Fitness

How to Increase Speed, Muscular Endurance, and Prevent Injuries with Exercise

Interval sprinting, calisthenics, and plyometrics all have a place for people that train. Instead of splitting each discipline up and making things confusing, why not integrate each of them into one drill. But before I do that, it is important for me to define what each discipline is for you.

* What is interval sprinting and how will it help me improve my body?

Interval sprinting is a method of running that asks you to run at varied paces. Think of an oval track and imagine running the straight part of the track and then walking/jogging the turns. This is a perfect example of interval training. A great workout to try is doing one mile (4 laps around Olympic track) using the interval style (run then walk/jog).

* What are calisthenic exercises and where can I do them?

Calisthenic is another word for bodyweight exercise and this leads to apex fitness. Mastering bodyweight increases flexibility, awareness, injury prevention, and your potential to have functional strength. Jogging in place is an outstanding calisthenic exercise that can be done anywhere and at any time. Do it for more than thirty minutes and you have yourself a great session of cardiovascular exercise by itself.

* I have heard of plyometrics, what are they and what do they do?

Plyometric exercise is a fancy word to describe a stretch shortening and lengthening process that muscles go through during specific movements. Various drills that include jumping, leaping, bounding, quick foot movement and acceleration are considered to be plyometrics. This type of training has become popular in recent years but has been given too much credit. This is only a small piece of a training program and implemented on a need basis. You do not need any equipment to do plyometrics, you can use your body.

* How can I put all these things together for a great workout without equipment?

It is real simple and I am going to give it to you right now. To start things off, jog in place until you begin to develop a consistent sweat. This perspiration is your bodys way of cooling itself down and also lets you know that you are warmed up for exercise.

Find a straight away and run it for ten seconds hard. At the end of the ten second run, walk/jog slowly for one minute. When the one minute ends, kick it into high gear again and sprint for ten seconds hard. Keep repeating this cycle for four hard sprints.

The last segment of the exercise day is to add the plyometrics. Pick a spot on the ground and jump over it as quick as you can front to back. Do this for thirty seconds and as quick as you can. The height of your jump is not as important as the quickness of your jump. Try to minimize the time you spend in the air.

Now jump quickly from side to side over the spot on the ground. Do this for thirty more seconds and concentrate on landing on the balls of your feet and then jumping quickly off of them.

* Can I have a quick list to copy and paste for later?

1. Jog in place
2. Interval sprinting
3. Plyometrics

Dave Lemanczyk is the C.E.O. of Dave Lemanczyk LLC, a leading developer of superior human performance products in today ’s fitness industry.
http://www.basketballstrength.com

6 Pack Quest Secret: Other People Matter

You might think that building that 6 pack is all up to you. Your drive & motivation. Your pride & determination. Sorry, but there’s more to it than that. Other people matter too. Don’t believe me? Keep reading.

The people we spend time with matter a lot. You may have heard this proverb, “Tell me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are.” Or this quote by motivational speaker Jim Rohn, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” Or your parents may have told you they didn’t want you hanging around with “that kind” of kid. There’s a good reason for all this.

The people we spend the most time with affect us. Human beings naturally and unconsciously change our behavior to better match that of the people we hang around with. When your parents said they didn’t want you hanging around with “that kind” of kid, they weren’t just worried about you getting into trouble in the present. They were afraid that some of that kid’s attitudes & behaviors would rub off on you over time. And they were right.

Face it. If you spent all your time hanging out with druggies who beat up little old ladies and knocked over convenience stores for fun, how likely is it that you would have turned out to be a model citizen? This isn’t to say that people who get a bad start in life, or those who take a wrong turn along the way can’t become great people in the end. But it is meant to illustrate that the people you spend time with affect you.

What does this have to do with your quest to build a great body and six-pack abs? A lot. Just as the people you hung around with as a kid affected what you did when you were growing up, the people you hang around with now affect you. And that includes your fitness program. Do you spend your time around obese, lazy people who think a healthy meal means having milk with their jelly donut and a workout is getting up from the couch to change the channel on the TV? Do you live with someone who sees overeating as a sign of love and believes no meal is complete until everyone is too stuffed to move? Do your friends think people with muscles are stupid, self-centered jerks? Would they rather suck down a beer and watch sports on TV than break a sweat of their own?

