Monthly Archive for June, 2006

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7 days to a Better Body : Day 2

Published on June 27, 2006 in Daily, Exercises, Health, Physical and Physical activities. 0 Comments

OK, now onto day 2. Today, we’re going to discuss about the basic routine you’ll have to do in order to keep yourself “top shape”. A daily routine consist of 4 important points: warm up, cardio, cooling down and logging. Let’s get into detail for each of these point.

THE DAILY ROUTINE

WARM UP
This step is important in order to activate your body and prepare it for intense workout. It helps to increase blood flow and warm up the muscle. If you don’t warm up, it’s possible that during your workout you could strain, pull or tear your muscle which isn’t good.

When you’ve warmed up, your muscle will be more apt to extreme conditions but this doesn’t mean you should attempt doing them. This will just prevent from any accident to occur if you weren’t warmed up. Warm up is used to increase the intensity of your physical activity because you do not want to jump from none to an extreme one.

The benefits of the warm up are numerous: higher effectiveness of your workout, higher muscle temperature which allows better elasticity and extensibility and increase of the heart rate.

A warm up could be:

  1. Jogging or jump-rope

    2. This stage will get your heart rate up and will increase your body temperature.

  2. Calisthenic (dynamic) active stretches

    3. This stage prepares your body to do various movements. You should get your muscle to work on their full range. Press-ups, lunges and squat thrusts are good for this.

  3. Sport-related exercise.

    4. This stage involve repeating the same movement in order to heat specific areas which are used a lot in the sport you practice. If for example you play soccer, you’d prepare your kick by kicking the ball back and forth to a partner.

CARDIO
In this part you have the choice between running or biking. You can also do specific training such as Air Alert 3 (AA3) or High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT).

If you’re on a day were you practice your sport, this would be the moment you’d be playing your game or doing whatever the sport is. Your body is now ready to accomplish what you want him to. If you haven’t been warmed up to swim, you might have some trouble at the beginning to feel great in the water. If you have warmed up, swimming benefits will be at their maximums.

COOLING DOWN
The cooling down step is important because it will help your body to remove the lactic acid waste created by the exercise. When you feel sore after exercising, this is most likely because you didn’t took the time to cool down. Stopping suddenly to do an intense activity will leave this acid in your muscle and this is why it hurts. The idea here is to slowly reduce the intensity of your sport. Say you’ve been running for a while, now start jogging, then walk. Then you can stop.

Once again, you’ll be performing stretching, but this time static active and static passive stretching. The goal of this type of stretching is to improve and facilitate your flexibility and the muscle will be quite warm at the moment. It will at the same time help your to relax as there’s no more cardiovascular activities going on.

KEEP TRACK (DAILY LOG)
This is part of day one idea. In order to keep you motivated, you must absolutely log your progress to see them increase. This will push you to do even more as you see you can.

Your log should contain:

  1. The date
  2. Your weight
  3. The exercice name
      4. If it’s in sets

    1. The number of repetitions in each set
    2. The difficulty level of the exercise
      If it’s on a period of time

    1. The lenght of the period
    2. The difficulty level of the exercise
  4. How you felt at the beginning of the workout
  5. How you felt at the end of the workout

I generally leave a mark beside the exercise I feel I can do more than what I’ve done that day. This way I know that tomorrow I’ll be doing more than what’s written there.

Here’s an example of an Excel sheet that would contain this information. Log example
It’s up to you to design your own if you don’t like this one.

Resume

WARM UP: Jogging or jump-rope, dynamic active stretching, sport related exercise.
CARDIO: Jogging or AA3 or HIIT or biking.
COOLING DOWN: Slow down the activity, static active and passive stretching.
LOGGING: Log your progress.

For stretching examples, I recommand Tricks Tutorial Developing flexibility. (Contain images)

A daily routine is important as it helps you keep the flow going on. When it’s installed, it’s a really good thing. When you’ll see the results, you’ll just want to keep going.

See you tomorrow for day 3.

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7

7 days to a Better Body : Day 1

Published on June 26, 2006 in Health, Nutrition and Self-Improvement. 0 Comments

Before even beginning to do exercise we have to lay the pre-requisites first. This is a must-do to well being and will be required for the next few day. Apply it for the rest of your life and you’ll keep getting great results. Keeping good habits is hard at the beginning but once it’s in place, you’ll never have to keep track of it because it will be natural. Changing habits are hard because they have been instored for a really long time and if they’ve been there for a while, we feel ok with that, even though we know they are bad. Make sure you dedicate your next 7 days to following this to the letter and you’ll see that the results will make you WANT to change those habits forever.

