Archive for the 'FITNESS' Category

A person working full time spends 1/3 of waking hours at work. This factor makes health of the work environment is really essential for your overall health and wellness.

Breathing in cleaner air and the usage of healthier products make a great difference on your health and overall wellbeing.

Easy ways for workplace fitness:

Cross training:

Continual improvement is the most essential thing. Most of you worry that you don’t observe any improvement even you follow the same routine over and over. At one time, your body and mind slips into the neutral.

Cross training mainly focuses on different parts of your physical structure. You need to learn the new ways for holding the weights, balancing your posture and breathing, then only every time you will get new appreciation for different skill sets.

Hydration:

Your body demands for water when it is being physically taxed. The same holds for your brain. Keeping your body hydrated helps in your endurance.

Drive ahead of your barriers:

Two kinds of barriers are there, first one is the barrier imposed by others and the second one is the barrier imposed by ourselves. Second one is the most restrictive. While driving beyond your barriers, know that each of you have specific abilities.

No matter how much you’d like to slim your waistline and lose the belly, it’s difficult to find a workout routine that not only works, but one that fits your needs and is easy to stick to.

Several fitness plans along with free and cheap technology was available to help you get in shape and stick to a training plan.

Read on for a look at the most simple yet effective plans —along with the best tech tools to help you get and stay in shape.

Despite the proliferation of diet plans and expensive exercise equipment, the key to fitness is and always will be healthy eating, portion control, and a solid exercise routine. (But, a solid exercise routine need not be hard or expensive.) Here are some of the tips and tools to help you get in shape.

From Couch to 5k to Marathon

If you’ve never done much running or exercise, getting started can be a bear. The key is baby steps, and the Couch to 5k running plan gets you ready to run your first 5k (that’s three miles) in just six weeks.

Pushups are excellent upper body exercises in which you will use your own body weight to build strong fitness foundation.

There is nothing wrong in doing modified pushups if you are not ready to perform the most difficult and traditional pushups.

Modified pushups are usually performed with knees positioning the floor, rather than your feet.

Pushups are considered as secondary exercises in regular workout schedule and they are usually given last priority in all kinds of body building or weight training programs.

But, because of its wide range of benefits, many serious health and fitness enthusiasts often believe pushups as the most effective exercise for improving their overall body fitness.

How to practice perfect pushups? Steps to follow!

It is always suggested to perform warm-up exercises before you start your regular body workouts. These warm-ups can greatly help you to reduce the risk of injury and makes your muscles ready for pushups. Make sure to stretch your wrists and arms properly while performing pushups.

• Select an appropriate place or hard floor that can support your body weight and assume a prone position. Now keep your feet together.

The latest star spouting a lean lifestyle isn’t a Hollywood celebrity with a wacky diet, extreme workout routine, or big-bucks trainer. It’s a state — Colorado.

Ever since 1990, Colorado has had the nation’s lowest percentage of obese adults. And on the CDC’s latest map of adult obesity prevalence, Colorado is the only state shaded in dark blue, because of its low percentage — 18.7% — of obese adults.

What’s up with that? What does Colorado know that the rest of the country doesn’t? And short of packing up the wagon and heading west, what can heftier states learn from Colorado?

Here are seven nuggets of Colorado’s weight wisdom, from James O. Hill, PhD, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado Denver and co-founder of America on the Move, a nonprofit group focused on healthy lifestyles.

1. For now, just hold the line.

“That’s the first goal,” Hill says. “If we could first keep from getting worse, and then gradually start going down, that would be very, very good.”

From strippercise to circus-trapeze aerobics, gyms and fitness gurus keep coming up with new ways to make working out less of a chore.

But though these whimsical classes and instructional DVDs can reinvigorate your gym routine, some of the glitziest (and goofiest) new trends can also put you at risk for sprained ankles, pulled muscles and overexertion. And some don’t even give you much of a workout.

Here are seven of the silliest fitness fads—with the lowdown on whether or not they really chisel and tone.

1. Weighted Hula Hooping. Maybe it was the 50th anniversary last month, or maybe it’s the buzz over the new Wii Fit version, but Hula Hooping, the backyard mainstay from the 1950s, is back—and a whole lot heavier.

National gym chains like Bally Total Fitness now offer hooping classes to kids and seniors alike, with weighted Hula Hoops that participants wheel around their outstretched limbs and torso.

Will the toy-based hybrid of strength and cardio give you the toned curves of Beyonce, who says she hoops to stay svelte? “The unweighted, traditional ones definitely work your core, and you can actually get the cardio system up,” says Jim White, certified fitness trainer and spokesman for the American Dietetic Association (ADA).

