Mar 01

Maintaining Healthy Eating Habits and Exercise when Traveling!

Establishing a stable Fitness routine centered around your work life can be a challenge.  A lot of the working population travel for either their work, their own business, or family life as well.  It’s already very challenging to establish a fitness routine on your own home grounds.  For those of you who already has a routinely scheduled fitness routine to where you do some sort of exercise routine 3 times a week, great job.  However, for the population who travels on airplanes or road trips and must stay in hotels for their work, going to different cities or different countries and maintaining a fitness routine on foreign grounds can pose a serious challenge.

When traveling interrupts your physical fitness routine and healthy lifestyle routine at home, one of the best ways to counter this obstacle in front of you is to PREPARE.  Preparation for healthy eating and exercise habits are two main components that can be managed and carried over for the individual who frequently travels.

Looking at the nutritional aspects of traveling and maintaining healthy dietary habits is always challenging.  One thing you can do to prepare yourself to avoid eating out at crappy restaurants on the road and avoiding foods that will put a halt in your healthy eating habit, is to first look at the city in which you are going to be traveling to and then do a quick Google search on something like looking for a healthy grocery store or healthy restaurants.  For example, you could just simply type into the Google search “Anaheim healthy restaurants” or “Portland Whole Foods.”  This is a great way to start the research process and prepare yourself for learning about a place where it is that you can obtain healthy foods that will not prevent you in your healthy lifestyle decisions when it comes to nutrition on the road for your job.

Not being able to exercise is always another obstacle that can prevent you from getting proper exercise when on the road.  Once again preparation is key.  Once again, use the Google search to look for hotels that have exercise facilities inside of them.  If those hotels have gyms, don’t be afraid to give a quick call to the front desk and ask them what type of equipment they have.  If it’s a hotel exercise room that has a treadmill, a floor, maybe a bench with a few dumbbells… then you can design a quick exercise routine that can be done!  Remember just spending 30 minutes to an hour in an exercise routine you can play huge benefits for people who are on the road and traveling and may feel limited to resources when adhering to exercise.

The other option is to do exercises in your hotel room.  If all else fails, you can stick to simple bodyweight exercises that require only your-self and the floor.  Exercise such as squats, planks, and push-ups can be programmed into an exercise routine that can give you a very significant benefit to maintain your fitness levels.

It’s true that exercising on the road may not be as beneficial to when you are exercising on your own home turf where you’re comfortable.  However, avoiding exercise is a lot worse than just doing 50% of your best.  Life throws a lot of obstacles in front of us that may keep us from adhering to a healthy lifestyle.  However, preparing for obstacles such as road trips and making sure that you have the proper tools to make Lifetime Fitness a priority in your day, you can make sure that you have a lifetime of exercise and healthy eating habits.

Feb 25

Shoulder Injuries- Core Exercise Modification: Swiss Ball Dying Bug

Shoulder pain from overuse or previous shoulder injuries can impede an individual from performing certain exercises in the prone position.  The prone position or “face down” position is where the arms are posted out underneath their chest or where one must hold their body weight over their elbows.  A great alternative to utilizing the core musculature to strengthen the abdominal, spine and shoulder muscles is to do supine exercises core exercises.  The supine position is when the body is positioned with the back against the ground.

A great supine core engaging exercise is the Swiss Ball Dying Bug.  Performing this exercise is a modification to individuals who may not be able to perform core strengthening exercises from the prone position to due various symptoms of pain in this position.  We all know that pain is not productive for optimum human performance, so let’s do what we can to ensure that we avoid pain throughout exercise and after exercise as well!

