Fitness & Wellness

Your gym bag should have all the necessities to make your transformation from John or Joan Average Citizen to powerhouse and back again. While some people have everything they need and seem to be pros carry just the right number of necessary items, others either forget things or have enough stuff in their gym bag to hold them over for several days. The first on the list should always be clean gym clothing and tennis shoes.

Don’t forget your toiletries.

If you’re working out after work and going directly home, hair product may not be on your list. However, deoderant should be, as well as other toiletries. A bottle of dry shampoo can help remove the greasy feeling sweating left in your hair. For women, light moisturizer with a little bit of coverage to take the red out of your face can help you feel more presentable after a workout, but without taking a lot of time. If you’re going to work, make sure you have the makeup you need for the office and both male and females need their hair care products. Don’t forget your comb or brush, you’d be surprised how many people do. Most people buy a special one for the bag.

Think about the workout and include items to help make it better.

If sweat poured in your eyes and your gym charges a towel rental fee, take your own. You’ll want to keep your hands dry so they aren’t slippery for performing some of the exercises. While a sweat band helps, it only goes so far and having your own towel not only assures you that it’s clean—or least only used by you—but also ensures you’ll have one when you need it. For women with longer hair, make sure a few hair ties are in your gym bag.

Bottled water or a refillable thermal bottle is important.

Staying hydrated is hard, but what’s even harder is drinking from public faucets when you’ve heard all those stories about e-coli and other bacteria thriving there. They don’t have to be true to make you appreciate having your own water in a reusable bottle that keeps it cold and refreshing for hours. If you’re an avid water drinker, carry one plastic bottle in and keep the thermal one in your gym bag for when you finish the first.
– Having a few healthy snacks to munch on after the workout will keep you from grabbing a high calorie snack with no nutritional value.
– Don’t forget the Rx. Aspirin or other anti-inflammatory, muscle balm and even an elastic bandage should be part of your gear.
– Bring a spare pair of socks. Feet sweat big time and you want a spare, particularly if you’re wearing your gym clothes home. Have an extra tank top or tee in your bag too.
– For women, particularly if you’re coming directly from work, have a face wipe to remove your makeup before a tough sweaty workout or you’ll be wearing your mascara on your cheeks.

Getting fit isn’t always easy. There’s the important matter of getting motivated and staying motivated. Carving out time is another problem. To solve that, sometimes you have to think outside the box. Everyone needs direction and guidance if they’re first starting out on a road to good health. If you can’t go to a personal trainer or only have a half hour or so to yourself in the morning or evening, you still can get the direction and expertise a trainer can provide.

Consider a trainer that does house calls.

Some personal trainers will come to you to provide their services. This can work best when your problem is finding time to leave the house, not a super cramped schedule. After all, do you want a stranger in your home before the kids get up? Another problem deterring this solution can be a lack of funds. If someone’s coming to you, expect to pay more. If the budget is tight already, this may not be a solution that is applicable.

Consider online training.

Online training is a viable alternative. Our online plan provides all the services of a personal trainer. Of course, we need information from you to help create the plan, just as we would in person. It’s customized and includes a complete program of exercise, hitting all areas of fitness from balance and strength to flexibility and balance. It also includes aid in the area of nutrition. In fact, to provide guidance until you learn healthier habits, we include seven days of meals. To make it even easier, there’s a grocery list too. You’ll be held accountable to your personal trainer via email and report progress, share success or get answers to questions that can affect that success.

Online training solves the deterrents caused by both time and money.

When you train online, you can get up early and workout in the privacy of your home. While I don’t recommend you workout late at night, since it stimulates increased circulation and make it difficult to sleep, it’s a possibility too. However, it’s much better to go to bed earlier and get adequate sleep to make early morning rising easier. It also solves the financial pinch, since online training is far less expensive than training in a gym or having private sessions with a trainer.
– No matter where you are, you’ll be able to train. If you go on vacation, as long as you have access to the internet, the trainer goes with you. That makes it ideal for people who travel frequently.
– Traveling can also put a strain at meal time. Email contact with a trainer can help you find healthy foods when on the road.
– Get a group together for support. With the low prices of the internet training, it’s affordable for almost anyone. Find three or four people who also want to sign up and then get together a few times a week to workout together. While you each will have different plans, many of the exercises will be similar, but with different goals.
– With online training, you can split your workout to shorter segments, getting at least ten to fifteen minutes of exercise in each one. It’s especially helpful to break the monotony of working at the computer and increase your efficiency in the process.

People don’t always eat because they need the calories to sustain them. They eat for a number of reasons. Sometimes, it’s emotional and triggered by anger or sadness. Sometimes, eating occurs because, frankly, you have nothing better to do. It’s hard to tell whether you’re hungry or bored in those instances, unless you focus on why you’re searching for food. Before you grab a quick sandwich, try some of these tactics to see if you’re really hungry or if it’s something else you seek.

