Wow, another month has gone by. What results have you had from your fitness routine? If you are at the same place as 30 days ago, what do you think you need to do differently?

Do you chart your progress?

OK, the last post talked about maximizing your results by using the principal of high intensity training. You want to get the most out of what you do, so you have to keep your intensity level high. Don’t slack off part way through your workout, don’t allow your mind to wander. You are at the gym (or in your home workout area) for a purpose, and that has to be your focus. Not what you need to do later in the day, not how your going to pay your bills, not your relationship status – focus on the workout. Period.

One expression that has stuck with me from my years in the military is the six P’s. Yeah, literally PPPPPP. This stands for Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. So what is your prior planning? Do you know exactly what you are going to do on any given visit to the gym? The more specific your plan, the more efficient your workout and the more likely you are to get the results that you are looking to attain.

So as you enter the doors are you thinking, incline dumbbell press, eight sets – ten reps each, 30 pound dumb bells, then flat bench, dumbbell flys, 35 pounds three sets of eight reps, then decline bench press, 85 pounds, two sets of ten reps. Or are you thinking, hmm, maybe a chest workout today. What should I start with?

I won’t lie, sometimes I don’t have my workout totally planned to the last rep and to the specific piece of equipment, but I do have a definite idea of what I want to do. I am not spending five minutes between each set trying to figure out what’s next.

The benefits of this planned speed workout are multiple. First, by working out quickly and efficiently you are actually getting a cardio workout at the same time you are doing your resistance training because your heart rate stays elevated. Second, that is burning more calories and raising your metabolic rate which is going to stick with you for hours after you leave the gym. Another obvious benefit is the resistance training itself which carries lots of further benefits, and lastly, you get more time in your day if you don’t wander around the gym trying to figure out what to do next.

Gonna Make You Sweat

I’ve talked a few times about doing HIIT, High Intensity Interval Training, while doing cardio. I absolutely believe that having intense bursts of highly concentrated effort makes the most impact on your health, and this is also part of the Seven Minute Muscle routine which I am totally following.

As a matter of fact I was talking with my youngest daughter about this last week. She’s nineteen and is concerned about fat. Concerned is a mild way of saying obsessed. Like so many young ladies out there she has been overwhelmed by the parade of ridiculously skinny models and actresses that a constantly in our faces in various media forms. The difference between my daughter and I is that I see them as unhealthy and unattractive while she sees their physique as some sort of goal that she knows she will never attain.

That has to be a bit disheartening for her, but realistically speaking a girl who’s 5’ 3” and is built like a normal woman is not going to ever have that super skinny 5’ 10” supermodel appearance. (I say thank goodness.)

But she can be super fit. Anyone (almost anyone) can be. So I was talking to her about the intensity level of her workouts, and the thing is she can’t really get a fast paced cardio because sports bras can’t meet the challenge. So she needs to get intense other ways – like increasing her incline on a treadmill, or packing a lot of resistance training into a seven to ten minute workout (via 7 Minute Muscle or something similar)

And the creator of the 7 minute thing recommended another fitness guru to me. I’m not going to disclose any names or information on this until I see results, but I have added a ten minute highly intense workout to my day. A fun part of it is that my daughter has made the commitment to join me in the workout. It is supposed to accelerate fat loss, and I have to say that after ten minutes I am dripping with sweat and breathing like I just ran a fast paced mile. Intense, yes, results? Well, we’ll see. It will be interesting to see how I compare to Stephanie. If a 47 year old man and a 19 year old girl both get good results, then I’ll know this “new guy” is on to something, and I’ll share more.

Until then, think about how you attack your workout. Do you spend lots of time at the gym, but most of it is wandering around? Or do you get in, get it done, and get out? Results are all about your intensity level. Until next time, take care.

You need ogygen and anti-oxidants..

The term anti-oxidant is heard in a lot of nutritional circles and you can find lots of foods and supplements that are labeled “high in anti-oxidants” but that description is totally subjective. It’s like describing someone as tall. If you are 5’ 10” you are tall in Japan perhaps, but not in the United States, so the key to terminology is having standards that are measurable and consistent. A key to that is having some sort of governing body that regulates that sort of thing. For anti-oxidants that standard is called the Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity, which is normally abbreviated ORAC.

The governing agency which will soon be validating these standards is the AOAC, Association of Official Analytical Chemists. This ensures that you are comparing apples to apples when you look at a label, because the way things are right now you could easily be confused by ORAC values that are listed on any given item.