Here are few queues and how to perform the Swiss Ball Dying Bug:

  1. Position yourself flat on your back holding a Swiss Ball in between your hands and knees.  Your arms will be perpendicular to the ground and your knees will be bent at a ninety-degree angle with your thighs perpendicular to the ground
  2. It is important to ensure that you are putting your hips in a neutral position and actively rotating the crest of your hips toward your belly button and actively pushing the rib care toward the belly button and crests of your hips
  3. Maintaining this stable position extend the opposite arm behind you with the opposite leg in front of you. (e.g.  Right arm goes behind you in unison with the left leg going in front of you).  Repeat this for repetitions of 4, 6, 8 or 10.
  4. To modify this exercise, simply extend your arms and legs to where they are not so close to the ground. This will put less torque on your back and hips and not as much force production on your abdominal muscles.

This is a great exercise to put in any exercise routine because it not only strengthens the core muscles of the abdominal region, hips and spinal region, but it also adds a component of coordination training.  Coordination training is significantly important because it makes us more agile, athletic and reactive in our everyday lives.

So, use this exercise if you are experiencing shoulder pain and having problems doing planks or any other exercise in the “face down” position.  In addition, add to your exercise routine in general to help refine your fitness and human potential!

Feb 22

Desk Worker Lower Back Injuries: Solutions

Back injuries for office workers and any sort of job that requires you to sit for a prolonged period of time such as being a teacher, delivery driver, or any other desk jockey position are some of the most prominent cases in the “professional sitter” career. Back muscle weaknesses in the desk jockey professions that lead to injury and discomfort and lack of performance in general throughout someone’s everyday life activities during their job.  Often, back injuries are caused by static positions where the orientation of the muscles are lined up for a long time sitting in a certain position. For example, sitting for 1-2 hours at a time. Not only can sitting in a certain position for a prolonged period of time encourage the likelihood of an individual forgetting to line themselves up in the correct posture, but also bad habits will start to form that will carry you through other activities during an individual’s day.  This will increase the likelihood of back injuries occurring for the desk worker population.

One way to counter this is to focus on local muscular endurance of the supporting back muscles of the spine.  Sometimes it’s the lack of muscular endurance that the back has that will lead to atrophy of the back muscles and then cause a detrimental shift in the person’s posture, leading to back injury and pain.  Therefore, a simple solution would be to work on some exercises that are not in the vertical sitting position that will help improve endurance of the back muscles.

A great example of this is a version of the plank exercise.  Either a straight-arm plank or a standard elbow plank being executed for 30 seconds once a day for three times a week will significantly help the muscular endurance of the back muscles.

So, a good solution to is not only reminding yourself to maintain proper posture throughout the day, but also implement an exercise that exposes some of these weaknesses in your back and your posture.  One of these exercises that will make you feel sensations of muscular engagements of some of the areas that is the simple plank exercise.

It’s very important to make sure that you have correct posture while you’re sitting.  Ensuring that your shoulder blades are over your hips and your ears are in line with your spine are a great place to start.  Albeit, there may be a lot of other things to address… but we want to start out very lightly and fix some problems that may be starting from years of putting your body in a certain shape that is not necessarily beneficial to the longevity of your back.

Once again, a simple solution that involves exercise to increase a muscular endurance of your back is the plank exercise.  Maybe perform 15, 20, 25, to 30 seconds of plank once a day for just three times a week.  Practicing this maintenance routine will not only help the muscular endurance of your back but will also help to ensure that you have a maintenance routine inline that will encourage the mindset of maintaining Lifetime Fitness!

If you aren’t sure about how to perform the plank exercise, follow along with this video and learn!

Feb 14

Protein Shakes, How Important are They? : Weight Loss, Lean Muscle Gains, Convenience, and Healthy Alternatives

Protein shakes these days receive a lot of attention due to the high amount of protein in a very small serving size.  Protein shakes consist of protein powder which is purchased in the form of a large container of about 30 servings.  One serving is about 20 to 30 grams of protein and comes in the form of just one scoop being placed inside of water and then either stirred or shaken and then consumed in liquid form, making it a quick and convenient way to consume a high protein meal in a matter of seconds.