Want to alter your existing eating habits and create new ones? Whatever the motivation will be, whether it was an off-handed comment from your spouse or looking at yourself in the mirror for first time, these types of things make you to put into the action.

Here are some wonderful tips that keep you on the track:

Note down the goals you want to achieve and also the motivating factors:

The main key for achieving the success is defining clearly where you like to finish up. If the goal is losing weight, then note down your weight before you start any program, measure yourself and put achievable goals within the time limit that you set.

Don’t set any goals that make you to lose more than 1-2 pounds within a week. Give yourself sometime to adjust to the new routine. So, till now you have defined your goal. The next thing you need to do is, write down what is the main cause behind your motivation to attain the goal.

Summer has officially arrived and it is a great reminder to all of us who have been hibernating indoors to go out and get some exercise and a little sun.

Exercise is key to improving fitness, and a little sun will boost critical vitamin D production and contribute to good health overall.

Even overweight seniors who walked for 30 minutes a day most days of the week had improved survival over the seniors who were normal weight but sedentary.

Incredibly, in most instances, death rates for those with higher fitness were less than half of rates for those who were unfit.

This is great news for seniors who may have packed on a few extra pounds over the winter, and it is once again a reminder that sometimes the key to good health is as simple as donning a pair of sneakers and taking a daily walk outdoors or at your neighborhood mall.

This study is also consistent with a lot of recent research showing that for seniors, the functional status or ability to get around and perform daily activities is much more important to predicting longevity than a specific diagnosis or chronic disease.

Are you anxious about your regular body fitness? It might be your busy day schedule or a business trip, which interrupts your regular workout time.

But, don’t bother about it! Here is a simple 15 minute workout plan, which you can practice at your home conveniently and achieve enhanced body fitness [Health and exercise for busy folks].

However, you can face dozens of daily life circumstances that often get into your way of perfect exercise routine. But, you should be able to defend yourself with all those situations and spend some time for your body fitness.

Even though it is not possible to avoid all those obvious situations, you need to make out some time for your regular body routine.

So, enter into a 15 minute body workout plan. This can become a perfect way for you to attain better health and fitness, in spite of your hectic daily busy schedule in life. A 15 minute workout plan mainly includes:

Yoga!

Apart from building strength and improving your body flexibility, yoga greatly helps to relax your mind and also improves your concentration level. There are many ways to practice yoga workouts, try to know more about all those yoga work outs and daily perform them every day for at least 5 minutes [Power yoga for strength and flexibility].

Chest and Back Exercises for Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced Lifters!

Practice chest [Chest developing exercises] and back exercises before you work on any other muscle groups. Try to raise the amount of weight you lift in each exercise by about 5-10 percent every week. Do the remaining lifts in your workout in any order you wish.

Here are some suggestions for beginner, intermediate and advanced lifters:

Beginners: Practice total-body workouts 2-3 times in a week. Once you complete the chest and back exercises, attempt to do any one set of 8-12 repetitions which are given below:

• Leg curls
• Dumbbell biceps curl
• Squat or leg presses
• Seated alternating dumbbell press
• Crunches (15-20 repetitions)
• Cable triceps extension

Intermediate lifters: If you are an intermediate lifter, then divide your program into two workouts, one for your upper body and the other for lower body. Alternate between the two programs and take one day break after each workout program.

Upper body workouts: After the completion of chest and back workouts, select one workout each for your biceps, triceps and shoulders. Practice 2-3 sets of shoulder exercises and 1-2 sets of the arm exercises.

For a beginner, the very first day in the gym is awkward enough. Beginning a workout program without knowing what you are doing makes it even worse.

Here are the common 10 mistakes that you should know about immediately:

1. Holding your breath:

This one may certainly look like a no-brainer. Don’t forget to breathe when you lift. Whenever you feel that the activity is new for you, you will concentrate more on doing it correctly. During this, you forget the natural things that you need to do. For lifting, the breathing pattern is exhaling on the positive phase and inhaling on the negative phase. Holding your breath causes your blood pressure to raise. If you hold your breath for even a longer time, it may cause fainting.

2. Spotting incorrectly:

Hanging around the gym long enough, you will eventually be asked to spot someone or you may need spotting yourself. If you think you’re going to require a spot, then ask for it. Gym rats are always more willing to help and it’s better to ask earlier to be spotted than screaming loudly when you get in trouble.

3. Exercising a wrong form of bench pressing:

Don’t pick your feet up from the floor when you bench despite of what it looks like just because someone else is doing it.

Somebody tells you to continue with your feet up, so don’t bend your back while you are doing this movement. But, if you have to bend your back then your benching way is beyond your abilities.

Prefer lighter weight so that your feet are always steadily planted. This prevents you falling from the bench and injuring yourself or others.