An Hour a Day does not Keep the Fat Away

  • December 1, 2010 4:01 pm

How often do people tell you that they cannot seem to lose weight even though they put in an hour per day in the gym or on the treadmill. Unfortunately, going about our daily lives and merely injecting an hour in the gym will not help us realize any goal of weight-loss or figure transformation.

As I have tried to emphasize before, fitness is all encompassing, it must be an ever present part of our lives. If your goal or definition of fitness then is yourself 15lbs lighter and more toned, then you must eat, sleep, and live in a way the progresses you towards that self-made definition.

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Break Down the Wall: Lactate Threshold Training

  • February 11, 2010 1:24 pm

If endurance is a critical component of your overall fitness then listen close. You NEED to know what lactate threshold training is. Why you ask? Well to put it as simply as possible, your lactate threshold determines how long and how hard you can exert near maximum effort, or to use the true term, exert yourself at your anaerobic threshold. So what I am saying is this; that wall you hit when you are running, that tries to bring you down to your knees and crumple in pain, is your lactate threshold. Now that we know our enemy, let’s learn how to beat it down.

First we need to understand some key concepts and know that the following is a simplification of a much more complicated set of biochemical processes but will suffice for our purposes.

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The Subculture of Steroids and Performance Enhancing Drugs

  • December 8, 2009 9:59 pm

The past few years have been unkind to many of the world’s top athletes. Olympic hopefuls to MLB sluggers to Tour De France cyclists, have all fallen prey to intense scrutiny as we seek to maintain the image of a pure natural athlete. I am not going to talk in specific about any one athlete in particular, but rather the culture of altering our bodies by way of non natural processes.

Everyone wants to be the best, be at the pinnacle of whatever sport or activity they may be participating in. We get it in our heads that to beat everyone else, we have to give ourselves a one up and this is where steroids and other performance enhancing drugs (PEDS) enter into the equation. Sure there are side effects to their use, but they can be mitigated by incredibly careful, doctor assisted monitoring. What I mean is frequent blood work and hormone panels. 98% of PEDS users do not fit into this category of careful use. So why even decide to go that route? You are short changing yourself, determining that you will fail at achieving your goal without even trying.

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Dynamic Flexibility Part 1: What is it?

  • December 8, 2009 9:48 pm

The question on when and how to stretch and warm up is one that comes up often. It is one of those, made to complicated because we think about it too much things. And from all this thinking have spawned several myths which we will talk about here later on. But what people fail to talk about or do much is dynamic warmups.

Dynamic warm ups are not exactly new, but they have yet to go mainstream. What are they? Well its warming up your body by stretching through movement. Examples of this are lunges, side bends, high knees, back pedals, scorpions, side stepping, high knee skipping, Frankenstein walk and MORE! Descriptions will follow.

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Alcohol and Your Heart: A Reason to Raise a Glass

  • December 8, 2009 11:38 am

Here is some health advice that we can all get excited about. Recent research is showing a stronger casual link between alcohol consumption and coronary health.

Before we get into the details let me say a few words. Drinking in this article will be defined as no more than one drink per day for women and no more than two drinks per day for men. Thus, we are not promoting in any way heavy drinking. Further, if you do not already drink do not start drinking because of this article. Most of the research in this area is new, and though it comes from prestigious institutions it is still not fully understood.

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Cholesterol: It’s Not the Evil You Think it Is

  • December 7, 2009 10:51 pm

In a previous post we discussed what it means to be physically fit and some factors that contribute to a state of overall fitness. Cholesterol was one of these factors and so this we are going to discuss what it is and how it influences our health and well-being.

Cholesterol is a sterol, which basically is a steroid with a hydroxyl group added to it. More simply, it is a steroid alcohol if you will. It is not, as many people assume, a form of fat. It is though found in all fats and oils.

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Are You Explosive: Functional Strength Explained

  • December 7, 2009 1:20 pm

Step into a gym and what do you notice first? The big guys right. What some people are able to transform their bodies into amazes all of us at some point or another. Men who look like descendants of Hercules himself. It is only natural for us to want to try and imitate these icons of strength and fitness, but before you set about training to be nothing but huge, ask yourself this. Do you just want to be able to move weight around, or be strong and immensely quick, explosive as I like to call it. The difference is this: being able to jump higher, run faster and exert force as quickly as possible versus having the ability to bench 300 pounds slowly or squat 500 pounds even slower. Ridiculous examples but I think you get the point. The mechanical difference is the types of muscle fibers we recruit to perform certain tasks.

There are two types of muscle fibers, fast-twitch and slow-twitch or TypeII and TypeI. Within the TypeII class there are fast-oxidative-glycolytic TypeIIa and fast-glycolytic TypeIIb fibers. Contrary to what some people believe, both exert the same amount of force, it is simply the rate at which they do so that varies.

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BMI as a Case of Misusing Data

  • December 6, 2009 7:31 pm

It can be said that as a society, we are generally concerned with the status of our weight and if we are overweight, underweight, or healthy. The most frequently used measurement for assessing what category we fall into is BMI, or Body Mass Index. If you have not heard of it then don’t worry, you have not been missing out on any real knowledge.

BMI is calculated via the following formula:

BMI =
( kg/m² )		 (weight in pounds * 703 )
————————————–
height in inches²

Thus, it is merely a factor of your weight and height. 703 is a conversion factor from imperial to metric units as the formula was originally derived by a Belgium statistician early in the nineteenth century. It is incredibly accurate at predicting the overall state of health of a population, but for individuals it is terrible. Now I will say that the CDC and most physicians use this measurement as a general rule of thumb, but it is still mind boggling trying to figure out why.

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