There are times in which protein shakes are very beneficial.  Perhaps when someone is in a rush and they need a quick meal, a protein shake is a great option to turn to.  In addition, sometimes protein shakes are utilized in the form of a meal replacement in the place of a meal to where only protein is absorbed as a fuel source removing fats and carbohydrates from that meal.  While protein shakes are useful in the sense of convenience and replacing meals. They are not always necessary.

The high content of protein inside of protein powders can sometimes be too much protein in one setting for an individual utilizing protein powder as an extra source of protein and or a meal.  If a person has not worked out efficiently, the body cannot absorb protein as efficiently, leaving excess calories from the protein being unabsorbed by the muscles.  The extra protein that lays around goes right to the fat cells.

While protein shakes are very appropriate and probably necessary in the athletic arena of a high school, college, or professional athletes who are practicing one the two times a day and then doing a form of strength training one to two times a day on top of that, you can see you where an extra amount of protein will benefit them.  Athletes in this scenario burn two to three thousand more calories per day then that of the general population, which are the people who work 8-hour days and have careers in some sort of job within our civilization.  Therefore, athletes participating in these demanding conditions can absolutely benefit from the increased amount of protein in their diet to rebuild the muscles that have endured a significant amount of stress.

The individuals of the general population do not necessarily need a supplementary version of protein if a well-balanced diet of protein, healthy fats, and carbohydrates is practiced throughout the day.  Adhering to a diet plan which takes in his into consideration eating 5 to 7 meals a day and having equal amounts of protein, carbohydrate, and healthy fats would be more beneficial than utilizing protein powder and making a shake.  Practicing these healthy lifestyle factors will help lose weight and build lean muscle.

In addition, protein shakes are not the most wholesome form of consuming your meal.  The emulsifiers and additives present in protein powder meant to stabilize the powder consistency inside of the protein shake are ingredients that only someone in the food manufacturing industry or a biochemistry class can understand.  Therefore, these extra ingredients that are unidentifiable are mysterious pieces of matter that you are putting into your body.  More often than not, it’s usually better to consume the food products in which you know what they are and where they come from.  Consuming unprocessed foods will also help reduce the risk of gastrointestinal issues, allergies to gluten and dairy, and reduce inflammatory factors that could cause cancer as well.

A good alternative to protein powder is creating your own version of a protein shake.
If you have a blender this is a great recipe to use in the form of a protein shake:

1 banana

1 Tablespoon Chia Seeds

1 Tablespoon Almond Butter

1 Raw Egg

1 cup water

-Put these all in a blender and blend until smooth!

This protein shake is ideal for after you are done doing any sort of work out that last 30 or more minutes.  The banana will serve as healthy carbohydrates in which your body needs to use as energy when rebuilding muscle and transporting protein to the muscle cell that has been stressed from the workout.  In addition, you have three other sources of protein which are the Chia seeds, almond butter, and raw egg.  The egg, almond butter, and chia seed will also act as a source healthy fats to add into your meal.

Don’t get me wrong, protein shakes are not the worst thing in the world.  In fact, they helped a lot of people lose weight.  However, if you’re looking for a more wholesome approach to a meal that has not been processed, packaged, preserved, and put into a container… it’s always better to get your nutrients such as protein, carbohydrates, and healthy fats from a meal that you can create yourself.

Feb 06

Adding Variety to your Core Training Program while utilizing the Posterior Pelvic Tilt: Eccentric Leg Lifts!

 

Exercises that support your abdominal muscles in the supine position can be a very safe and useful way to train the musculature of your core and trunk region.  One of the reasons why performing a core exercise in the supine position is because you must learn to properly utilize a posterior pelvic tilt while doing this exercise to execute the technique correctly and efficiently.