How that happens is the same confusion you often see in regards to caloric content. You see calories serving size on a package of candy (or whatever) and think, “oh, this is only 120 calories” but upon closer inspection you see that the tiny package contains four serving. Yikes. This is misleading, but totally legal. I won’t get into the ethical question, but it certainly seems to be skirting that issue.

ORAC  values are kicked around in the same way. You are looking to get maximum anti-oxidant value for your dollar, and you need to be very careful how the information is presented. You may think an anti-oxidant beverage is giving you good value, only to discover that the per ounce value is much lower than, say, whole fruits. In addition to that whole fruits also provide more fiber and other important factors, but that, again, is another issue.

The important thing for the consumer to realize is that when you are looking at ORAC values, make sure that the portion size is taken into consideration. Anti-oxidants are very important for fighting the free radicals in your system, but if those anti-oxidants aren’t bio-available, you aren’t doing yourself any good. That is the “gold” in the ORAC system of measurement is that it takes that bioavailability into consideration.

For example, if you take iron supplements, it may list 45 milligrams on the label, but if your body does not take that 45 milligrams and get it into your bloodstream, it might as well contain zero. If that supplement is 50% bio-available, you are better off taking something that contains less iron, but crosses over into your bloodstream from your digestive tract more efficiently.

Measuring that efficiency, that bioavailability is the biggest benefit to ORAC. You may have noticed ORAC ratings starting to appear on items in the grocery store, or in your supplements. Hopefully with a little bit of information it will be more helpful to you as you make selections to maximize the health benefits.

If you are like many people you would like to see your abdominal area looking like the proverbial six-pack. And like many of those folks you may think that you can “sit up” your way to those abs, or maybe crunch them into existence and that is just plain impossible. Unless you have a low body-fat percentage those abs are never going to peek through for the world to see. Two problems arise with this quest.

Attainable..with effort and diet

The first problem is the disproportional exercise done to your core. Concentrating on your abs is a great way to do permanent damage to yourself. You have to think about your core (or any area of your body for that matter) as a balancing act, because that’s what it is. Consider someone walking a tight rope and one end of that balancing pole keeps getting weight added. Gradually they are getting twisted and bent over in the opposite direction trying to counter that additional weight.

Your body does the same thing, but you don’t see it externally until the damage has been done. You are working and tightening and strengthening your abdominal muscles and internally you are pulling your body forward at the waist. This is causing all kinds of stress on your spine and all the connecting tissues – tendons and ligaments. You have to work your lower back to compensate for any abdominal work you are doing, and if you think about it a shapely lower back is also quite a sexy attractive thing.

I stress this sort of thing all the time. You have to look at your muscles as a push-pull system, so if you look at any joint, there are two distinct muscles that work in tandem with each other providing the locomotion. You have to work these muscles proportionally – maybe not in the same day/same workout, but definitely proportionally.

Moving on to the second problem with the “ab quest” people tend to do the same exercises over and over again hoping that their persistence will pay off. Now don’t get me wrong I am all about persistence, but you have to mix things up to get results. The body is an amazing piece of equipment and it adapts extremely well to the tasks it is presented. So if you do the “same old same old” day in and day out your body will be less impacted by the activity.

You have to challenge your body by shocking it with something totally different every few times. This is why professional body builders (and others) do lots of variations for the same muscles or muscle groups. For the chest it might be something as simple as going from a flat bench press to an incline, or switching from a barbell to dumb bells. It can be just as simple as that for your core exercises. Look around the gym or around your home and think about how you can do things a little bit differently, and don’t forget that push-pull balance. That is very important for long term health.

Life is a balancing act...

This is sort of a continuation of the last post regarding slippery places. I realize that lots of those so called “slippery places” are somewhat unavoidable. In those cases you need to bite the bullet and really employ your will power to keep your diet and your life clean.

Let’s face it – without a balance to your life it would be pretty empty. Visiting friends and relatives and going to those special occasions – weddings, bar mitzvahs, birthdays, Thanksgiving dinners, etc, etc – are the things that make life worth while (at least in my book)

The trick, if there is one, is portion control. Do have a piece of wedding cake. If there’s a small one take that. If not, just ask, and they can cut you a small piece. Don’t take that large piece, it’s too easy to continue to pick at it until it’s all gone.

