Barbecues and summer vacations at the beach are just around the corner. It’s that time of year again to get beach body ready! Need a little help? Check out these great tips.

Eat Right
Eating three reasonable meals and two snacks a day will keep you satisfied and boost your metabolism. Here are a few healthy eating tricks:

1. Eat at least two servings of low-sugar fruit and three servings of vegetables a day. Eating the actual fruit and vegetables rather than juices that contain no fiber will save you calories!

2. Choose whole grains, as they have more Vitamins E and B6, magnesium, zinc, copper, manganese, potassium and fiber. The complex carbohydrates will help you lose weight.

3. Say no to sugar-sweetened drinks. Choose drinks that have no or few calories and be wary of sodas and teas. Many of these beverages are high in sugar.

4.  Decrease the amount of pre prepared foods you eat such as frozen meals, canned soups, and food from restaurants. These foods are typically high in sodium and calories.

Get Moving
Start an exercise routine to burn calories and tone muscles.

Here’s a great video featuring an amazing summer weight loss workout that uses differing muscle groups to fatigue the body, raise the heart rate and burn calories. No fancy equipment necessary, just a few dumbbells and a Spri Xercise Ball!

Here are few practical solutions that, if done regularly, may help to ease that pain:

1) Stretch your hip flexors:

The hip flexors are a group of muscles that act to flex the femur into the lumbo-pelvic complex. When you sit all day, this group of muscles is put into flexion for an extended period of time, causing them to essentially shorten. This pulls the pelvis down, causing a compression of the muscles of the spine. This, in turn, can cause intense pain.

Here is a hip flexor stretch. While this one is performed on a PowerPlate, it can also be performed on the floor:

2) Stop doing hyper extensions:

Unless you have been directed by a doctor, physical therapist or have an underlying reason that your spine is destabilized, stop doing this exercise. Over-strengthening of the erector spine can lead to compression of the spine and exacerbate other common muscular imbalances. Try performing exercises that work to strengthen the whole core as a unit (such as planks).

Here is an example of a plank on a PowerPlate. Again, this can also be done on the ground:

Try these and see if it helps. As with all pains, these are meant to be suggestive only. You should consult with a physician before undertaking any exercise recommendations found anywhere.

Spring is here! As we all prepare for spring cleaning, it’s important to remember to start with ourselves. Exercise is an important part of preventive medicine, but do we really know how exercise detoxifies our bodies?

It’s commonly thought that as you exercise, toxins are released through sweat but this isn’t true! Sweating is triggered by the brain. The hypothalamus regulates temperature in the body. When the body heats up, it stimulates the eccrine glands, which produce moisture on the skin’s surface to cool the body. Sweat itself only contains water, sodium, potassium, chloride, and very tiny amounts of toxins.

Interestingly enough, one study recently published in Nature found that exercise does push waste and toxins out of the body – just not with sweat. Exercise accelerates natural processes that remove junk from inside the body’s cells. Our cells accumulate this junk, officially called “flotsam,” from misshapen proteins and debris from cellular membranes, viruses and bacteria broken down as part of the everyday wear on our cells.

Autophagy, or “self-eating”, helps to keep us healthy by breaking down the flotsam and converting it into energy. This process works by creating specialized membranes that trap and carry the junk to a part of the cell called the lysosome, where the junk is broken apart and burned as energy. Without this process cells could malfunction or die. Difficulties with autophagy have been associated diabetes, muscular dystrophy, Alzheimer’s, and cancer. This process affects our metabolisms and our health in much the same way as exercise. Until recently, it wasn’t clear how the two interacted. The question was whether exercise might affect this cleansing process and, if so, how does that affect our health?

Researchers at the University Of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas studied this question. They had several mice medically treated so that the membranes that engulf flotsam waste would glow. The mice then ran for 30 minutes, and scientists observed significantly more membranes in their cells, revealing that the mice were experiencing increased rates of autophagy – but what did this mean for the subject’s overall health?

