Archive for August, 2008

Sure, you know walking is good exercise. But here’s some­thing you might not realize: You can give your waistline (and other body parts) a serious trimming by tweaking that walk around the block.

Using one of these secret weapons: plyometrics, hills, or intervals, you can reduce your waistline.

The strategies strengthen legs more quickly than plain old walking sessions, and you can walk longer and faster to burn more calories.

After six weeks of walking four to six times a week, you will feel stronger and look slimmer where it counts.

Secret weapon: Plyometrics

Adding bounding, jumping, and skipping moves (called plyometrics) to your walk is a fun way to spike the intensity. You’ll burn up to twice as many calories –and significantly more belly fat — per minute than you would just walking at a moderate pace.

Make it work for you

Try this workout, gradually adding more plyo­metrics as your fitness level improves. It can be done either outside or on the treadmill (just be sure to step off the machine to do the plyometrics moves).

1. Walk 15 minutes, building to a moderate pace.

Do you think you must have a gym membership essentially to get perfect body physique? Not necessarily, gym membership doesn’t help you to become a perfect body builder.

Do you know most of the body building enthusiasts usually perform their body building workout program at home?

So, if you feel that going to gym or having an annual membership card at gym ensure you success at body building, realize that it is absolutely wrong. Making a body building program successful at your home is as easy as having the equipment.

Instead of paying for an annual membership card at any fancy gym, invest money for your own workout program at home. These are certain essential strategies that you have to consider while starting body building program at home.

First of all, hire a professional fitness trainer!

Hiring a professional is very important when you are starting your own gym at home. He can assist you to assess your body condition and to set short or long-term body building goals.

He can help you in performing different exercises in safe and proper form and also assists you in buying quality gym equipment for your home.

People who walk on a treadmill even years after stroke damage can significantly improve their health and mobility, changes that reflect actual “rewiring” of their brains, according to research spearheaded at Johns Hopkins.

“This is great news for stroke survivors because results clearly demonstrate that long-term stroke damage is not immutable and that with exercise it’s never too late for the brain and body to recover,” says Daniel Hanley, M.D., professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

The study’s results suggest that patients’ brains may retain the capacity to rewire through a treadmill exercise program months or years after conventional physical therapy has ended.

Researchers at the GRECC, led by Richard F. Macko, M.D., and Andrew P. Goldberg, M.D., have developed treadmill therapy for stroke patients over the past decade.

Investigators at all three institutions combined efforts to recruit 71 patients who had a stroke at least six months earlier, with an average time lapse of nearly four years.

At the study’s onset, half of the subjects could walk without assistance, while the rest used a cane, a walker or a wheelchair.

Hill Training - A very demanding method to increase muscle power and strength! It is the training for running up hills.

It integrates several excellent running programs and is ideal for the athletes of football, basketball, cricket, rugby, and running, where high running speeds are most essential.

In hill training, the athlete makes use of the body weight as the resistance to move forward and as a result the driving muscles that provides power to the leg needs to work harder.

The method aims to provide the athlete with a good knee lift and movement in the ankle.

In hill training, the athlete aims to run hard, moving upwards with the toes, flexing the ankle, landing the foot on the hill with its front part and then dropping the heel below the toes level as the weight is applied.

The calf muscles of the foot elongate upwards and downwards and learn to contract very quickly. Thus, these muscles improve its strength and elasticity.

Moreover, they become more powerful and work at a higher rate. As the hill training involves high knee lift, the quads in the thigh that help in knee lift also improves its strength.

Everybody performs fitness training to maintain their health. But not all of us know the best way of fitness training.

Once must give importance to know the right and the best way to perform fitness train because it could give bad effect if the wrong way of fitness training is performed.

Before fitness training, it is very important to doing warm-up or stretching exercises to prevent accidents or to enhance the output during the training.

There are also a number of precautionary measures and tips to serve as guidelines when doing fitness exercises.

1. Stretch before and after workout is very important to increase your flexibility and to avoid injuries.

Almost everyone knows that stretching before workout prevents injuries during the exercises, but only few people know that stretching after workout, when muscles are still warm, can increase flexibility.

2. Hold your stretching position for more than 60 seconds to increase flexibility.

While holding your position for 20 seconds is enough for warm ups, holding each position for at least 60 seconds will develop the body’s flexibility.