When laying on the ground and rolling the crest of your hips toward your rib cage, the body will use more of the surface abdominal muscles and deeper abdominal muscles, like the psoas muscles.  A posterior pelvic tilt while on your back will also flatten out the lower back, which will decrease the likelihood of back injuries occurring during this exercise and in everyday life.  Additionally, flattening out the lower back will teach your body to position your hips in a proper position when laying down and facing upward.  It is important to learn how to position your hips in a posterior pelvic tilt because you are essentially utilizing your glutes to roll the crest of your hips toward your ribs and utilizing your deepest psoas muscles to stabilize the spine as well.  Learning to utilize these muscles is very important when standing because you will support your spine and learn to keep these muscles engaged throughout the day which will lead to less injury and less fatigue and in your abdominal and back muscles.

The video featured in this article shows an Eccentric Leg Lift.  The word eccentric refers to the lowering motion of an exercise or the lengthening of a specific group of muscles.  In this case, the eccentric motion is the lowering motion of the legs from an elevated position and focuses on the core musculature which supports the legs from falling to the ground with gravity acting as resistance.  In addition, eccentric movement causes more muscle adaptation to a fewer group of muscles, which will significantly improve muscle cell size and endurance of areas of the core region that are sometimes neglected.  This is a great exercise to throw into your abdominal training routine because it will break the monotony of doing your standard ab training routine.  Variety overtime is very important to any sort of training, in this case specifically abdominal training.  Adding a new type of stress on the body will cause the body to adapt to that type of stress from the exercise that is placed upon it.  Therefore, after doing a few weeks of the same core movements, it’s a good idea to change it up.   Throwing the Eccentric Leg Lift in to your abdominal routine would be a great exercise movement to add into your program if it does not involve any sort of eccentric training.

Lastly, the Eccentric Leg Lift is very beneficial for people who have low back problems because you are lying flat on your back and avoiding sheering forces on your back due to the support that the ground gives you.  In addition, with learning how to properly utilize the posterior pelvic tilt, the ground is a great place to start as well.  The eccentric movement also calls for a lower rep scheme but increases the time under tension, which means that performing less reps will decrease the likelihood of some sort of tweak or strain occurring throughout the movement.  When you’re not sure, slower is usually better. You will also see a few modifications of this exercise and the video that will decrease the difficulty of the exercise and still make the exercise effective with less difficulty.

Jan 29

Core Muscle Endurance and Strengthening: Medicine Ball Pull Through

The Medicine Ball Pull Through exercise is a great core exercise to add into your program to develop strength in the rotary muscles of the center and trunk region of the body.  Performing this exercise will not only be a strong exercise for the core, but is a great exercise for the arms, shoulders,  glutes and some lower body stabilizer muscles of the hips knees and ankles.

 

When performing this exercise, ensure to press your supporting arm into the ground to utilize your shoulders and arms to stabilize your spine so that your spine stays rigid as you pull the medicine ball across the mid line of your body (like demonstrated in the example).  Pushing your supporting arm into actively into the ground will activate the muscles that stabilize your shoulder blade (the pecs, traps and other muscles of scapular stabilization) and also activate the triceps muscles as well to ensure that your arm is a actively stabilized position.

 

In addition, it is important to make sure that the crest of your hips are square to the ground and tucking them toward your rib cage.   This is what we call a posterior pelvic tilt. To achieve this, make sure that your ribs are inline with the crests of your hips, your spine is in a neutral position, and you are utilizing your glutes to stabilize your hips.  Another great queue to ensure that your spine remains in a natural and braces position is to keep your core engaged by depressing the rip cage toward the belly button.  It is also important to ensure that the back of your head is inline with the back of your body and your forehead and parallel to the ground.

 

To modify this exercise, you can perform it from your knees as opposed to having your legs fully extended.

 

A contraindication to this exercise would include an individual who has wrist problems such as carpal tunnel, previously broken wrists or a wrist/hand injury that might put a strain on the wrist while posting out in the prone push up position for this exercise.  To modify this exercise due to wrist trouble, you can utilize push up stands or Yoga blocks to brace your put the hand in a more comfortable position.  If nothing else helps the wrist for this position, it might be a good idea to omit this exercise from your program.

 

Start with 4 repetitions and move up to 6,8 and possibly 10!

