by IcennaEmach | Jan 3, 2010 | Uncategorized
”The main reason diets fail, and health, fitness, and wellness goals are not achieved, is that our mental discipline weakens in an attempt to lose weight and become fit in a small span of time. Ironically, we consider ourselves weak willed and undisciplined when our dieting and exercise goals fail.” K. Miller
As a Health/Fitness coach and trainer in the St. Augustine, Florida area for over 10 years, I’ve seen many health trends come and go. Until a year or two ago, I received many exercise and health related questions from people seeking to obtain the “single” best approach to health. For example, “What is the best exercise?” “What is the best food?” “What is the best abdominal exercise?” And Etc. To most of us today, even novice exercisers, these questions appear narrow in scope and too basic for real health change to occur.
With the New Year here, this is a good time to summarize health observations. Specifically, I’ve noticed an ever increasing number of people gaining a better sense of what it means to be healthy and fit. They, it appears, are taking a broader and less superficial view than in previous years of what it means to be healthy and well.
There are many health observations that I could write about, but the three featured below were chosen because they represent an awareness that transcends superficial fitness practices and provide a hopefulness that I believe is necessary for real health change to occur.
Observations
1. We Use a Multi Tiered Approach to Health. People are savvy in what they require from a competent trainer. Years ago, a trainer needed only to be competent in putting a client through a vigorous routine without getting him or her injured. Today, this approach is fast disappearing. Trainers today must have an awareness and appreciation for engaging their clients in a more holistic approach to health, wellness, and fitness in order to keep up with the increased needs of their client base.
2. We Understand Exercise Cannot be Used to Mitigate Poor Eating Habits. The new attitude today is, ” I worked out hard today, let’s not mess things up by eating poorly.” People have adapted this new attitude because they are looking at food not merely as calories to be burned through exercise, but nutrition to be gained through proper eating habits.
3. We Realize The Best Exercises Are The Ones We Actually Do. There are certainly best approaches to take as it relates to a well balanced fitness program. It should include various aspects of fitness from cardiovascular fitness, muscular strength and endurance, to flexibility, balance, and body composition. And, they should include the more wellness oriented aspects of health, such as stress reduction, nutritional needs, and relationships with friends and family. However, if we are not ready to tackle the full demands of what it means to be healthy and well, then pick one exercise and do it well.
It’s amazing how focusing on one activity can change the heart and mind of an individual. In my earlier days of training clients, I used this singular approach successfully by putting one through an intense, but manageable workout with the hope that their minds would become open to engaging in other aspects of health and wellness. It’s still a great approach, and can be used as the basis of jump starting any lifestyle change! Try it yourself and drop me an e-mail at [email protected] letting me know how you are doing.
by IcennaEmach | Nov 22, 2009 | Uncategorized
Staying active and eating moderately during the holidays is a challenge for most of us.
Enjoying family, friends, and great food while maintaining fitness goals is most effectively achieved through proper planning. Take these action steps before your holiday outings by getting back to the basics of thoughtful planning.
Because the holiday season, with its emphasis on beautiful caloric rich foods and drinks places us in high risk situations for continuing healthful living, we need to recognize, identify, and practice a new set of skills. But before these skills are practiced, a little perspective helps in accomplishing our holiday goals of fitness and weight maintenance. The key is in not being too hard on ourselves, while asking ourselves to take responsibility and execute a plan.
Keys to Feeling Good During The Holidays
Stay Organized and Thoughtful. We tend to think that others are more disciplined in integrating healthy behaviors, but in reality, they are just more organized and thoughtful. Have a plan and tell yourself that you are in training for a new skill. As you improve at organizing yourself and projecting possible barriers, the newly learned skills will come naturally. Keeping healthy and maintaining your weight during the holidays will get easier with each passing festive season.
Stay Focused. It’s easy to rationalize unhealthful behaviors while shopping, cooking and enjoying festivities with friends and family. Recognize this type of thought process as destructive, and replace those thoughts with visualizing the people you admire who have mastered healthy skills. Know that it is within your reach to enjoy the camaraderie of the holiday season while maintaining your health. Take an attitude that others are doing it and so can you!
Stay Honest. Certain events during the holidays will inevitably occur, that you as an individual cannot control. Recognize and identify these events. This is no time to indulge in self-berating behaviors. Conversely, many events will be within your control, and will directly correlate to decisions that empower you to maintain a healthy lifestyle.
Visualize how you want to feel after the holiday season has ended. It’s true, gyms are crowded with new members after the 1st of the year and we assume it is because of well thought out New Year’s resolution planning. The truth is, many people go to the gym in January simply because they have under-exercised and over-indulged in food and drink during the holidays. They are feeling out of control. Tell yourself that it does not have to be this way. We can enjoy the holidays, make workouts and or walking/jogging programs a priority, and try various foods that our friends, families and favorite restaurants have to offer in a moderate manner.
Take control this holiday season! And get back to the basics of what an increasingly growing number of savvy people consider the cornerstone of living well – a healthy life!
Action Steps
– Six days prior to the holiday festive season, put your goals of weight maintenance and adhering to an exercise routine throughout the holiday season in writing. Keep in a visible area. Read daily to reinforce mentally.
