Your Health and the Economy - 8 Things You Can Do To Stimulate Them Both

Our President is working hard to make an impact that will stimulate the economy and get this country back on it's feet. He tells us in his speeches that it's time to act responsibly and that we need to change our habits. Every time I listen to him speak I can immediately relate his message to the same message that I write and speak about. It takes the same thought process to change one's habits to stimulate muscle if you want to be lean and fit. After all, isn't health and fitness about taking responsibility for our lives? You bet it is! So at this trying time in our nation's history, I think we should also make an effort to take responsibility for our health.

Got stress?

Yeah, me too. If you find yourself indulging your senses with food or alcohol or anything else that creates a temporary escape, then you are simply avoiding and prolonging making positive changes. You are moving away from improving your life and your health. That's not good, and it's probably just making you feel worse in the long run. Look, I'm not going to paint you a rosy picture and tell you this is easy and that everything is going to be all right. What I can tell you is this. If you want a healthier life...live and be healthy. If you want a happier life...live and be happy.

The quote for the day:

"There's no way to happiness. Happiness is the way." ~Buddha

You can substitute health or wealth or anything in place of happiness for that matter. It gets down to three very simple and repetitive tasks that we all do, all day long.

The three things that we do are:

What we think about - thoughts
The choices we make - feelings
What we do as a result - actions

Now that sounds really simple. On a conscious level it is. But most of the time we are on auto-pilot. We go through the motions thinking the way we think and doing things the way "we do" them. Because that is who "we are". But all of a sudden we realize that we are over weight, malnourished, we see the bags under our eyes, we've got a rash, our teeth are yellow or coffee stained, our hair is dull, our nails are brittle. Sounds attractive, doesn't it? Well, it doesn't have to be this way.

Think about how we start each day. There's an opportunity to have your day go down hill right from the get-go. If you have a big mirror and you don't like what you see in your reflection, your mental state has just been affected. Heaven forbid you decide to step on the bathroom scale. If you don't like the number you see, you've just registered another whammy. Now let's suppose you take a shower and than get dressed. You either like the way your clothes fit or you don't. If you don't, strike three, you've just started your day off with three negative emotional experiences that could send you to Dunkin Donuts for breakfast!

So getting back to my point. The word for the day is "stimulus". What controls your actions is your thoughts. Pay more attention to what you pay attention to!

Here's a few suggestions.

• Watch less news. It's mostly negative
• Read the comics, not the obituaries
• Take a hot bath before going to bed to relax you
• Avoid quarreling, especially with your spouse and kids
• Take an afternoon 20 min power nap (more on this later)
• Go to bed fifteen minutes earlier than you do now
• Get up fifteen minutes earlier than you do now
• Read before bed, but no TV

In short, replace negative stimuli with positive stimuli. Think about what you are doing the moment you are doing it. Ask yourself, is this a bad habit? If you can find a way to catch yourself in the act of the things that you do that don't support you and then change your thoughts about that very moment, you are well on your way to changing the world. And the world is you!

Press on!

The "Dirty Dozen" Workout

Here's a great workout for you. What I like about this workout is once you understand the rules you can make infinite substitutions and scale it for time and group fitness level. I use this workout for boot camps classes, small group training, and one-on one training too.

The foundation is 12 exercises for a 12 minute workout. Some of the exercises require dumbbells and some require just body weight. The protocol is :45 seconds work with :15 seconds rest / transition. Scaling it back will shorten these durations.

Note: In editing this clip I cut off some of the video at the back end of some of the exercises to keep the entire movie under You Tube's 10 min limit.

Scaling For Time and Fitness Level

Depending on the group size and overall level of ability, I will scale this workout accordingly. For example, I may ask the group to perform this workout in 6 minutes instead of 12. This way each exercise is performed for :20 seconds with a :10 rest. Another option is :30 /:10 which will make this an 8 minute cycle. In a typical boot camp class we will perform this routine up to three times. First round 6 minutes, second round 12 minutes, third round 8 minutes.

You might notice in this video that some people appear to have less than perfect form. They are working to improve their form and/or they are working around an injury. BTW, don't forget to give people options for making the exercises easier or more difficult so that everyone gets a "10" experience.

Good luck and please send me your comments and suggestions!

Movement Matters

A large part of my work day is spent observing how people move when they exercise. Regardless of fitness level, there’s much more to exercising than meets the eye. I believe that everyone needs to learn how to move properly either before, or as part of their fitness program. One of my teachers and mentors, Paul Chek, HHP, NMT has written a great book on this topic that I highly recommend titled, “Movement That Matters”.

In my ten years of experience as a personal trainer and coach, I have observed that strength training with weights and jogging are the dominant forms of exercise. It’s also been my observation that the skills of balance, stability and coordination are far more important to human development in gaining strength and improving athletic performance than most people realize. The vast majority of fitness experts and exercise enthusiasts don’t realize the vital role played by the Central Nervous System (CNS).

In short, training the CNS is the most important element that a training program needs to include. A training program that does not address the needs of the CNS is an incomplete, inefficient and less than effective program. The CNS can be trained in a variety of ways, and the easiest way to work on the CNS is to include exercises that involve multiple muscle groups and that are performed while standing and moving.

These relatively simple movements will improve your balance, stability and proprioception. (PRO-pree-o-SEP-shun). That’s a ten dollar word that means the sense that you are moving properly and are aware of what your various body parts are doing.

The worst thing that a beginner can do is to try to do exercises with an “external load”, that’s another fancy term that means “lifting weights” – before learning how to move properly and developing the requisite balance and stability skills. One of the worst things that anyone can do is to just jump on exercise equipment and start cranking out reps.

I’m not a fan of most exercise machines. The problem with machine-based exercise is that the machines provide all the stability and balance for you so that your body never has to work on these skills. The pillars of human movement are pushing, pulling, bending, twisting, raising and lowering (squatting) and locating (walking, running, etc). When you combine movement patterns that require the body to use many muscles and multiple joints at one time, you are far better off than using any machine that isolates one muscle group at a time.

By adding external load (weights) and challenging balance, the CNS must adapt to the new way of doing things. This “stimulus” to the muscles and the CNS is what the body adapts to. Thus we improve our ability to move, flex, extend, and balance, and ultimately we get stronger too.

I’m a big fan of body weight exercises like mountain climbers, squat thrusts, lunges, and push-ups, etc. There are too many to list. Personal trainers and strength coaches who are doing their jobs properly will have their clients working on these dynamic and functional exercises before progressing to adding weights.

In closing, CNS training is more complicated than weight lifting, and a program that works on the skills of balance, stability and proprioception will allow people to get the most out of their exercise time and effort. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather complete my workout in less time, burn more fat and build more muscle. Wouldn't you agree?