 

This core exercise is a great compliment to any sort of program in which you do not have a core exercise in the prone position.  In addition, you will be training muscular endurance of the muscles surrounding the spine, which is a critical component toward decreasing the likelihood of lower back pain and injuries occurring.

Jan 18

Eating Out with Friends and Over Eating- Pick a Number and Stick with It!

Sometimes I talk to clients about the pressure of making healthy food choices when you are out with friends for drinks or some sort outing such as employee functions, family parties or other social events. When there is delicious food like buffalo wings, bread, or cheese fondue out… one wants to partake in the festivities that the event is offering.  In addition, there might also be beer, wine, and other mixed drinks that probably aren’t the healthiest for the human body to consume in massive quantities.  When confronted with the situation, some people feel that it may be rude to not partake in some of the delicious food that is being offered for the social events.  Consuming too much of this food can play a big impact on your goals to maintain healthy weight and lean muscle.

So, what can you do in this situation?

A good solution instead of completely abstaining from everything and eating a green salad and drinking water every time you go out, would be too pick a number of the amount of snacks that you want to eat.  For example, if there are fried egg rolls in front of you that was made by one of your favorite employees or bosses or friends… pick a number, like two, and eat just two over the whole night instead of just grazing aimlessly the entire night on random snacks.  Grazing will lead to overconsumption and you won’t even know how many items of food you’ve eaten.

In addition, when it comes to alcoholic drinks pick the amount of drinks that you’re going to have.  Instead of just filling up drinks one after the other… before you go into the event, choose your threshold of drink capacity. An example might be one to two glasses of beer and/or wine, or maybe just one mixed drink over the whole night.

Social situations are always challenging when it comes to maintaining weight especially because a lot of social gatherings are surrounded around restaurants, drinking alcohol, and food. More often than not, the healthiest food choices are not available during these meetings in most social circles.  So use some of these queues to count the amount of items that you consume over the night and set a limit to it.  This way you won’t have to appear like you’re being rude to your host or the person who’s taking you out to eat.  And you can still maintain your health and fitness goals.

Jan 11

Should you take a day off from your normal training routine when you’re not feeling your best and just wait for the next day? No.

A hot topic that has been brought to my attention time and time again from clients is if they are not feeling 100% up to training on a day that they want to train should they take a day off or not.  Perhaps they had a long day at work. Maybe they had to work an extra hour or two…Or they broke up with their girlfriend or boyfriend the night before.  Sometimes these things might come into play and effect one’s attitude and make them not want to necessarily head to the gym.  So I get asked the question, “Should I just skip that day or should I give it 50% of my best?”

In my opinion, you should always commit to a day that you say you’re going to be working out.  There’s a few reasons behind this. One reason being that if you say you’re going to skip one day then that trend might continue to the next day.  Then you’ll have skipped two days in a row and not just one.  Just like many things that occur in progression, if you do more of one thing it’s going to lead to the probability of the other thing occurring more often… and you’ll build a habit out of skipping.  In this case, skipping a gym day completely due to some unsuspected circumstances that may affect your mood or your energy levels will lead to another day of skipping.

Therefore, a good way to turn feeling crappy about heading into the gym to the positive, the best solution would be to go to the gym and give your best efforts.

So what if you feel a little depleted? At least get started and go through your warm-up routine and go through the proper exercises that will help you feel better walking out than when you walked in.

There is a similarity to the above-mentioned about “skipping days leads to skipping more days.”

Showing up and giving your best will lead to more days of showing up and giving your best. 

Not only will you feel better leaving the gym then when you walked in you’ll also probably remove some of that negative energy that has been haunting you all day.

When you have qualms about skipping days at the gym and not showing due something not going right in your day, the best thing to do would be to follow through with your commitment to your health and fitness.

