Let’s face it, getting and staying in shape can be a costly investment. And, if you’re not careful, its greatest cost is the one commodity you could use the most of: time (keeping monetary costs in check is another volume, entirely). Yet, even many seasoned exercisers often have difficulty changing their bodies with regular workouts. And worse, many think the more hours spent training heavily, the better the result. Not true! Often this break-neck pace leads only to fatigue, burnout, and injury.

What most people also may not realize, there are several, easy ways to redistribute your time and create ’smarter’ workouts. These common sense, turbo-chargers cost little or no money, will help change your body in a positive way, and all without giving up a lot of time.

Here, I’ve given you four simple strategies that can help you turbo charge your workout (and your body), too:

Warm Up and Cool Down Sufficiently. In short: take 10. Strive to take 10 minutes before heavy exercise to get blood flowing with light aerobic activity (walking, or a series of slow arm and leg circles) to get the large muscle groups moving and prevent injury. At the end of your workout, try to opt for 10 minutes of light stretching, aiming at the major muscle groups: arms, back, chest, and legs. This will help re-absorb lactic acid (metabolic waste that builds up during exercise and can lead to soreness).

Drink More Water. Just eight-8oz. glasses of water per day will carry away waste and toxins from your body. It will also help keep you cool during exercise and replace the fluids lost during your workout (you will usually lose 1 liter per 1-hour workout).

Get Adequate Rest. The body requires a sufficient amount of sleep for rest and tissue repair (usually around 7-8 hours per night for the healthy person). Sleep also provides the body time to lower levels of bacteria in the body. It actually stimulates the immune system! If you can’t get your eight hours, try to take a quick 10-20 minute power nap sometime during the day.

Go Easy on the Starchy Carbs. Try to “balance” starchy carbs (cereals, breads, white potatoes, rice) with protein and veggie alternatives.

My own personal case study: Even though I’d been exercising for years, I couldn’t shake the extra 10 pounds I’d gained in college. I exercised for about an hour every day rotating my routine between cardio and resistance training. Did I need to exercise more? I wondered. Maybe, but I couldn’t fit another hour into the day. So, I took a good look at my diet. What I found was, every day I was loading up with starchy carbs! Lots of cereal and toast. Lots of potatoes and white rice. Resolve: Just by balancing my meals with egg whites, sweet potatoes, green leafy veggies, and lean meats, I lost what remained.

If you could use a Jump-start in you workout or haven’t seen changes in awhile, these four ideas are well worth your consideration. Plus, just by changing one small thing, you could make quite a difference in your shape. It will add a new element of vigor to your workout! So, reap the big rewards of these small changes, they will pay dividends on your investment.

About The Author

Laura Turner, Certified Personal Trainer has developed a series of health fitness and nutrition tips available at http://www.1brand-new-body.com ”

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Source: Get Fit

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Your aerobic threshold is the heart rate that will determine how to get the most from your aerobic workout. One of the questions I have been repeatedly asked by those new to aerobic exercise is how to tell if they are getting the most from their efforts. They are unsure if they are at the ‘right’ heart rate to get the most effective aerobic benefits.

First, a brief explanation of what ‘aerobic’ exercise is and why it is so important to your health. Your body converts food into energy by two very different forms of metabolism. Aerobic - with oxygen, and anaerobic - without oxygen.

Anaerobic metabolism is the creation of energy through the burning of carbohydrates in the absence of oxygen. This happens when the lungs cannot supply enough oxygen to the blood to keep up with the demands from the muscles.

Anaerobic metabolism is most generally associated with short, very intense, forms of exercise, mostly with weight training or sprinting. Anaerobic metabolism is crucial to increasing muscle mass. This why you will hear from weight lifters that they do very little, if any, aerobic types of exercise.

The biology of aerobic and anaerobic metabolism is very complex and with very little research you can quickly become lost in the complexity without a degree in biology.

I am going to simplify this complex process as the vast number of people who are interested in improving their health are not necessarily interested in becoming biologists.

The primary fuels used by the body for energy are glucose and fatty acids, with protein used when the first two are depleted. The first two are burned by the body aerobically during most of our normal activity, including moderate exercise. When the activity intensity reaches approximately 80% of the maximum possible the body switches to anaerobic metabolism.

Aerobic metabolism is very efficient and produces few negative byproducts. This is not true of anaerobic metabolism which produces lactic acid which causes muscle pain and is the reason our muscles ‘burn’ after intensive weight training.

Aerobic metabolism is like burning natural gas, clean hot flame with little waste.
Anaerobic exercise is like burning old tires, with lots of thick sooty smoke. Which one do you think is better for your body?

