A Tough Love Approach to Health and Fitness

A Tough Love Approach to Health and Fitness
by: Anna Fleet

Yesterday at the grocery store, I came across a child, who was about 8-years-old. She was lying on the floor flailing her arms and legs yelling “I want a chocolate bar.” I could have predicted the outcome. The child continued to scream until mom put a chocolate bar in the cart. The crying ceased instantly.

As they passed, I took note of the contents of the grocery cart - Coco Puffs cereal, soda, 3 bulk bags of potato chips, chocolate covered granola bars, macaroni & cheese, hot dogs…you get the drift. Try as I might I couldn’t help but feel scared for that child’s future.

You see, a long time ago I was that obese little girl. I was unhappy with my body, but I dulled the pain by eating – chips, chocolate bars, hotdogs. I threw tantrums because I knew my mother didn’t have the patience and would just give me what I wanted.

By the age of 12 I was 4-foot, 11-inches and 135-pounds. My doctor put me on a restrictive diet. However, I would steal money from my parents to buy candy. It didn’t make sense to me. I was allowed to eat those foods before. Why were punishing me? I hated myself more.

In the early 80’s, being a fat child was rare. However in 2006 one in three North American kids are overweight. Both parents likely have full time jobs, which means less time for healthy meals and exercise. Fast food and activities have taken over the family roost.

I’m sorry I have to lay this responsibility on the parents, but kids only practice what you preach. If they see you eating poorly; they’ll follow suit.

Practice what you preach by adopting and enforcing these FitnessGear101.com family lifestyle changes:

• Explain the difference between health food choices and non-healthy food choices.

• Sit down and compile a weekly grocery lists with your child.

• Let them go with you to the grocery store and shop only for the foods on the list.

• Get kids involved in preparing healthy meals, so they adopt healthy habits for life.

• It’s normal to shelter our kids from ridicule. However if your child is obese their health is at risk and tough love encouragement is needed, for example: “honey, you are overweight, but I believe in you and I’ll support you because I love you.”

• Never use food as a reward. Instead reward them with mini-golfing or baseball.

• Ditch the clean-plate policy. If your child is full, don't force them to finish.

• Institute an open policy about food. Kids should be comfortable telling you when they’re hungry and not hungry without fear you’ll get mad.

• Don't eliminate snacks. It will lead to lying and binge eating outside the home. Instead plan a cheat meal once a week when they’re allowed any foods they want.

• Encourage physical activity. It will get them up and out and encourage them to socialize with other active kids.

• Never allow eating in front of the TV. This encourages passive eating, and the child won’t concentrate on how much they’re eating or when they’re full.

• Limit TV or video games to 1 hour per day. The rest of the time, keep them busy with outdoor activities.

About The Author
Anna Fleet is a certified fitness instructor, and the face and voice behind fitnessgear101.com – an excellent website with valuable information about weight loss( http://www.fitnessgear101.com/fitness-articles/weight-loss.aspx ), stretching(http://www.fitnessgear101.com/printables/stretching-diagram.aspx ), cardio equipment( http://www.fitnessgear101.com/cardio-equipment/ ) and more.

How to Rejuvenate After Your Workout by Kamau Austin

How to Rejuvenate After Your Workout
by: Kamau Austin

Regular exercise will help protect you from chronic disease, improve your mood and decrease your chances of injury. The older you are, the more you have to gain from exercise.

All it takes is 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week.

Everyone tries to exercise, but most people forget about their body once they have finished the exercise. If you are not careful about your post-workout routing, it will come back to haunt you.

After a workout, exercising for several minutes at a low speed helps blood to be redistributed throughout the body consistently and prevents the dizziness, sickness, and muscle cramps that sometimes occur after exercises.

In addition, you need to supply your body with water and carbohydrates after a workout. Carbohydrates help regenerate muscles, increase stamina, and prevent fatigue. A few good examples of high quality carbohydrate foods are bread, rice, jam, fruit, vegetables, table sugar, potatoes, and sweets.

It's also important to cool down your muscles after exercising by stretching them. Stretching improves flexibility, lessens soreness, and improves circulation. Here are a few tips:

• Hold a static stretch for twenty to thirty seconds.
• Stretching positions should be repeated after the cool down period to enhance muscle strength and flexibility.
• Include some deep breathing exercise in your cool down routine to oxygenate your system.
• At the end of any strenuous physical activity, gently bring your breathing down to normal. Walking and easy indoor cycling are great follow-ups to a workout. Both of them allow you to hydrate yourself and also put on warm clothing.

