 20 weeks of endurance training against 15 weeks of interval training:
Energy cost of endurance training = 28661 calories.
Energy cost of interval training = 13614 calories (less than half)
The interval training group showed a nine times greater loss in subcutaneous fat than the endurance group (when corrected for energy cost).
Read that again. Calorie for calorie, the interval training group lost nine times more fat overall. Why? Maybe it's my new favorite word EPOC, (exercise post oxygen consumption). Others might refer to it as "after burn". Either way I don't care. I'm a real world guy. If the interval training group had lost the same fat as the endurance group, we'd get the same results in less time. That means interval training is a better tool in your fat loss arsenal.
So next time you start doing some cardio bust out some intervals. Whether it's a walk-run on the treadmill or raising and lower the resistence on the elliptical it does not matter the type only that you work very hard on the high end of the interval. Try a 2min work to 2 min rest for 14 minutes at your next session.
I want to start out this first blog on persistence. Because I can give you all the workout and nutrition advise I can but if you are not committed to achieving your goals it's all for not.
If you truly want to have success achieving your goals you need to start with the end in mind. Keep thinking about how good you will look and feel once you get there.
Here is my favorite quote about persistence is from Calvin Coolidge that I have on my office wall.
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; Nothing is more common the unsuccessful individuals with talent. Genius will not; Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
My name is Tony Lelack CSCS, I have been in the fitness industry for the past 16 years in Oregon.I have worked with everyone from high school and college athletes to the person who wants to loose weight and body fat. The one thing that I have learned over the past 16 years is that there is so much MORE to learn. My passion is truly helping people achieve what they had thought was impossible.