As long as you can breath without gasping for air you are burning your fuel aerobically. There are different formulas for figuring out your ‘correct’ aerobic threshold. Look on the wall of most gyms and you will see one of these formulas on a chart comparing age with intensity.

These charts are clinical formulas based on countless measurements of people exercising at different rates to come up with an average. These numbers are good as a general indicator, especially when first beginning your exercise program.

Far more accurate is your own personal aerobic threshold and you can figure this out fairly easily. Your own personal number is the heartbeat you have when you first become breathless…when you can no longer tell someone your name without gasping for breath.

This is the level that you will get the most benefit from your efforts. Keep your heart rate a few beats per minute below the point where you are beginning to gasp for breath. You need to maintain this level for a minimum of 15 minutes to attain the benefits of aerobic exercise.

Clinical studies have shown that doing aerobic exercise at least 3 or 4 time a week will increase the left ventricle- the chamber of the heart that pumps the freshly oxygenated blood into the body - by 15% to 20%. It will do this in four to six weeks!

As you continue to train your body you will be able to do more work, or go longer without exceeding your aerobic threshold. This very positive feedback will be helpful in keeping your commitment to stay with your program. You will have proof that your efforts are having a positive effect.

Another very important benefit of aerobic exercise is that when you have substantially raised your heartbeat you are moving a lot of blood through the body. This improves the nutrient flow to the cells and helps to get rid of waste materials that accumulate during normal cell function.

It also helps to move hormones and other necessary complex chemicals produced by some cells for the benefit of other cells located throughout the body. The cardio-vascular system, and its health, is the single most important factor in your good health.

The author has been an aerobics instructor for over 28 years. He has taught classes for private health clubs and has been a Certified Group Instructor for the Y.M.C.A. since 1980. He is currently developing web sites focused on Health and Fitness.

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Source: Aerobic exercise

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Being a busy person that is constantly on the go does not mean that you don’t have the time to stay in shape and keep your body fit while you are traveling. Unfortunately, the excuses we make do not keep us in shape nor able to keep up with the high demands of a busy life. If you join a health club, you would be making a great decision and a much easier way to stay fit.

Many health clubs offer the same types of services in other facilities. Some even have guest passes to specific spas and athletic clubs around the country. Another way to stay fit while traveling is to stay at a hotel that has spas and sporting facilities. If your hotel does not offer these things, it is highly possible that the hotel itself has spa and exercise arrangements elsewhere.

To get this information, ask a clerk at the front desk and he/she is sure to provide you with the information you need. Today, many hotels have treadmills or other exercise machines. This will help keep you active and fit. It is also important to remember that most cities or towns have a YMCA or a YWCA. Search the Yellow pages and give the facility a call. When traveling, there are many opportunities you can take to stay fit.

At times, the specific location you are in might not offer any type of exercise facility or spa for you to visit. If this happens, you can be creative and turn your hotel room into your personal gym. Before you leave to go on your trip, bring along some hand weights, exercise bands, and any other type of exercise equipment that is travel friendly. With all of these items, you can easily turn your hotel room into a gym.

Use your elastic bands are a way to achieve resistance. While in your hotel room, use furniture such as chairs or beds that will help you work out. Depending on the furniture in your hotel room, you just might want to stick to body weight exercises. These are also great ways to keep your fit and in shape. To do this, find ways to combine pushups, legups, and crunches. Though these exercises do not exercise a huge range of muscles, you will still be able to work your heart and continue to build up your endurance.

When traveling, I think we all understand that working out is not the easiest thing to put into a busy time schedule. Many people who travel have very tight time frames and do not also have time to add in a complete workout session. Fortunately, there are many other ways to still exercise in order to keep your body fit. You can simply try stretching in your hotel room or taking a long walk around the hotel or town you are visiting. Many hotels today also have swimming pools. Go for a swim.

Swimming is a great exercise that is able to work the majority of the muscles in your body. You can relax and exercise at the same time. Since there are so many ways that you can work out while traveling, you shouldn’t have an excuse for not finding some way to exercise and keep your body fit. It doesn’t matter what time you work out, just find 20-30 minutes per day to do some sort of exercises, no matter the type. Even if you cannot do the exact some workout routine you are used to, switch it up a little. Any exercise is good exercise.

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Source: Wellness

Popularity: 59%

Personal fitness implies not only the acquisition of certain physical skills but the ability to withstand the emergency demands of everyday living. Certainly, a personal fitness enthusiast could reasonably expect to survive a sprint for the bus or a bout of early morning driveway shoveling. Unkind, indeed, would be the Fates to deny such rewards.

People sleep better, think better, digest better, and feel better when they are in shape.