These four tips will help you avoid mishap after a strenuous workout session. However, mishaps still occur and cause problems like muscle pain, or in older individuals, arthritis.

Osteoarthritis is the loss of the body’s shock-absorbing ability. It is a degeneration that is part of the aging process. And when a person who has osteoarthritis exercises, there can be problems.

This can be a serious problem since regular exercise is recommended as a good way to fight a host of medical conditions associated with aging. But now there is hope for people suffering from osteoarthritis too.

There are products, such as Phosoplex™, available that help counter the effects of osteoarthritis. Phosoplex™ is able to Rejuvenate the body and combat the aches and pains associated with the deliberating affects of osteoarthritis.

It is also effective in countering the muscle pain that often accompanies workouts. Phosoplex™ is available at Amazon and at http://www.BODeStore.com. So enjoy your workout without worrying about the future.

About The Author
Kamau Austin is a health and fitness enthusiast and advocate. He writes on a regular basis on timeless health and fitness tips at the Fit After Forty Blog. See more useful health and fitness news and tips at… http://www.healthandfitnessvitality.com

kamau@searchengineplan.com

Knock Out Knee Pain by Stephanie McIntyre & Kamau Austin

Knock Out Knee Pain
by: Stephanie McIntyre & Kamau Austin

You may first feel it when attempting to bend down to pick a dropped item or possibly you experience it as morning stiffness that you feel when you first get up out of bed. But whenever it hits you knee pain will undoubtedly get your attention. The good news about knee pain is that it responds well to self care measures. There are a number of factors that can put you at risk for knee pain. Some of them are:

• Overweight: If you weigh more than you should, you put more stress and pressure on your knee joints. Over time this excess pressure can cause pain.
• Overuse: An inflammatory response can occur when a repetitive activity, causes a muscle to get fatigued. This inflammatory response can damage surrounding tissue. This can be further compounded when you don't give the knee enough time to fully recover thereby making it prone to re-injury.
• Lack of muscle strength: Experts site lack of strength and flexibility as the leading cause of knee injury and pain. Weak or tight muscles offer less support for the knee joint.
• Mechanical problems: Having misaligned knees, one leg that is shorter than the other or other structural abnormalities can contribute to knee pain.
• Previous injury: If you have previously injured your knee chances go up that you will injure it again. Possibly because the knee was not given enough time to properly heal or because the knee doesn't return to the condition it was in prior to the injury.
• Age: Some knee related conditions affect young people more often than old, for example Osgood-Schlatter disease or patellar tendonitis. Other conditions such as gout and osteoarthritis tend to occur in older people.

An injury to the knee can affect any of the ligaments, tendons Or bursa (fluid filled sacs of the knee)or a combination of these areas of the knee.Some of the most common causes of knee pain are:

• Bursitis - An inflammation that comes from pressure on the knee. The pressure may be from repeated overuse, kneeling for long periods of time or other injury.
• Tendonitis - Pain that occurs in the front of the knee. It usually gets worse when going up and down stairs. This is a common injury of skiers, runners and cyclists.
• Torn ligaments or cartilage - This injury can cause severe pain and lack of stability of the knee joint.
• Strain or Sprain - A minor injury to the ligaments cause by sudden or unnatural twisting.
• Hip disorders - May cause you to feel pain in the knee area.
• Osteoarthritis - a condition affecting the joints characterized by pain and stiffness
• Gout - A metabolic disorder caused by an accumulation of uric acid in the joints.

As mentioned above knee pain responds well to self care. Some of the things that you can do if you experience knee pain are:

• Apply ice 15 minutes at a time, initially and then about 4 times a day thereafter until the pain subsides.
• Rest and avoid the activities that contributed to the initial injury.
• Elevate your knee to bring down the swelling.
• Over the counter medications can provide pain relieve from pain.
• Sleep with a pillow underneath the affected knee.
• Gentle compression, such as with an Ace bandage may reduce swelling and provide support.

It is not always possible to prevent knee pain but there are some things that you can do to lessen the likelihood that knee problems will occur.

• Keep off excess weight.
• Maintaining a healthy weight will keep your knees from having to support more than they were designed to support.
• Stay flexible. Weak muscles make you more prone to injuries of the knees. So do stretching exercises, daily to maintain flexibility
• Exercise wisely. Don't exercise when you have pain or you're tired. If you have chronic injuries consider switching to sports or exercise that put less stress on your joints. For instance swimming instead of basketball.
• Get good fitting shoes. When shoes fit poorly we may compensate in the knees and hips, causing them to be misaligned and making them prone to injury.
• Proper supplements: There are supplements that can help the body keep the ligaments and joints lubricated, and actually help rebuild cartilage.
• Like Phosoplex™ is a supplement that is recommended for osteoarthritis and joint pain. It is a powerful, all natural and safe solution for joint lubrication, pain relief and the rebuilding of healthy cartilage.
  

