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A President’s Standard of Fitness: Do you Measure Up?

  • December 9, 2009 12:20 pm

How many of you all remember the presidential fitness tests when we were in grade school? Well there is new test which is based on the same program aimed at adults.

Created in 2008, the adult fitness test is meant to test the aerobic fitness and muscular strength and endurance of the men and women of the United States. It is pretty basic in its testing criteria and easy enough that anyone can do it at home. You could even make it a competition between you and your friends to further motivate yourself to try harder.

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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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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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What is fitness? A Misunderstood Word

  • December 7, 2009 10:59 am

When asked what it means to be physically fit, most people respond by answering that it means being athletic, thin, strong, fast or any combination of the latter. This is still a broad definition. Since this blog’s purpose is to help explain what fitness is and how one can be fit, I find it necessary to define the term.

For our purposes, fitness is the epitome of health. Now this might seem bizarre or incorrect, but a properly executed fitness regimen will provide excellent health benefits. Merely exercising and dieting by no means produce fitness though. For example, someone who runs everyday but is on a high carbohydrate, low fat and medium protein intake  diet is at risk of developing atherosclerotic disease, among a slew of other things. Fitness then is a compound measurement of many key areas.

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