They have more confidence, too. There are very few medical studies in depth to prove these statements—for some reason research men have laid greater emphasis on other areas. But they are true. Talk with friends who regularly participate in sports, try some form of exercise yourself—the proof is there. Corroborating evidence abounds. Labor leaders have long known this. One medical report, for example, chronicles the result of a specific labor-management dispute. The union representatives had, under duress, maintained a vigorous program of fitness. The management people had not. The wrangling lasted days, with long and wearying sessions. Stalemate after stalemate was the order of the discussions. Slowly but surely the management men became fatigued. At that point the well-conditioned, union people were able to extract concessions previously not possible. Perhaps winning and losing or dollars and cents should have nothing in common with personal fitness, but they do.

The final personal fitness extra is a touchy subject. Not only do fit people have fun and gain satisfaction from their skills—they look good. Vanity and pride sometimes are not regarded as “nice.” But they play a tremendously important and beneficial role in our society. They stimulate us to study more, work harder, give more freely, and look better. There are many ways to put a best foot forward. A clean, crisp, neat, trim appearance is one. Men want to appear more manly and women more feminine.

This is part of human nature. Looking better is fun. And it is “nice.” Narcissism can be overdone and often is. But we are not concerned with Muscle Beach. A little bit of honest pride in one’s clothes, haircut, fingernails, and figure is socially acceptable. People spend time and money on their appearance, yet pretend they do not care. Nonsense! This is not an admission of a crime. Why not look better? And what easier or more economical way than through fitness?

Sports activities do have an effect on ego. G. Hambridge in his book TIME TO LIVE Adventures in the Use of Leisure succinctly summarized this as follows:

The experience of the spectator is mild compared with that of the player, which is the reason games should be played, not watched from a grandstand. At the risk of uttering a blasphemy, I wish to remark that catching a fast ping-pong ball and returning it with precision gives a pleasure not so far removed from that a painter feels when he makes a good stroke with his brush on canvas.

That is one of the reasons why athletic games are so valuable for those of middle age and beyond. The game not only keeps the body supple and in “good tone”—which, after all, calisthenics would do; it subtly flatters the ego with a sense of mastering new and difficult things. All of us need that kind of flattery on occasion. We get it in games no matter how modest the skill required.

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Personal Fitness means many things to many people. Unfortunately, when most people say they are healthy, they really mean that at that particular moment they are free of any known illness, do not have symptoms, and have a feeling of well-being at rest. Absence of disease is a negative definition of health and fitness.

Adequate personal fitness allows the individual to perform his daily chores without interference by fatigue, to have sufficient physical reserve to meet unexpected emergencies safely, and to have enough extra energy to enjoy leisure time. It is positive in its implications and thus can be attained and maintained only by activity, not by rest.

While personal fitness is easily defined, it is difficult to measure, particularly after college years. If one strives toward being fit, it is only fair that one should be able to assess how far along the road to fitness he has travelled. He should be able to say, “I am fit” or “I am not fit” or “I am getting there.”

However, the human economy, being in a constant state of internal and therefore fairly invisible flux, is not amenable to the measurements available to evaluate, for example, the federal economy. There is no convenient metric or decimal appraisal of fitness, no series of figures which can be fed into an adding machine with a slip of paper stating, “You are 86 percent in shape” or, worse, “You are 2 percent fit.”

Many excellent tests have been devised to set up standards of personal fitness for specially designated groups. At the service academies, for example, officer candidates must perform an irreducible number of push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, dips, rope climbs or shuttle runs (these vary from year to year) if they are to pass the physical fitness requirements of these academies. Likewise, most school systems have adopted a variety of fitness measurement programs in an attempt to bring all students up to an at least acceptable lower limit.

Present formal testing methods are beset with problems which render them of only limited general applicability. First, the standards proposed apply to minimum degrees of fitness. If a cadet can “pass” his fitness test, he is safe. There is no urgency for him to do his best; merely to “pass” is sufficient. An isolated instance is the swimming requirement of a well-known university. Here undergraduate students are required to swim one hundred yards in the pool before receiving a degree. This admittedly is better than no swimming requirement at all. But it falls far short of insisting that students must continue to swim, say, once a week after they have “passed” swimming. Gradations of fitness improvement should be encouraged, not merely reaching a minimum goal and stopping.

The second stricture of rigid and inflexible testing systems is that they apply to selected and specific groups. What might be good shape in junior high school would bring tears of disappointment at West Point. And what might be the absolute nadir at West Point would bring tears o£ exultation at a hospital for chronic diseases. Various tests may have great validity in comparing members of selected groups. Perhaps the range of personal fitness norms can be established for retired English bus drivers, Swedish lumberjacks, Annapolis plebes, and Boy Scouts. This is satisfactory for groups. But you are not a group. Groups may be homogeneous; individuals are not. It is fair to say that many tests can be adapted to different purposes by merely raising or lowering the minimum standards.

Popularity: 74%