Scientists then developed a new strain of mouse that had normal autophagy levels but could not increase its response due to stress so that levels remained the same even when the mice were exercised. The scientists then fed these mice, as well as a group of normal functioning mice, a high-fat diet for several weeks until they developed a version of diabetes. The normal mice were able to reverse their diabetes by exercising, even as they continued the same diet. The autophagy-resistant mice, however, remained diabetic and had higher levels of cholesterol in their blood than the other mice. Increased exercise alone had not been enough to improve their health.

Overall, this study showed that exercise aids the autophagy process and forces cellular waste out of the body and stimulating this process even helped to reverse diabetes by removing toxins from the body. We have learned that an increase in autophagy, prompted by exercise is important to achieve the health benefits of exercise and it is possible that people who don’t respond as efficiently to aerobic exercise may have difficulties with this process. Perhaps someday we will have autophagy-prompting medical alternatives that might help everyone benefit more from exercise but for now all that we can be sure of is, given normal cell functions, exercise plays an important role in removing harmful toxins from our bodies.

1. Not Having A Plan
Your primary objective should influence the amount you do, as well as the the intensity and the type (cardio, resistance, stretching) of every workout. Pick a goal such as losing 10 pounds, running a 5K, or improving your endurance and research proven plans. This is a great way to optimize your workout and stay focused!

2. The All-Or-Nothing Approach
Research shows that just ten minutes of exercise can provide important health benefits. A ten minute workout is better than a 0 minute workout!

3. Skipping The Warm Up
Taking 5-10 minutes to gradually increase your body temperature and heart rate decreases your risk of injury since working cold, stiff muscles can lead to sprains and tears. Warming up also increases circulation and improves range of motion.

4. Not Switching Up Your Routine
Once your strength and stamina improve, it’s time to upgrade your routine. The same workout week after week will lose its effectiveness and may lead to injury or burnout, as well as becoming incredibly boring. To switch up your routine, you do not need to spend more time at the gym. Simply try to manage your time differently and more efficiently. This is why interval training has become so popular!

5. Unbalanced Training
Most people focus only on certain muscles (such as the abdominals or biceps), but it’s important to work your whole body and core.

6. Rapid Progression
Exercising too hard and too often, or increasing intensity too quickly, can result in injury and/or setback.

7. Ignoring Heavy Weights
It can be intimidating, but you aren’t gaining anything from avoiding heavy weights. You have two types of muscle fibers: slow and fast. If you don’t use the heavier weights, you neglect the fast fibers, which are important for moving quickly, lifting heavy objects and for spine and hip stability. Ladies, if you’re worried that you’ll bulk up, don’t be. Women cannot add much size to their muscles due to low concentrations of testosterone.

8. Not Protecting Your Bones
It’s important to do weight-bearing exercises to help protect your bones. While treadmill walking is sufficient to keep the spinal bones strong, your hip bones need more loading. Remember the terms “steep,” or “step.” Either increase the steepness (incline) on the treadmill or attempt stepping exercises.

9. Incorrect Machine Set-Up
Exercise equipment is adjustable. It’s important that you set it up to fit you correctly before you use it. Using poorly adjusted equipment could lead to injury and/or setback. If you’re unsure about proper set up ask a staff person at your local gym or fitness store.

10. Always Running At A Steady Pace
Again, we’re back to interval training. It teaches your muscles to burn energy more efficiently so you can go faster. Try starting out with a half or one-mile warm-up, then doing four to six rounds of running faster than your regular pace for a quarter mile and then switching to a slower pace for the next quarter mile. Strive to gradually lengthen the faster-paced intervals, but be careful not to progress too rapidly. Limit these interval runs to a few times a week to help avoid injury.

March may be coming to a close, but National Nutrition Month is not over just yet and it has signaled a reminder that “dieting” and eating well are not necessarily the same thing.

Why is nutrition important? What you eat affects how your body works your ability to fight off infections and diseases. It’s impossible to separate your eating from your health and fitness.

Healthy eating can seem like a time consuming and costly endeavor. Consider these easy tips to improve your health and fitness:

• 1. Start your day with a healthy breakfast
  Breakfast starts-up your metabolism and refuels both your body and mind after a good night’s sleep. Eating breakfast also reduces hunger and prevents eating binges.