– Four days prior, visualize what your days will look like during the holiday season. Imagine the shopping and time schedule you will have, the food preparation you may do, and what parties you may have, or will be attending. Envision accomplishing written health goals during each activity, and keeping your exercise schedule consistent.
– Three days prior, mentally strategize any barriers that may occur in preventing you from accomplishing your goals.
– Two days prior, write down possible goal barriers, as well as alternative strategies you will implement if barriers arise.
– One day prior, mentally rehearse accomplishing health goals and overcoming all barriers that may arise. See yourself adjusting to new strategies in various holiday settings. Use positive self – talk as a tool to gain self control of negative defeatist attitudes. Go to www.selfhelpmagazine.com/articles/sports/selftalk.htmlfor an overview of how positive self- talk can enhance your success.
Daily, remind yourself you are practicing skills that may be easy to implement during the year when your routine is dependable, but more challenging during the holidays when activities are more hectic. Remind yourself to slow down, and think about health priorities, while rewarding yourself for making good choices.
Daily, take solace in the fact that implementation of good healthful habits becomes easier through the holiday seasons, and changing old neurological pathways now, positions you for a more vital and vigorous quality of life as you progress through the years.
by IcennaEmach | Oct 31, 2009 | Uncategorized
High intensity interval training, also called HITT, is a specific type of interval training that in the past was practiced mainly by athletes at the highest level of sports. Today, it is implemented commonly by athletes and non athletes alike who desire obtaining the most, lean, athletic, and sinewy physiques that are “possible for them.”
Emphasis on, “possible for them”, is placed because it’s important to understand that we have innate body shapes that make becoming lean more easy, or more difficult,depending on genetic factors. There are three body types:
Ectomorph
Body types are naturally lean and thin skinned. They will see quicker looking body fat results than the two other body types, mesomorphs and endomorphs.
Mesomorph
Body types are characterized by dense musculature. They will see results less quickly than ectomorphs, but have greatest lean muscle looking potential.
Endomorph
Body types are characterized by softness and fatty areas throughout body. These individuals respond to high intensity interval training less quickly than ectomorphs and mesomorphs, but results of fat loss percentages are more pronounced than the former two groups.
The Truth of the Matter
Think you are an Endomorph? Think again! Go back to your childhood, and recall what body type you were at age 10. This is what you are today, even if you feel a little soft.
EPOC to Super Charge Metabolism
When you exercise using the high intensity interval system, your body consumes considerably more oxygen. And the more oxygen you expend, the more calories you burn. However this increased oxygen during exercise is not really what fuels what we all desire- a higher metabolic rate, it’s the after-burn, or what is called EPOC, and more descriptively, excess post exercise oxygen consumption that fuels our metabolism. It works like this. The more energy your body uses during training, the higher EPOC. EPOC works in increasing metabolism by telling our body to get back to balance or what is referred to as homeostasis.
Getting back to homeostasis takes energy though, and this energy burns calories for several hours if not days afterward. That’s why hard working athletes who consume thousands of calories still find it difficult to sustain their weights. Their bodies are calorie burning machines even when they are at rest. How would you like to have even a fraction of their speedy metabolisms? You can. Next week we’ll go over specific high intensity interval training techniques to get you started on EPOC. In the meantime, think about this:
1. Training without good nutrition is nothing.
2. Over eating is not good.
3. You can do what you want to do.
4. Now is the time.
5. Control your destiny by managing your health.
by IcennaEmach | Oct 12, 2009 | Uncategorized
People will often ask me what they should eat before they train. It’s a good question because what and how much you eat prior to working out should depend on which fitness component you will be working on. For example, say that your emphasis on a particular day is going to be muscular strength, and so you will probably be lifting free weights and or a machine weights. It is a known bit of information in the world of strength that what you eat prior to strength training has a direct correlation on your ability to lift. Foremost one has to eat prior to strength training because it aids in keeping the blood sugar levels up so we do not feel weak or faint when exerting the energy.
It is true that most of our energy comes from food that we have eaten the day prior as it is stored in the muscles in the form of glycogen. This glycogen is what fuels our energy especially when we are engaged in endurance events. When it comes to strength training though, there is a direct correlation between what we consume one hour – 30 minutes prior to a strength event and how we actually perform.
So the question is,
What to Eat Prior to Strength Training?
1. Protein
2. Carbohydrates
3. Fat
Here’s good examples of the three eaten together- see if any will work for you. And by the way, if you are not used to eating before you workout or real early in the morning before you train, just start with a small amount of food. Ideally depending on your size, 250- 500 calories should be sufficient. You should not feel full as if you are too full, all your digestive organs will be using the blood and energy that you really need for the muscles you are aiming to strengthen.
* One slice whole grain toast-1-2 TBLS peanut butter- an orange or 6 oz.orange juice.
* One slice whole grain toast- one poached egg – 4 to 8 oz. cantaloupe.
* Half cup to one cup steel oats – half cup soy milk – half cup berries
* Small bran and flaxseed muffin – 1 to 2 oz low fat cheese – small apple or other fruit.
* Smoothies made with yogurt, fruit and low sugar protein powders.
