Warming Up

When you have to fit an exercise routine into your already busy schedule, you might be tempted to simply skip the warm up routine, even though you've heard horror stories about people getting injured while working out. Three words: don’t do that. When you skip your warm up, you are not only putting your body as risk for personal injury, but you are also making the workout more difficult and less effective. For the best results, it is important to warm up every time you work out.

Warming up doesn’t have to eat up the time you allotted for exercise into your day. In fact, a decent workout only has to be 5 minutes long to do its job. It doesn’t have to be boring either—you can mix up a number of great moves to make your warm up as fun as the rest of your exercising. Remember that a good warm up gets all of your muscles moving, even if you don’t think that you’ll be intensely working out a set of muscles on any particular day. Warming up is also important regardless of if you’re doing cardiovascular exercises or lifting weights.

The moves you do for a warm up shouldn’t necessarily be difficult or make you break a sweat. The main goal of the warm up isn’t to become a part of your workout, but simply to slowly move muscles that you haven’t really thought about all day to wake them up. Good moves, therefore, include things like jogging in place, doing jumping jacks, lunging, and jumping rope.

A good warm-up can also including slowly stretching your muscles in a variety of ways, although this is usually more effective for a cool-down. Also consider exercises that work on balance and form in order to prepare you for the exercises you will be doing in the workout.

If you’re really short on time, why not try warming up before you even get to the gym. Slowly jog or power walk to the gym, park as far away as possible and lunge to the door, and take the stairs instead of the elevator. That way, when you get to the gym to workout your warm up routine is already half way done.

A good workout always builds in intensity. This is the best way to shed pounds and maintain a healthy weight. Weight loss workouts are only risky if you don’t warm up, because otherwise your body will respond to prevent injuries. Although you may be tempted to skip this step, that is never a good idea. 

  

The Macronutrients of Nutrition

Nutrition can be a confusing subject for the ordinary person. Of course we have all heard about vitamins and minerals, antioxidants and fiber, complex carbohydrates and sugars but how does it all fit together?

Well to start with, our bodies require certain amounts of macronutrients to survive. There are a few people who focus on one nutrient over another and they consume more of one and less of the others but in general we all need some of these nutrients and a healthy diet consists of a good balance of the all three macronutrients.

The macronutrients are protein, fat and carbohydrates. Protein and carbohydrates both provide 4 calories per gram, while the more dense fat contains 9 calories per gram. A calorie is at its most basic description the amount of heat energy required to raise the temperature of 1g of water 1 degree Celsius. While that is a rather confusing definition for most of us it is easier for us to just know that a calorie is just a measurement that we use to determine the energy content of food.

Due to this discrepancy of 5 additional calories per gram, it was believed for a few years that the fat in our diet was the main cause of the fat on our bodies. It has since been proven that this all too simple explanation is not quite true. The fat on our bodies is caused by a number of different factors including the eating of too many calories altogether be they from fat, protein or carbohydrates.

Protein is the building blocks of the tissues in our bodies and it is essential to all of the processes within our cells. Protein can be found in animal tissue, dairy products and eggs but also vegetarian sources such a beans, legumes and especially soybeans.

Carbohydrates are the main energy source of our bodies. A simplistic explanation of carbohydrates is that they convert to sugar in our bodies, which in turn provides the energy that we need. Carbohydrates can be further broken down into simple carbohydrates, which include sugar, candy, white flour and more and complex carbohydrates, which include whole grains and vegetables. Simple carbohydrates break down in our bodies at a very rapid level, causing energy swings and increased hunger while complex carbohydrates break down slowly which gives us sustained longer-term energy.

Fat was long misaligned as being bad for our health but that is not completely true. The saturated fats and trans fats are destructive to our bodies but there are also essential fats that we need to maintain good health. Those would include the monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats such as olive oil, peanut oil and canola oil and the fats found in nuts and seeds, avocados, olives and the acai berry. The bad fats are the saturated fats such as the fat found in animal products and the "fake" fats or trans fats that are created by hydrogenation.

The macronutrients of protein, carbohydrates and fat are the building blocks of nutrition and all of the rest of the positive nutritional factors, like vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and more are found within one of these three macro nutrients.

Karen Lynch recently discovered the acai berry and she is very excited about the potential of this new superfood. She has been avidly studying the health benefits of the acai berry.

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Yoga With Richard Freeman: Ashtanga Yoga: The Primary Series [VHS]

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