If any of these sounds like the people you hang out with, how likely is it that you’ll be motivated to keep going when things get tough? How likely is it that you’ll develop a fitness model’s body when you hang out with people like these? If you somehow achieve your goals, how likely is it that you will be able to maintain them for long around people like these?

It’s a painful but true 6 pack quest secret: If you really want to succeed in your quest, you must surround yourself with the kind of people who will support you in that quest and avoid those who won’t.

Deciding which people you will spend time with isn’t enough to let you complete your 6 pack quest. To learn more about a complete system that will give you abs to envy, visit this 6 Pack Quest blog.

Why People Will Get Fat?

There are more people who are considered overweight nowadays. In fact, it mainly happens in some developed countries. It seems that when people become richer, they will get fat a lot easier. However, do you know why people will get fat?

It is also true that a lot of people are trying to lose weight these days. They are doing that in order to be much healthier. Of course they also want to be more attractive. There are a lot of fitness center out there. And you can also see that a lot of advertisement on weight loss products. From all these you will certainly know weight loss is really a big business.

Let us now talk about why people get fat. In fact, the first thing is that people are consuming too much junk food these days. A lot of people become slaves of junk food. They will have burgers and French fries for all their three meals. One thing you should understand is that these junk foods are not healthy food.

As a matter of fact, the calorie you can get from one burger is enough for your whole meal. However, you will not have only one burger for a meal. As a result, you will probably eat more than you need when you are having these junk foods. There are also experts who believe that obesity becomes a serious problem for children because they eat things such as burger too much!

People nowadays are very busy and they do not really have three meals a day. I bet most of you will tend to skip your breakfast. Of course it is not healthy for you. You will be starving yourself if you skip meals. For example, if you skip your lunch, you will tend to eat more when you have dinner. This will make you get fat a lot easier.

You will also get fat easily if you do not do any exercise at all. Exercising can help you to increase the metabolic rate. And this will help you to burn the fat within your body. In fact, there are lots of adverse effects if you do not do any exercise at all. The chance of developing heart disease will be a lot higher.

There are also experts who believe that genetic makeup can also be a reason for getting fat. This means that if your family has the gene of getting fat easily. You will also tend to get fat easily. However, this theory is still under debate!

The author has a website on Health, Fitness and Wellness. Be sure to check Healthy Weight Loss Plan and the article Weight Loss Pill Review.

Fitness And Where You Stand Right Now

Fitness is a term that is used to help define a persons ability to stay in the best physical shape. You may ask, then, “What am I staying in shape for?” For each person, the answer will be different.

For many, it is a matter of staying healthy as long as possible. You see, your body is designed to work as a machine. When each part of the machine is cared for, the entire machine works the best it can. When the machine is neglected either in part or in whole, then the machine doesn’t run well and eventually won’t run at all.

For example, If a car is well maintained, it will last many years longer. If it isn’t taken care of, for example you don’t change the oil, you cut several years off the life of the car. That is costly to you, but you can always buy a new car.

When you look at this as your body, you are shaving away days, weeks, and even years from your life. You cannot buy a new body to lengthen you life, and you cannot easily make pain from poor maintenance go away

Fitness is a necessary part of life. And please remember, fitness is something for which you can develop good habits. This makes it easy.

You do not HAVE TO struggle with fitness. When you were three, you were probably taught to brush your teeth. You learned to put your clothes on. When you were learning how to do them, you may have hated it.

But once you learned how to do it, it became something you didn’t think twice about. Do you worry about brushing your teeth today? No, because it is a habit. That is what we want you to think of when you think of fitness.

It’s just something that you do. Granted, the first weeks of learning to be fit and staying healthy will be the hardest. You may dread it. You may find excuses about not doing it. You may claim that getting fit is just too hard. You may say you just can’t give up foods and habits you love. That is just not true.