• 2. Have pre-prepared healthy snacks with you to the office, school or on-the-go
  If the body goes without food for longer than four to six hours, its metabolic rate may slow down along with the rate at which you burn calories. However, avoid snacking on the wrong foods or snacking on too much food.

• 3. Don’t rely on “willpower”
  Instead, arrange your environment so that you can be successful without relying on willpower alone. If the junk food isn’t around to tempt you then no willpower is required! Also, try enlisting the help of family and friends.

• 4. Drink water when you feel hungry
  Drink a glass of water, wait for a while, and then see if you’re still hungry. A glass of water might be just what you needed.

• 5. Finish your last meal two hours before you sleep
  When you sleep, you don’t need too many calories, and food is more likely to be stored as fat.

• 6. Try to consume more high-volume, low-calorie foods
  Foods like pizza can contain enormous amounts of calories in small unsatisfying portions. This causes you to exceed your recommended caloric intake and still be hungry! The same amount of calories in foods like apples will satiate your hunger much, much faster. This is because fat has three times as many calories as protein or carbohydrates.

• 7. Train yourself with paired associations
  If you’re having a hard time replacing those high-calorie, low-volume foods with a healthier alternative, try training yourself to expect the healthy alternative as a reward. If you finish a workout, don’t reward yourself with chocolate and pizza. Instead, try a light yogurt or a fruit smoothie. You’ll come to associate and crave these new healthy rewards in no time!

• 8. Boost your fiber intake!
  Fiber works wonders on your digestive system and can also lower your risk of diabetes and heart disease. Some forms of fiber also lower blood cholesterol and sugar levels. This is a great way to improve your health and aid in weight loss!

You may also try adding some of these wonderful high fiber foods to your new healthy eating habits: Raspberries, Pears, Apples, Strawberries, Banana, Raisins, Split Peas, Lentils and Beans.

Many of us go out of our way to avoid stairs, but using them as part of our exercise routine is a great way to lose weight and improve fitness; while toning and strengthening problem areas. Stair exercises can be used for aerobic and anaerobic conditioning, lower body strength training, power development and flexibility.

Dr. Harvey Simon, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School states that one reason American women outlive their husbands by an average of more than five years could be a result of many housewives taking care of two- or three-story homes. The Harvard Alumni Study also found that men who average at least eight flights a day enjoy a 33% lower mortality rate than men who are sedentary.

In fact, researchers in Canada monitored 17 healthy male volunteers with an average age of 64 while they walked on the level, lifted weights or climbed stairs and the results revealed that stair climbing was the most demanding exercise of the three. They found stair climbing to be twice as taxing as brisk walking on a level surface and 50% harder than walking up a steep incline or lifting weights.

So what does this mean? Take the stairs whenever you can. Even at a slow pace, you’ll burn calories two to three times faster climbing stairs than walking and begin incorporating stair exercises into your workout routine for faster results. All you need is 30 minutes and a set of stairs to complete a killer workout. Of course, if you cannot find an endless staircase for your workouts, you can always utilize the ClimbMill at your local gym. ClimbMill’s replicate this real world exercise and work all the major muscles of the legs, including quads, hamstrings and calves while still burning fat and improving cardiovascular health.

For more information, please check out http://consults.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/15/stairs-as-fitness-tool/

The increasingly popular trend of barefoot running relies on the theory that running shoes are the cause of many runners’ injuries. So are running shoes actually causing your injuries?

Famous runners have gone barefoot before us, including Ethiopia’s Abebe Bikila, the greatest Olympic marathoner of all time, who won the first of his consecutive gold medals while running barefoot in a world record time of 2:15:17 minutes.

Interest in barefoot running sparked when Michael Warburton, physical therapist and marathoner, published an online paper titled, simply, “Barefoot Running.” Warburton points out that the extra weight of shoes on your feet is much worse than a pound or two elsewhere. Weight on your feet is subject to constant acceleration and deceleration and Warburton claims that 100 grams of extra weight on your feet decreases your running economy by 1%.