To begin our journey, we must follow some important guidelines. I’ll try to keep it short and give you the most important things to consider.

  1. The most important thing about exercising is what you eat and when you eat.
    1. If you don’t eat enough

      2. If you don’t eat enough, well, you’ll have trouble going through exercising as you’ll feel tired quite fast. Exercising burn your fat, but it also burns your calories first, this is why there are some joggers who jog in the morning before eating. This way, they run on an empty stomach which will help them burn calories and then they’ll eat, generally a protein shake or something which contains lots of energy.

    2. If you eat unhealthy food aka Fast Food

      3. Fast Food is known to be the biggest cause of obesity in America. The problem with Fast Food mentality is that it fills one primary need: it has to be quick. But we have to pay the price: all the stuff that is used to allow fast food cooking is not good for our health.

      What I would suggest, like many dietist would, is that you stop as much as possible to take Fast Food. This might be something really hard for many but it is a step to take in order to make sure you’ll be on the way to get a better body.

    3. If you’re always eating

      4. If you’re always eating, there’s a problem. Your stomach needs time to digest and if you keep food coming in, it’ll have problems filtering the junk stuff and keeping the good stuff. Like a muscle, it needs time to recover and prepare itself for the next food intake, but if it’s constant, it’ll get tired and that’s when you’ll feel tired too.

    4. You have a low water intake

      5. This one is crazy. Most of us think we don’t need to drink water if we don’t feel thirsty but in fact we should take around 8 glasses of water of 8 oz per day. There’s a simply formula to calculate approximately how much water you should take based on your weight:
      Weight/16 = Number of 8 oz glasses of water OR Weight/2 = Number of oz of water

      So for somehow who weight 128 pounds, he’d be taking 8 glasses per day. Note that there are some modification when the weather is hot or for various reasons. This should be a basic guideline.

    5. Recommanded

      6. Eating is just a question of portion control, containing carbs, proteins and good fats. Being awake generally for 16 hours, you should eat every 3 hours, which is about 5 (small) meals per day. This will give your stomach enough time to digest and it will give it at the same time the opportunity to absorb everything from each meal. Don’t forget to drink water everyday.

      Good food would be:
      Protein: lean cut meats, eggs, fish, dairy
      Carbs: whole grain breads, brown rice, oatmeal, yams, sweet potatoes, cream of wheat
      Good Fats : olive oil, canola oil, fish and flax seed oil, hemp seed oil, almonds, egg yolks

      In order to know what should be your daily consommation, we’ll use the Harris-Benedict formula, which is available in a calculator format.

  2. Motivation is one of the biggest reason people stop exercising

    3. So in order to prevent anything related to motivation I’d recommand you fix yourself goals that you know can be reach soon (those will be called short term goals) and goals which will be on a long term period (long term goals). The reason we have to use short term goals is because we are all looking for quick gratification, so in order to get some, we’ll fix ourselves some easy goals. It doesn’t need to be “I want to lose 10 pounds in the next month” but something like, I’ll drink a water of glass each time I wake up in the morning” or “I’ll wait 2 hours until I eat once again”. When you’ll realise you’ve been able to do these, you’ll be amazed at your capacities and will want to progress.

    Physical training is hard without any motivation, pretty much like anything else. I’ve once heard this: “If I were to give you 1 million dollar to do some thing you really don’t like to do, would you do it?” Well, pretty much everyone would do it? Here’s another one: “If you had to run as fast as you could in order to not get killed by wolfs, would you?” Those questions pretty much answers themselves. This is the mentality you want to have. You want to be able to tell yourself, “I can and I WANT to do this until the end, no matter how easy or hard it will be because I want the results!” Now we’re talking the same language :)

These are the basic pre-requisites you must follow if you want to see results fast. They should be respected at least for the 7 days you’ll follow this course and if possible, for the rest of your life. They will help you maintain a good health without having to stress yourself too much with the hows and what to eat.

See you tomorrow for day 2.

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7

7 Days to a Better Body

Published on June 21, 2006 in Daily, Health, Physical and Self-Improvement. 0 Comments
“Discover Tips that will forge an amazingly attractive body under one week. Guaranteed!”

From this serie of article you’ll learn…

  • What is the perfect nutrition and diet to follow.
  • How to be able to keep up with exercising and why many stop doing it.
  • How you should perform your exercises. The magical order to gain better results than your average way of doing it.
  • The workout which gives you the best results to lose OR gain weight.
  • Tips on how to perform your sport(s).
  • The magic of stretching.
  • Which supplements to take and what they will help you to achieve.

See you on June 26 for the first article of this amazing serie.

 7 Days to a Better Body

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Updates: This serie is now over. You can now take a look at each day:
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7