Everyone always says the hardest part of staying in shape is showing up right?  Well the easiest way to get out of shape is to just not show up at all.  So do yourself a favor if you’re feeling a little crummy. Give your exercise routine the best that you can give every time that you get in to your workout. Unless you’re shivering from a fever, have a broken leg or bleeding profusely… there’s no reason you can go in and get some physical activity in to improve your journey to Lifetime Fitness.

Nov 28

Holiday Eating: We Don’t Need to Gain 5 Pounds this Season… Gain 2 Pounds Instead

It’s holiday season coming up with Thanksgiving and Christmas right around the corner.  This means lots of awesome spreads of food from your favorite relatives and friends.  This usually means that you get a giant plate of food at the buffet table or served to you at dinner with the family.  Holiday traditions such as gingerbread cookies, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, sweet potato casseroles and copious amounts of turkey and ham with mashed potatoes and stuffing are all over the place.  You might find some of these items at your offices as well or your place of work.

With all of these delicious items literally put right out in front of you, it’s hard to say no.  Trust me, I’m an advocate of eating large amounts of food throughout the holidays. I’ve been known to cook some pretty epic food and also be the champion eater at every holiday event.

This could be a recipe for disaster if your trying to lose weight.  With all of these delicious food items around and the pressure of having to eat these items because your relatives or friends made a certain dish, it makes it really hard to try to watch what you eat.

So, what is a good way to mitigate the damage of eating unhealthy Foods that taste delicious and still maintain your weight?

Here are a few recommendations:

1.  Track your weight: I always find it amusing to see how much weight I gained after a holiday meal.  In order to maintain a healthy weight and not gain too much fat mass, it can be a good idea to utilize the scale to track your body weight.  Instead of gaining 5 pounds throughout the Thanksgiving or Christmas week, shoot for your maximum threshold of weight gain to be around 2 to 3 pounds.  Being mindful about the amount of body weight that you are at will help you with your food choices and how much food you are eating.  This could also help with overeating during the holiday feast.

2.  Make sure to pack plenty of vegetables on your plate.  When you see that there is a side dish of green beans or a salad of some sort, this will help curve your appetite a little bit and also supply your intestinal tract with plenty of fiber to digest food little more efficiently.  Once again this is a great way to help with overeating during the holiday feast.

3.  Take a walk after you consume a ridiculous amount of food.  Just sitting down after you eat might be a good way to go back to the table and eat more food.  Keeping your body active and in motion will be a good way to curve your appetite as well.

The holiday season is a great time to get together with family and enjoy food together.  Food has always been a great method of bringing people together.  Let’s use food to bring people together and enjoy some good conversations and try not to use it as a gluttonous way to punish our bodies.

Nov 23

Hiking and Inclined Walking: Super Effective Method to Burn Fat and is Easy on Knees!

Getting out and enjoying the outdoors at a local hill or mountain is a good way to improve your cardiovascular endurance and boost your fat metabolism. Hiking up a hill is a great form of exercise because it is in the category of what we would call “inclined walking.”  Inclined walking puts positive stress on the muscles of the lower body that is very similar to that of prolonged jogging or running routines.  By putting stress on the lower body during inclined walking, heart rate responses will increase and your Aerobic Energy System will kick in.  This means that by utilizing the Aerobic Energy System, you will be going into a intra exercise fat burning mode.

The benefit of inclined walking is that it will put less stress on the knee and Ankle joints due to the angle of force that is being put upon the feet and knees when hiking uphill.  Don’t get me wrong, running is a very beneficial form of exercise.  However, for the population that suffers from knee pain issues such as arthritis, chondromalacia or some sort of surgical repair, prolonged running activities like jogging or interval running training on a treadmill can be detrimental to knee joints.  Therefore, by walking up a hill for a prolonged period at a slower pace can still give you similar heart rate responses than that of a prolonged jogging activity.

So, go get out your favorite hill and hike around and enjoy the views!  You will not only be doing a different form of activity in which you can experience beautiful landscapes, but you will also be utilizing your aerobic Energy System for fat metabolism and get a great lower body workout as well.20161113_113135

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