So barefoot running could potentially make you quicker, but is it really safer? According to Harvard’s Skeletal Bio Lab team barefoot runners tend to avoid landing on the heel of the foot and instead land with a forefoot or midfoot strike. These strikes do not generate the large impact transients of heel strikes and if impact contributes to some forms of injury then barefoot running might have some benefits. However, this hypothesis has yet to be test.

In fact, there have been no scientific studies that prove running shoes directly cause injuries, or that barefoot running is the solution. There are many factors that can increase or decrease your chances of various running injuries including: nutrition, training program & history, cardiovascular fitness and musculoskeletal strength. Our muscles and bones adapt to the demands that we impose on them, starting any new training program or style should be done carefully and slowly.

You’ll need to know the following definitions to understand the rest of this entry:

Repetition (Rep): One complete movement of a single exercise.
Set: A group of consecutive repetitions.
Rest Interval: The time taken to recuperate between sets.

The multiple set system:
This system is what most people think of when they think of strength training. It involves doing multiple sets for each exercise with a rest interval in between to let the muscle group partially recover.

Here’s what a multiple set workout could look like for your upper body:

So that is all well and good but how can I design a program like that?

Choosing the number of sets, reps and weight:
You are given a range so that you have a way to progress the exercise. If you’ve never strength trained before, start with two sets. On your first set try to pick a weight you can do comfortably 12 times. On your second set pick a slightly heavier weight that you can comfortable get up 6-8 times, but then struggle to get the last 4-6 reps. Our goal is to not be able to push the weight with good form by the end of the final set.

Rest times:
The length of your rest times will vary depending on your goal and fitness level. If you’ve never worked out before, be sure to take longer rest times (up to 90 seconds) so that you can really focus on maintaining form through the exercises.

If your goal is weight loss, you may want to decrease your rest times (30 sec or less) slightly in order to raise your heart rate.

If your goal is to get stronger then you should lengthen the rest times (90 sec) to enable the muscles to fully recover so you can push more weight on the next set.

Choosing Exercises

Here’s a few helpful points on how to choose exercises.

Number of exercises per body part:
This is dependent on your fitness level and time restrictions. It’s important that you listen to your body. If you are so sore you cannot move for several days, then you OVERDID IT. If you have a little soreness or stiffness when you stretch the muscle group the next day or two then you hit it right on the sweet spot.

The Best Exercises?

There is really no such thing as a best program or exercise. Here’s some logic to follow as you build your own programs.

Balanced:
Notice in the example above it is perfectly balanced. There are two multi-joint chest exercises (incline/decline press) paired with two multi-joint back exercises (bent over row/ lat pull). Overworking one set of muscles causes tightness that can lead to repetitive stress injuries.

Variety of Angles:
The first chest exercise (incline press) works the muscle at different angle than the second. The Lat pull hits the muscles of the back in a significantly different way from the rows. This allows the whole body to strengthen and allow the whole muscle group to develop.

Large to small:
Finally the program starts with the largest muscle groups (chest and back) and works to progressively smaller exercises (bicep and tricep). If you do it the other way, you won’t be able to work the large muscle groups effectively as the smaller ones are secondary muscles used in the exercises to work the larger ones (your triceps are also pushing when you do a chest press). So, what will happen is the smaller muscle will get too much work and the large one not enough.

Good luck and next time we’ll get into more advanced forms of strength training!

This is the first of a series of blogs on strength training. Also know as resistance training, it encompasses everything from body weight exercises (such as pushup) to using fixed path selectorized machines to advanced circuit training seen in Crossfit classes. For our purposes, WBV training done on the PowerPlate should be considered a form of strength training – although there are some other factors to take into consideration when designing programs for vibration platforms.

The purpose of this blog is not to argue the benefits of strength training (for that you should check out one of the previous entries) but to give some basic information to help you make good choices when designing you own programs.

So here we go…

What happens to my body when I strength train?

One of the amazing qualities of the human body is its ability to adapt to the stresses placed on it. This ability to adapt to stress is known as the general adaptive syndrome. When the body is physically stressed physiological changes will occur that allow us to more efficiently overcome the stress. OR whatever we do we get better at.

