Fat Kills You

Already dedicated exercisers make small but costly mistakes regularly in their workouts, and one tiny change can have a huge impact on their results. Time is valuable, and for each precious moment invested you want to ensure the best possible return. If your body is not yet as lean or toned as you would like, it is likely that you are committing some key training mistakes. These errors can sabotage the efforts of even veteran exercisers. By learning about the most common fitness faux pas and their fixes, you will mistake-proof your exercise and see tremendous payoffs. Six of the biggest fitness faux pas are?

Faux Pas #1 Skipping Over Your Warm-up The Facts? Warming up prepares the body to work efficiently: longer, stronger and more safely. Skipping your warm-up may cause you to fatigue early, keeping you from realizing your full potential. Perhaps more importantly, warming up drastically decreases your chance of injury. The time spent in a warm up is much less than the time required to heal a muscle strain or joint injury.

Smart Fix? Invest 5-10 minutes in performing a toned-down version of your fitness activity or perhaps instead something like walking or cycling at an easy pace. Some gentle range-of-motion exercises are always encouraged. Save the deep stretching for after your workout.

Back pain, one of the most common physical, and debilitating ailments today, affects 70% - 80% of us at one time or another in our lives. However, as a result of the obesity epidemic, that number continues to climb. So if you are suffering or have suffered from back pain, you are not alone!

Back pain suffers, resulting from wear and tear and the aging process, generally are over 40 years of age; but it is not uncommon for individuals in the 30’s to experience back challenges. The complex spine changes during aging at varying rates from individual to individual as determined by genetic factors, lifestyle choices, and prior injuries.

Just remember, the odds are in your favor that you will experience some sort of back pain in the future. So what do you do when that happens, and how do you prevent it from happening again? There lies two, seventy two million dollar questions.

First off, don’t panic! Over 95% of back pain does not require surgery, and will subside on its own anywhere from a couple of days to months. With the back, it is rather tricky to predict how quickly it will heal. Be patient, and keep positive!

When we think about the life in the country, there is always something rosy about it. What is it that the people in the country have that we do not? When you ponder about it you find that those lucky souls eat good food, they work really hard, by work I mean real physical work and they have good night’s sleep. Of course they do not have all the amenities and facilities that the city life has to offer.

But the city life comes with a lot of strings attached. People in the cities are generally less healthy than the people in the country. One of the reasons is pollution of course but the other reason is because people in the city do not get enough exercise.

Now, when I talk about healthy bodies please make no mistake about what I am referring to. I am not talking about the Mr. Universe kind of body, the bodies that we see on WWF.

I am talking about people who are fit. And fitness and exercise are just two sides of the same coin. They both go hand in hand.

So you’ve been a mother for a while. Good for you, mothers are important. I know I have one! But you know what? I’ve seen my mother get so tied up from taking care of Dad, me and the house that she had very little time to take care of her fitness. Boy, the things you see in retrospect. Anyway, my mother used to be a beanpole; fitness came from all kinds of activity. I’ve seen the wedding photos so I know it to be so! I can also remember my mother putting on weight over the years. I’m sure my mother will read this, so I must choose my words carefully! When I think about it though, I know why this can happen to a lot of mothers. Life gets in the way and fitness takes a side seat.

It can be truly hard to find time for fitness as a mother when you have a child, or even two for that matter! The amount of running around and chores that need to be done can make you really tired at the end of the day and the last thing you’re thinking of is fitness.

Great endurance racers will tell you "Leave your egos at the starting gates." One of the hardest things in any race, especially the Tour De France that you will never notice is one’s ability to tame the ego. Lance is a self proclaimed "data junkie" when it comes to his training tactics. Even though the Tour is over 2300 miles and takes three weeks to ride, every hill, every mile and every rotation of his pedals are calculated ahead of time. But, what happens during the race if not disciplined in the off season can ruin the best of training tactics.

Each day is considered a stage and at the end of the race it is not the number of stages one wins that determines a winner, but the clock. Sure every rider would like to wear the yellow jersey at least once, but at the end of the day, that is not what matters most. The Tour De France may be better known for its ability to crush the best of egos rather than the mammoth Pyrenees Mountains. Much greater than Lance’s gifted physical abilities is his ability to sacrifice his ego for greater goods.