Life is about the fun, not about denial. Enjoy yourself and if you do over-indulge, just spend a little more time at the gym the next week or two. Having a day when you eat a bit more than usual can also help out your weight loss. Check out my post on cycling your eating.

Life is a balancing act...

There is an old saying that goes “If you don’t want to slip, don’t go to slippery places.” I don’t know whether I read this in a fortune cookie or in a psychology class, or maybe on the radio, but it sure is something we all need to wrap our thoughts around. What does it mean?

In the application of addiction, it is used to warn alcoholics to stay out of bars or any place where alcohol is served. This may not be as obvious as you may think. If you are going to a friend or relative’s house for a cook-out, they may have beer and/or wine at the party, then what do you do? If you are in the early stages of your commitment to a sober life, and have doubts about your strength, you may need to touch base with your sponsor or you may need to just make like a tree and get out of there. (An old corrupted metaphor, forgive me.)

This same analogy though can be applied to any sort of behavior, or it can even be reversed. Are you on a diet? Maybe you want to stay away from the bakery, if pastries are your weakness. Do you want a positive “slip?” Then perhaps go hang out at the gym and slip into some exercise. It’s hard to show up there and just watch, just like it’s tough to go to a bar and not drink.

Think about your life and where you slip. Should you modify your behavior in some way to keep yourself pure in some sense? This could be as simple as not watching the Home Shopping Network if you are compulsively spending money you don’t have on items you don’t need.

We all have our “guilty pleasures” and some of them don’t do any harm to anyone. You can have a piece of cake upon occasion and it won’t kill your diet. You can buy something on impulse if it doesn’t take away essential money from your budget. Things in moderation are fine for most people. The main idea though is to stay away from situations where you are going to be tempted by things you have serious challenges saying no to.

Improv Your Mind, and Laugh!

I had a long weekend. It’s Wednesday and I am finally sort of back in form. I performed this weekend at the Harrisburg Comedy Festival with my improv troupe, Dutch Blitzkrieg, and we did fairly well, as far as the competition went. Placed in the middle of the pack with 14 teams competing. The best part was that I was literally sore from laughing so much.

Oh, my goodness, so much funny in one room! I was exhausted from so much going on though, because there were about 14 hours of performances and another 8 hours of workshops. Monday I then had to drive to southern Delaware to pick up my daughter’s car that had broken down while she was on vacation. I then had a two hour round trip drive to Philly for a class I am taking there, but through all of it I laughed.

I’ve heard many times that laughter is the best medicine. It’s been proven through clinical trials that happier people and people who laugh recover more quickly, so I’ll say it. Steer away from things that bring you down. Whether it’s the bad news on the tv or radio, or a horror movie or whatever, stay away. Check out happy things.

You don’t have to be uninformed, but don’t wallow in it. Look at uplifting movies. Go to a beautiful concert or theater performance. Check out some improv comedy. Life is short. Be happy.

Let’s face it, you can work out until you are blue in the face (or more likely red in the face to be more realistic) but until those abs start peeking out from your midsection, you really haven’t reached the pinnacle of fitness. And yes, I’ll admit that for the average person having that six-pack is a fantasy that won’t ever come true. For people much past puberty it is a lot of work to have that happen. It’s just too much work.

But if you want to get that six-pack there are two ‘secrets’ that will help you to get there. The first and by universal agreement is diet. Diet really is the key to fitness in any sort of a workout regiment. Whether you want to run a marathon, help control cholesterol, perhaps impact diabetes or “merely” get in better shape, diet is about 85 percent of the battle. Your physical workout is going to have a definite impact – that’s where the definition and form all come into play, but your diet is going to make or break your fitness goals. Eating as close to whole foods as possible and having a truly balanced diet is extremely important. Eating smaller meals multiple times a day is the best routine for weight loss and increasing metabolic rate, but unless you are eating healthy at those meals, six times a day isn’t going to help you nearly as much.

The second part of our “quest for abs” is exercise. What exercises are you doing and how are you doing them? I wrote once before about how to get “really small muscles” and that article discussed in detail how people work most of their muscles to get them larger – think of large pectoral muscles on a man (larger pectorals can also increase breast size.) So why would doing a lot of exercise reduce your abdominal muscles? It won’t. That is a problem that some people have. They exercise their abs and obliques and then are surprised that they get larger.