If you follow the above suggestions you will go a long way to knockout knee pain before it begins.

About The Author

Stephanie McIntyre and Kamau Austin are health and fitness enthusiasts and advocates. They write on a regular basis on timeless health and fitness tips at the Fit After Forty Blog. See more useful health and fitness news and tips at… http://www.healthandfitnessvitality.com/

kamau@searchengineplan.com

Fitness - Anaerobic Training by Gaby Munteanu

Fitness - Anaerobic Training
by Gaby Munteanu

Anaerobic fitness is the force component of fitness in general, which also contains at least two other essential components: aerobic fitness (the part of cardio-vascular resistance) and joint mobility. Speed and skill are native qualities and they are not very relevant for the health state – which is the main concern in mass fitness, the one meant to keep the body in good shape.

The purpose of anaerobic training programs is developing the force, the fortifying of the body or the muscular mass. There are situations when only force or muscle fortifying is intended. The typical example for these situations is given by the sports organized in categories, in which physical force (with the interdiction of going over a certain limit of weight) is tested. Growth of muscular mass determines increase of force and fortifying of the skeletal muscles. In this case, the fitness programs are very similar to body building trainings, without being followed by the spectacular, yet dangerous changes, specific to body building.

The purpose of anaerobic fitness is uniform, balanced and harmonious development of all the muscles, without ignoring their functionality. This last idea is important for making a clear difference between fitness and the tendencies, many times narcissistic, manifested by body building practitioners. The sportsman who takes up fitness wants to be able to and is able to do something with his muscles, more than showing them in contests or in different other occasions and places (disco, swimming pool, clubs, etc.).

One of the important characteristics of anaerobic fitness trainings is the use of general programs, during which all or almost all the muscles are worked out in one training session. In body building the programs are divided and trainings are focused every time on one, two or at most three groups of muscles; while in fitness one training can be focused on a certain area, but it does not exclude the other muscles, which will benefit, directly or indirectly, of at most one exercise for each group of muscles. This way, the programs are not excessively long; they take an average of one hour and fifteen minutes; thus the catabolic faze is avoided; this usually appears in very long training sessions (two hours or even more).

Another modality of reducing the time of training is doing super-series whose object is to train two antagonistic groups of muscles (chest and back or biceps and triceps, etc.). Thus, for each group of muscles must be performed a series of exercises, without a break in between; the break is taken only at the end of this double effort. The programs can also contain triple series or even giant-series (more than three exercises one after the other). The intensity of the training can be considerably increased: many muscles can be trained in a short time.

The weekly frequency of the training remains the same (three sessions); so the aerobic phase can be covered in the free days. If only three or even two weekly sessions are possible, mixed programs can be adopted: after the anaerobic fitness, always done at the beginning of the session, 15-20 minutes of aerobic fitness are added for balancing the two phases (anaerobic and aerobic). In this case, also, training must not take longer than one hour and a half; otherwise the phase of catabolic processes is initiated – a phase in which muscles 'self-cannibalize'.

Anaerobic fitness is recommended to all somatic types, with specific differences of modality of training.

In the cases of ectomorphic and mezomorphic types, all the series (3 or 4) performed on the same machine must be finished, and then the machine and the group of muscles which is trained must be changed at the same time. This system is also called 'workshop training'.

In the case of the endomorphic type (the overweight), circuit training is preferred: the group of muscles trained is changed after every series and the whole circuit must be repeated three or four times. This type of training consumes more calories because an aerobic component is introduced by not having breaks between series and slightly increasing the cardiac frequency.

Growth of muscular mass through fitness programs can't exceed one weight category (5-6 kg), but they do not misbalance the other motion parameters.

About The Author

Gaby Munteanu is a fitness trainer, with over 15 years experience, and editor at http://www.healthfitnessworld.com. HealthFitnessWorld.com - Health, Fitness, Body Building, Weight Loss, Nutrition - Articles and Resources.

HealthFitnessWorld.com is dedicated to providing high-quality, free advices, tips and resources on health, fitness, body building, supplements, nutrition, weight loss, beauty, massage, acne, medicine, depression, massage.