For approximately 80-90% of people that suffer from asthma, exercise can be a strong stimulus for an attack. This syndrome has become known as exercise induced asthma or EIA. The likelihood of an attack is further increased when exercising in cold weather, so this article offers some basic information on exercise-induced asthma and how to prevent or minimize the severity of an attack.

Asthma is a condition where the subject experiences bronchospasms and/or bronchoconstriction - a narrowing of the bronchii (airways) due to excessive smooth muscle contraction, and inflammation. An asthma attack can be very frightening and in severe circumstances, result in death by asphyxiation (suffocation). With the initiation of exercise in healthy individuals and asthmatics, hormones such as adrenaline produce a relaxing effect on the smooth muscles of the airways (bronchodilation). However in asthmatics, this relaxation is followed by bronchospasm and usually begins within 5-15 minutes after exercise.

The abdominal muscles are essential for maintaining good posture and core stability, however many exercisers are unclear on the correct way to exercise them. Traditional exercises for the abdominals include crunches and sit-ups also known as trunk curls and curl-ups. The following are ten things to avoid when performing exercise for the abs.

1. Do not use a machine or contraption of any kind to exercise the abs, body weight and medicine balls are more than sufficient. No contraption or machine will ever work as well as a perfectly performed curl-up performed on the floor.

2. Do not pull on your neck with your hands while performing curl-ups this may cause excessive strain on the muscles and vertebrae and prevents the training of the neck flexor muscles. Rather place the fingertips on the ears.

3. Do not hoist your body up by throwing the arms and shoulders forward. Rather imagine having double-backed tape stuck to your spine and the back of your head and peeling the back slowly off the floor. Starting by peeling the back of the head, then the neck and then upper back off the floor. If you find it impossible to curl up to a 60-degree angle from the floor with the fingers touching the ears, try performing curl-ups with hands on the floor by the sides, pointing straight ahead or folded across the chest. Even laying propped up on a gradient of some kind will help, as this moves the center of gravity further towards the muscle origin, making the exercise easier.

“Things do not change; we change.” ?Henry David Thoreau

The following article is a chapter from my new book, The Da Vinci Fitness Code.

Professor Stanley Plagenhoef, one of my greatest mentors, introduced me to the Fibonacci number series in the early 1980’s. He encouraged me to think of those numbers in the ideal relationship of health and fitness. I took his advice and bought books that spoke of the Fibonacci numbers, and the link between those numbers and The Golden Mean Ratio.

The first and best book I ever bought is titled, The Curves of Life, written by Theodore Andrea Cook, ISBN # 0-486-23701. The publisher is Dover Publications in New York.

Interestingly, this publication mentions on its title page, that the book includes special relation to “The Manuscripts of LEONARDO DA VINCI.” I learned many details from this insightful; brain penetrating book (and others I later read).

Some I will reword from memory. Leonardo said: “?you cannot be a good master, unless you have a universal power of representing by your art, all the varieties of the forms in Nature.

Physical exercise is something that you need to do on a regular basis. If you’re looking for examples of great fitness exercises to try out, you’ll find them on our site.

A regular exercise program of either running, walking, cycling, swimming, aerobics or any other physical exercise helps to improve the efficiency of the human body in many ways. A healthy exercise regimen can help strengthen the body physically, as well as make you more confident and help you avoid some future illnesses.

Exercise keeps your bones and joints in line and strong, so the benefits aren’t purely superficial. It also acts to strengthen your cardiovascular system, to help keep your heart healthy. A few great fitness exercises used in conjunction with a healthy lifestyle and healthy diet can help you live longer and better.

A general feeling of improved well-being can be found through light exercises, so there is no need to overdo things. Light walking is probably the easiest fitness exercise there is; yet this doesn’t mean it isn’t a great fitness exercise. It helps blow the cobwebs away and can improve the heart, lower blood pressure and improve physique. All of these things help keep you healthy, active and measurably improve your lifestyle.

A valid connection between hypoglycemia, fatigue and premature termination of exercise been firmly established and therefore carbohydrate loading is a proven form of boosting running endurance in prolonged events lasting more than two hours in duration. While there are various methods of carbo-loading, the process basically involves consuming large quantities of carbohydrate-rich food in order to saturate the body’s carbohydrate stores. It is proposed that with these increased energy stores, the competitor will be able to avoid exercise-induced hypoglycemia and continue exercising longer than if this saturation process had not occurred. This article aims to further explain how to perform carbohydrate loading and the reasoning behind its practice.