Think about the first time you ride a bike in the spring after not having done it all winter. You are slower, it takes more effort to do a ride that was easy at the end of the season and the next day every part of you hurts. Then, after a couple of weeks of riding, you are back to normal. What you couldn’t see was that your body increased its capability to recruit muscle fibers, increased its ability to pump blood to the legs and became more efficient at dispelling lactic acid buildup. In other words, your strength and endurance increased.

So what does that have to do with a dumbbell curl?

When you pick up a weight, do a crunch on a ball or perform a pushup, your muscles strain to produce force. As your muscles become overloaded they begin to break down. The next day the micro tears created in the muscles are repaired. This process makes you stronger.
Unfortunately, because the body adapts if you do the same thing over and over again the effect of the workout will diminish each time. The body will get better at that one specific action, not get stronger as a whole (or better at burning fat or have more stamina depending on your goal).

What’s the point?

In the end, whatever workout you choose needs to stick to two principals:

1. Variety – Your exercise routine needs to change at regular intervals. You can increase reps, sets, weight, or time under tension. You can add in different exercises, increase the instability of the exercise or alter the rest time between exercises. Any of these tactics will help to change your workout and keep your body guessing.

2. Progression – Your workout program should have a systematic plan to make it harder as your body adapts. Think about your workout not in single sessions but how it will evolve over the course of a year. As your body adapts, plan out what you will do to keep pushing your limits without going too far and over-training.

Next week we will go over some over-arching approaches to designing a strength program.

Back pain will be experienced by 90% of adults in their lifetime and when it hits, there isn’t anything that one wouldn’t do to get rid of it. When you have back pain everything changes; you get out of bed differently, you feel ridiculous trying to pull that t-shirt over your head, you’re not comfortable standing, sitting or laying down – you simply want it to go away so you can put on your own socks again and get your regular life back.

Your spine is like the Mama of your body, and you know what they say, “If Mama’s not happy, nobody’s happy.” A common root cause of lower back pain is weak core muscles, which fail to provide adequate support for the discs and vertebrae that construct the joints in our lower back. Combine that with poor posture and the compressive forces of body weight and gravity and your back pain becomes more of a question of “when” rather than “if.”

How to relieve lower back pain

As we discuss the “how,” let’s remember the “why.” Weak abdominal and back muscles do not support proper posture which is the position which best resists gravity. The forces of body weight and gravity compress the discs that are in-between our vertebrae and act like the shock absorbers of our spine. Compression on the discs causes them to expel nutrients and fluids, resulting in decreased flexibility, a decreased capacity to support the loads on the spine and an increased chance for injuries like herniated discs, slipped discs, bulged discs or muscles strains.

Inversion is the whole package when it comes to targeting the cause of your lower back pain and conditioning your muscles for improved posture and core strength. Inverting on a Teeter Hang Ups Inversion Table decompresses your spine and other weight-bearing joints by reversing the loads caused by body weight and gravity. Being upside down harnesses those same compressive loads and uses them in your favor to decompress your body, allowing tight and tired muscles to stretch and relax while also opening up your joints and allowing your discs to rehydrate. Regular inversion can be therapeutic in relieving muscles spasms in your back, stretching and elongating the muscles through your back and hips, realigning the spine and optimizing disc health.

It’s important to remember that once back pain is at bay, you should continue to maintain your inversion routine to help keep it at bay. Then take your inversion routine to the next level by beginning a fitness regimen to strengthen and develop a stronger core, primarily focusing on your back and abdominal muscles. A strong core will promote better posture and provide more support for the spine. These exercises can be done right on your Teeter everyday.

Inverted exercised like crunches, sit-ups and squats allow you to perform these important core exercises with little to no loads on your spine and joints. Many Teeter fitness fanatics report back that their core strength advances faster, the exercises are more effective, they do them with virtually no back pain, and they experience greater muscle definition. A great looking core is a bonus to strong and healthy muscles that better support your spine in an effort to avoid future back pain.