In fact, if you have the will power to save your life by sacrificing for just a few weeks, you’ll see that fitness can be easily mastered for the rest of your life.

Best of all you can go through the process without having to struggle. Struggle is not necessary. That depends on you and on the support you have.

Take a look at yourself right now. What do you see? If you are unhappy about any part of your body, chances are that area of your body is bothering you because it’s unhealthy.

Although many people start looking into fitness because they want to lose weight, fitness is not just about weight loss. You work to improve your overall wellness and increase your lifespan as well as the quality of life that you are currently living. You can look and feel great.

If you don’t think that you need to lose weight, that’s great! You are one step closer to being healthy.

But, that is not to say that you don’t have health problems beyond that. Many people are still at risk for high blood pressure, high cholesterol as well as other concerns, even though they aren’t technically overweight.

You need to take into consideration the fact that overall health is important to improve for health, long life, looking and feeling good.

Peter Woronoff is a psychotherapist, martial artist, and a recovering fitness enthusiast. Claim your Free Audio to take the Struggle out of Being Fit atwww.StayFitNow

Making Fitness or Martial Arts Part of Your Life

Pick up a newspaper or turn on the local news on any given day and you are liable to hear a report on how Americans are getting fatter. Government statistics tell us that approximately 60 percent of Americans (127 million people) are overweight. Many women who enroll in martial arts or fitness clubs have a primary goal of losing weight. Unfortunately, some expect instant results. If they don’t see immediate weight loss they become discouraged and inpatient. Some even drop out altogether.

In my 20 plus years of training men, women and children of all shapes and sizes, I have learned that diets just don’t work. If they did, we wouldn’t have an obesity epidemic. The diet industry continually makes promises that they can’t deliver and is fleecing the public at the tune of $40 billion dollars a year. The diet industry doesn’t want to tell you the truth. And why should they with the kind of money they’re taking out of people’s misery? The truth is that weight loss is difficult for many people to achieve. Weight loss is a personal struggle, complicated by an individual’s upbringing, eating habits, metabolism, genetics and psychology. Yo-yo dieting and subjecting the body to strange eating regimes is much more detrimental to one’s physical and mental health than maintaining a steady weight.

I’m not here to sell you the same bill of goods as the diet industry. What I will do is encourage you to develop a healthy lifestyle and feel better about yourself. When you train, go with the attitude that you want to move, breathe and stretch. What’s important is that you focus on wellness. According to Steven Blair, director of research at the Cooper Institute for Aerobics Research in Dallas, Texas, “There is a misdirected obsession with weight and weight loss. The focus is wrong. It’s fitness that is the key.”

Fitness is also a word that has been presented to the public at large. Go to any gym in America, what do you see? Weights and cardio machines, not much more. The only thing you can do is train strength and endurance; that’s not enough for true fitness! And how about the gyms with Yoga classes? Great, add flexibility to the list, if your lucky. You see Yoga teachers are a dime a dozen in America, especially in fitness gyms. Finding a good teacher is like finding a needle in a haystack, and they’re not at your local “Fitness” Center! Truth is many of the “Yoga” instructors in gyms don’t know a great deal and could actually end up hurting you.

Fitness is far more in-depth then most people are looking at. If your not improving in all areas of human performance: strength, endurance, flexibility, coordination, balance, body unity, grace, speed, hand eye coordination, reactions (and the list goes on) you are not completely improving your fitness.

You will notice that with a good well rounded system of exercise, you will start having more strength, more endurance, and more flexibility, and all the other benefits mentioned above. If you want to lose weight, it will take patience, exercise, sensible diet changes, and sacrifice. There is no way around it. Focus on fitness, moving, breathing, stretching, feeling strong and enjoying your martial arts or fitness routine.

Calasanz is the creator of a system of exercise called Physical Arts. Movements based on his understanding of the martial arts that improve strength, endurance, flexibility, coordination, balance, body unity, weight loss, and tone. Physical Arts exercises are available at http://www.interdojo.com