How do you feel?

If you’re stomach is growling and you haven’t eaten for hours, it’s not difficult to identify hunger. Sometimes, those cravings to eat come when you’re full. That’s when you know it’s something else driving you toward the cupboards and fridge. Real hunger grows slowly and lets you know several times you’re hungry. Emotional hunger occurs suddenly and becomes an overpowering craving for specific foods. These may be emotional comfort foods or crunchy salty ones, like chips. Both types indicate a feeling feeding rather than true hunger.

Try exercising or doing something active.

There’s no doubt that your nibbling was the need for something to do or overcome frustration, anger or sadness, if it goes away when you workout for a while. It doesn’t have to be strenuous, although getting your heart rate up does trigger hormones that make you feel good and burns off hormones from stress. Running up and down stairs for a few minutes is one solution if it’s rainy or dark outside, going for a walk if it’s not, can divert your attention and often work off that irresistible urge to snack.

Have a “to-do” list close at hand.

You can eliminate the urge to eat, while getting more done if you have a “to-do” list in hand. These are active tasks that you can complete in 20 to 30 minutes. They shouldn’t be major projects, but things you wanted to get finished “some day.” Cleaning out a drawer, the top shelf of a closet, moving the couch and sweeping both the couch and floor behind it are a few examples. When you feel that craving come on and know it’s from boredom, start one of the tasks on the list. Make them quick so you can cross it off the list and get the feeling of satisfaction, which often makes the craving go away.
– Do your cravings indicate a nutritional shortage? If you keep finding you have the same cravings, maybe it’s a nutritional shortage. There are a number of stories where pregnant women crunch on ice, only to find they lack iron or vitamin C to absorb it. When they get an adequate amount the craving disappears.
– Drink a glass of water. Sometimes, people eat because they’re thirsty, not hungry. If you drink a cup or two of water and the craving is still there, it’s something else.
– Think before you eat. Give yourself an emotional checkup. Is there anything bothering you? Figure out how to resolve it, even if it means just letting it go.
– Are you feeling deprived? That’s not a surprising emotion if you’re denying yourself some of the food pleasures you enjoy. Start with allowing a small portion of your favorite food as a reward after a week of healthy eating and then move on to non-food rewards, like a new outfit.

If you’ve ever tried to create a workout program on your own, you’ll find there are hundreds of different exercises and many different ways to do them to reap benefits. It can be confusing, which is why we provide the programs live or online. We make sure you get variety in workouts for several reasons. The first is easy. It prevents the boredom that can occur when you do the same workout repeatedly. You simply go through the motions after four to six weeks and eventually that boredom will make it harder and harder to workout, until eventually you quit.

You’ll push past the plateau when you switch your workout regularly.

When you do the same workout repeatedly, plateauing often occurs. It’s when the body becomes too efficient at doing an exercise or specific group of exercises and burns fewer calories. Efficiency is good in our daily life, but when it comes to weight loss, not good at all. You’ll see slower weight loss and less progress, which is why trainers offer a wide variety of workouts to help you accomplish your goals.

When you do the same workout repeatedly, you can develop stress injuries.

Runners often have stress injuries like shin splints, Achilles tendinitis, stress fractures and plantar fasciitis. Those come from doing the same type of movement continuously. You’ve heard of tennis elbow and workout injuries from strength training that start with pain, but if the exercise continues, ends in chronic persistent pain even when not lifting. Overuse injuries mostly occur in older individuals, but if you run constantly, it can happen at any age.

You need to work muscles on all planes to ensure functional fitness.

There are three planes of motion. The first divides the body into left and right halves. It’s called the sagittal plane and encompasses backward and forward movements. Bicep curls and back squats exercise that plane. The second is the frontal plane, that divides the body into a front half and back half. It involves side to side movements, like side bends. The third plane is the transverse plane and that divides the body into the top half and bottom half. When you do twisting movements you’re working that plane. Switching exercises frequently focuses on strengthening muscles on all planes.

There are many muscles in your body, some very small, some large. When you vary your workout, you ensure that you build all the muscles in your body.

Switching your workout is good for both your body and brain. Learning new exercises, like learning movements in ball room dancing, stimulates the creation of neurons in your brain and keeps the ones you have in better health, boosting your memory and aiding your learning skills.

Switching your workout keeps you more excited about exercise. Some people find that it also helps to find a different way to workout, like bike riding, when you don’t go to the gym or exercise with an online program.

Every time you switch your workout, your body has to adapt to the change. You might feel sore for the first few days, until it makes the adaptation.