Read more at Associated Content

Owing to the hot and humid weather in summer, it is good to modify your fitness exercise routine in advance.

It is most essential for those who exercise outdoors. This helps to protect the body from heat related illnesses such as heat exhaustion, dehydration, heat stroke and many more.

But, now the question is how to modify a fitness exercise routine, right! It’s very easy if you follow the suggestions given here:

Maintain body hydration: Proper body hydration is the key to maintaining a fitness regimen during hot and humid weathers.

During summer time, it is good to hydrate the body by drinking lots of fluids, at least ten to twelve hours before you start your fitness workout.

Also, drink water or other fluids for every 15 minutes while performing your fitness exercises. As the body loses salt and other electrolytes while doing exercise, it is wise to restore the loss with some sports drink.

It is also good to stay away from caffeine within twenty-four hours of your fitness exercising, as it is the primary agent for body dehydration. Sun exposure is also a factor for body dehydration. Better avoid all those factors that support fluid loss.

Push-up is a great exercise to build upper body strength and maintain good physique.

It is a fantastic workout because it has several different variations. It involves muscles somewhat differently and keeps you away from getting bored with routine workouts.

Before we go further about push-up variations, it is most essential to focus on the two basic points–maintain a straight line right from the heels to the head and touch the chest to the ground.

While push-ups can be practiced with or without the use of technical equipment, here let us go through few push-ups that require no technical equipment and you can easily practice at home.

Basic push-up

• Start by lying down on the floor with your chest facing down. Position the palms flat on the ground with shoulder-width apart and feet together. Ensure that your legs and back are in a straight line.
• By looking forward, push your body down and as you go down, touch the floor using your chin.
• While rising up, make sure that you don’t bend your back and also that you breathe out constantly.
• Take a gap and repeat the workout.

1. With regular exercise you can overcome or prevent depression altogether. Sadly many people suffer from depression, whether for brief or extended periods of time.

It is a proven fact that getting your moving with some exercise not only takes your mind of your problems, it causes endorphins to be released that give you that natural high and feelings of happiness.

2. Exercise provides your body with more energy! Some people believe that exercising will tire them out.

On the contrary, as you train your body at the gym, you’ll notice that you’ll have more energy throughout the day without stimulants like caffeine to give you that buzz to stay awake!

3. Getting some exercise will actually help you reduce stress! Most North Americans are overstressed, overworked and under-active! Why not combat this with some exercise to not only help you stay in shape while many hours are being spent in front of a computer in the office, but reduce the daily stress that you feel.

4. One of the reasons why so many people work out at a gym is because they recognize the connection between burning calories, building muscle and losing weight.

When you are trying to build massive, healthy and perfect body, good nutrition plays a vital role.

In your routine bodybuilding plan, you should also look at the nutritional ratio of carbohydrates, proteins and fat, along with cutting down calories.

Usually, many professional body builders attribute their credit of accomplishing good physique to carefully planned nutrition.

So, as far as nutrition and diet for body builders is concerned, they must essentially consume balanced muscle building food.

So, if you really want to build muscle mass and get good physique, here are certain tips to provide good nutrition for your body.

Eat small and frequent meals!

When you feed your body several times a day, your body metabolism increases certainly and contributes to effective bodybuilding. With increased body metabolism rate, you burn excess fat and develop good muscle mass quickly.

If you really want your bodybuilding program work for you, eat at least four to six meals in a day depending on your fitness goals.

Include all essential nutrients in required ratio!

40-40-20 is the most popular nutritional ratio considered by many professional body builders. This means your routine diet must essentially consist of 40% proteins, 40% carbohydrates and 20% proteins.

Most women (and men for that matter) understand intuitively whether their bodies tend to store fat around their waists (forming an apple shape) or lower down around their hips, thighs and buttocks (forming a pear shape in women).

But few of us understand the dramatic impact body shape has on our current health and risk of future disease.

A number of recent studies have shown that it is your waist size and body shape rather than how much you weigh or tip the scale that best predicts your risk for a number of chronic diseases.

For example, a study found that while only half of the obese patients studied had metabolic abnormalities that placed them at much greater risk of heart disease, a full quarter of the normal weight adults had these same worrisome metabolic risks as well.

Why the risk in normal weight adults? Experts concluded that waist size may be much more important in determining heart risk than body weight. A normal weight individual can have a greater waist size — and therefore a greater health risk — than an overweight but smaller-waisted friend.