What you want to do is short bursts of effort. This is generally referred to as High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) and lots of people just think about this with cardio-vascular training, but it really works well on the resistance training side as well. So think about instead of doing a slow and steady three sets of 25 or 50 reps (or whatever you are comfortable with, but not too comfortable) you want to do maybe twenty really quick reps, rest thirty seconds, do a second set, thirty more seconds rest and then the third set. I also believe you should concentrate on doing leg raises, either on a machine, or lying on the floor.

Remember to also work that opposite set of muscles – the lower back – to keep a balance to your appearance and stability. If you stick to a good diet and are faithful and consistent with your gym visits a visible six pack is possible at any age.

If you watch a little kid try to pick up something heavy usually you will see them holding their breath and scrunching their whole face up. It’s a serious business and they are communicating through their actions. Usually they will also take a peek to see who is watching them, and this doesn’t really change too much when you go to the gym and watch the adults lifting. I’m often amazed by the people who neglect the advice of the karate master, Mr. Miyagi.

You know Mr. Miyagi, actor Pat Morita (sorry Jackie Chan, but Pat will always be the “real” Mr. Miyagi to most of us.) He was the guy in the Karate Kid who said to Daniel-San, “Don’t forget to breath. Is very important.” And this really is a life lesson. Without breathing life would be very short, and withot proper breathing during workouts and cardio, you could very well hurt yourself. Holding your breath during the concentric portion of your lift puts a great deal of stress on your body.

People have been known to get dizzy, have nosebleeds, and in extreme cases brain aneurisms have listed this stressing of the body as a possible cause. So what should you be doing? Anytime you are doing the concentric part of the lift you should be exhaling. The concentric part, for those who may be confused or just want clarification, is when you are tightening muscles. This is when you are pushing up on a bench press or a shoulder press, or pulling on a back exercise. It is also when you are pushing on a leg press or in the ‘standing’ part of a squat.

The opposite portion of the lift is called the eccentric portion and at that point you should be inhaling. To clarify again, this is when the weight is approaching your body on a bench or shoulder press, or when the weights are moving away from you on a back exercise. This is also the portion when your fanny is heading for the ground on a squat.

Another way to look at this is that you are exhaling when you working and inhale on the release portion. Hopefully this makes it crystal clear.

Don’t take your breathing for granted and think about this whenever you are lifting. I will write more on breathing for running and cardio for a future article. As always any question you have, I would be happy to address in future articles as well. Stay healthy and stay happy!

What do you put in their bucket?

There are stories all the time about America’s growing love/hate affair with health and fitness. We all love to be fit and healthy, but so many people hate doing anything to make it happen. That in turn is reflected in the growing (and growing) trend of obesity, and this is not only in the United States, but unfortunately also reflected abroad. And I may be off on this, but I doubt it, children always seemed to be thinner twenty or thirty years ago. Of course not all children were thinner, but most were. This is reflected by recent statistics that have been gathered.

In an article from the CDC obesity among children has tripled since 1980. The percentage among really young children (under 11) has risen from 6.5 to 19.6 and for teens the rate has gone from 5 to 18%. It’s not just our imaginations folk; kids are getting fatter. I will point a finger right at the sedentary lifestyle that is so prevalent now. Video games and computer interaction has replaced the neighborhood games of Tag and Kick the Can. then was

That number boggles the mind. But what can parents do about it? That seems to be the real challenge. I know in raising my four children I found that the punishment of “no screens” was the most dreaded thing that could happen. Now adding loss of phone privileges to that is appropriate since almost all phones have screens as well. The thing is that the loss of screens seemed to wake up opportunities to get outside and run around like kids did “back in the day.” They continued to actually play more outside for weeks after a punishment as they came to appreciate the fun that was to be had in a natural setting.

The other thing that I found, and continue to find, is that you are the one who regulates their diet. Giving in to the temptation to buy a bag of potato chips or cookies just takes your kids to a place where they expect that and don’t have as much appreciation for more healthy snacks. Even neighborhood kids who come over to our place know that there is always a plethora of fruit, and they take advantage of that. (I’m glad to see it.)

Having unusual fruits around is an invitation to explore. Kids who have never eaten a pomegranate are usually amazed when you break open the skin and they see the glistening purple buds and they love the taste and sensation of eating them.

The “trick” if there is a trick, is to make food interesting. There are so many recipes and so many different dishes that you can have tasty tempting snacks and meals that keep kids (and you) away from the junk food habit.

Obesity isn’t just going to go away. Unless there is some real effort on our parts to educate our children on nutrition and healthy habits, they will never develop them. And who knows, in the process we end up more fit and healthy ourselves