What To Eat When Working The Cardiovascular System?
When you are training the cardiovascular system and using the largest muscles of your body in a continuos motion, eating is a little different just prior to working out. If you are doing a long slow bike ride or long slow elliptical or jogging walking training day, then you’ll want to eat a little more simply and definitely a little less if you are eating just one hour prior to your training. You’ll have to experiment with your timing, but general quidelines say that you should eat more simple carbohydrates if eating 1-2 hours before a cardiovascular training day. You should also know that Proteins and Fats tend to take much longer to digest than carbohydrates and so for this reason, they are not a good choice if eating one to two hours before training.
If You are Diabetic
If you are diabetic, prone to low blood sugar, or older, adding a small amount of protein or a good fat is a good choice regardless. It will keep your blood sugar from dropping. You should experiment. People with regular blood sugar levels will most likely feel better doing endurance activities with small amounts of simple and or complex carbohydrates depending upon the time or distance of the event. There are variations of how you can best eat prior to training when it comes to the use of cardiovascular intervals, or even flexibility training but we’ll take that up another day. Call or email if you have any questions. I’d be happy to help.
Our Wealth is in Our Health,
Kim Miller
by IcennaEmach | Sep 28, 2009 | Uncategorized
“We are not only what we read, we are how we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental Psychologists at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The story and Science of the Reading Brain. Wolf contends that the style of reading promoted by the Internet puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else and that we may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged shortly after the printing press came into play. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction remains largely disengaged.”
Google, and other search engines thrive on loads of information. Of course it has its pros and cons. As a writer, it is a godsend. I can get research, get quotes and not have to sift through any books or go to the library. The downside is that I have slithered down that superficial road of just finding information, but not really interpreting it or making the mental connections that are necessary for thoughtful reading to occur.
The point is that we may be heading down that same superficial road with diet and exercise. We are, I believe, heading deeper and deeper down that road of trying to be healthy by educating ourselves incessantly with internet health information. Something is missing. It seems to me that we may be confusing the very act of reading health information with actually implementing the health information. Writing in the July issue of Atlantic, Nicholas Carr relates how the London Scholar Group from the University College in London has been studying the behaviors of internet users and that what they found was that people using the sites exhibited a “form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to one source they’ve already visited.
Are we receiving a lot of information, but processing it the same way we are reading it – by skimming? Ironically diet and exercise for good health and wellness calls for just the opposite. We need to design a plan and stick with it. We tweak it only after we have sustained an effort for a considerable amount of time, and additionally have assessed it for it’s worthiness in helping us to achieve our health goals.
It’s ironic, as we get increased information on diet and exercise, we get more of the health problems associated with obesity. The state in which I live, Florida, one news station reports, is the most obese state in the nation. Do we need to consider that there may be a direct correlation between our style of reading health information and the future of our wellness?
Our Wealth is in Our Health
Kim Miller
by IcennaEmach | Sep 7, 2009 | Uncategorized
Having a personal trainer does not have to be a lifetime commitment. Trainers are utilized in multiply ways and most good trainers enjoy the variety of reasons that people come to them whether for one single session or a continuous program. Credentials are important. The following are various reasons people may hire a trainer.
1. Learn proper alignment and form on machines and free weights.
2. Weekly as an extra energy boost to typical routines.
3. Quarterly for changing routines, and offering more progressively challenging tasks.
4. After the Holidays as a motivational jump start.
5. Prior to special events to look and feel good.
6. Weight loss jump start.E-mail accountability programs to boost fitness or wellness goal success.
7. Body sculpting program for swim wear season.
8. After cardiovascular rehabilitation to reinforce implementation in new setting.
9. Learn safe back strengthening exercises to decrease back pain.
10. Full body conditioning prior to or after surgery to decrease surgery complications.
11. Reduce blood pressure prior to deciding with doctor on taking prescription drugs.
12. Increase bone strength prior to deciding with doctor on taking prescription drugs.
13. Design training routine for sporting competition.
14. Abdominal training exercises post pregnancy.
15. Target muscle training such as triceps ( back of arms), hip, and gluteus routines.
16. In home training or consulting on various fitness routines or health programs.
17. Home gym set up consulting and implementation advice.
18. Blood sugar reduction program.
19. Nutrition and exercise consulting via e-mail, phone, or in person.
20. More fun, more challenge, and more variety.
Hiring a Personal Trainer
Find out if the trainer is certified by a nationally recognized body such as the American Council on Exercise (acefitness.org) or the American College of Sports Medicine. Both of these organizations require a health related academic degree.
Ask the trainer about his philosophy related to teaching fitness and see if it matches your philosophy of fitness.
Ask him what his specialty areas are and how he would quide you in reaching your goals.
It should be offered , but ask for a no obligation training session to get a feel for how you may work together.
Remember, you are hiring them, and attention to your needs and how best they can be met should be their number one priority.
Unlike in years past, the services of personal trainers are not just for those that are looking to build their bodies. Clients have a variety of ways in which they may benefit from the expertise of an ever increasing specialized profession of fitness trainers. Hiring a personal trainer that suits your interests and needs is a challenge of past generations.
