Fitness & Wellness

Changing how you look and feel takes time. You won’t drop 30 pounds overnight or exercise once and see huge muscles. It takes time, so even when you feel discouraged, don’t give up. Decide you’re going to workout one more month, one more week or one more day. If you do that enough, you’ll see results that you’ll love. I have clients in Dublin, CA, who had huge goals, but they took them one day at a time and never quit. They got results.

Just do one more.

Doing just one more push-up, one more crunch or one more lunge can bring more results than you thought possible. When you feel like you’re finished and have given your all, try to do one more. Don’t do it at the expense of form, but steady yourself and attempt. If you do this with every exercise, you’ll be amazed at how much you can accomplish. Like any goal, you’ll achieve it faster and get better results when you adopt the one more mindset.

Help yourself stick with it by measuring progress in several ways.

If you’re just measuring your progress by weight loss, you might get discouraged. When you’re working out, you’re losing fat tissue and gaining muscle tissue. Muscle tissue weighs more per cubic inch than fat tissue does. It’s like comparing the size of a container holding a pound of iron to one holding a pound of feathers. The container with feathers will be larger, so the more fat tissue you have the larger you are. Use various ways to check your progress, like measuring inches or clothing size. When people first start, they often lose inches, but not weight. The results are still the same, they look thinner.

Track your progress.

Keep yourself in the game by keeping score. Track the number of reps, sets and amount of weight you lift. When you feel down, like you’re making slow or no progress, go back to the day you started and see how far you’ve come. You’ll see the improvement in your strength and endurance by looking backward and it makes the journey forward easier.

• Get a workout buddy. Not only can a workout buddy help keep you focused and accountable, you’ll find that both of you benefit by help each other stay positive.
• Find ways to increase your exercise time doing everyday tasks. While you might not like taking the stairs instead of the elevator or carrying out the trash, consider it exercise that boosts your endurance or strength. It makes the jobs easier and improves your overall fitness.
• If you workout in the morning, have your gym clothes laid out the night before you go to the gym and put them on as soon as you get out of bed. Half the battle is getting ready. Once you’re dressed, the rest is easy.
• Just go to the gym. Tell yourself you only have to workout for five minutes. Once you start, if you feel like it, extend it another five and then another. Before you know it, you’ll complete your entire workout.

For more information, contact us today at LIV Fitness 247

If you spend just ten minutes scanning the feed on Facebook or read the stories on Yahoo, you’ll find something about diet or exercise. Everywhere on the internet there are articles that have nothing to do with the truth about losing weight and profess that only the author has the inside track to a weight loss secret. The fact is, if weight loss were only a matter of consuming a certain food or taking a pill, there would be no obesity in America. Doctors would prescribe it and insurance companies would pay for that solution. To help clear up those misconceptions, here are a few fat loss facts to remember.

I often see people recoil when I suggest they eat healthy fat, but fat alone won’t make you gain weight.

Fat definitely is higher in calories per gram than protein or carbohydrates are, but you need a certain amount of fat to function properly. Gaining weight is about total caloric intake. If you stick with healthy sources of fat, such as nuts or avocados and keep your total calorie count within guidelines, you’ll lose weight. Don’t fall for the fat-free dairy options, either. In order to make fat free food taste good, manufacturers often add sugar. The fat in the original product also makes you feel fuller and more satisfied longer.

The best way to lose fat is to go on a diet.

Anyone who knows me, knows how opposed I am to dieting. That might sound funny, since I also talk about calorie intake for weight loss. The truth is that dieting doesn’t work, not only because it leaves you feeling deprived and hungry, but because diets always end. When it ends, people go back to old eating habits that put on weight in the first place, and sometimes even more. What really works is making lifestyle changes that focus on healthy eating, more whole food, eliminating sugar and cutting out processed food. That keeps body fat from returning.

Cardio workouts are the best way to burn fat.

That’s simply not true. While cardio workouts are necessary and burn tons of calories, they don’t discriminate where they get the calories. It burns both fat and lean muscle tissue for those calories. Since muscle tissue requires more calories for maintenance than fat tissue does, the more muscle tissue you have, the higher your metabolism is. The best route for burning high amounts of calories is strength training.

• Make your strength training a better fat burner. Turn those exercises into circuit training or high intensity interval training. Vary the speed of your workout or go from one exercise to another with little rest between the two.
• Make your workout work for you by varying it frequently. When you do the same workout consistently, your body becomes more efficient at the moves and burns fewer calories.
• Make water your best friend. Not only will staying adequately hydrated boost your performance, it also fills you up if you drink a glass before dinner and you’ll eat less. Even slight dehydration can drain your energy.
• Focus on workouts that have compound movements. They use more than one muscle group and therefore burn more calories—which ultimately burns fat.

For more information, contact us today at LivFitness247

There are a number of people that believe that when the body feels sluggish or out of sorts, a good detox or cleanse can help. What is a detox? A detox is a short term change in diet that is designed to help remove the toxins in the body to aid certain health problems or conditions. You may feel you need a detox if you’re out of sorts. It’s It often focuses on the liver and kidneys, the two primary detoxing organs. It provides the nutrition they need to be optimized, while also aiding in removing toxins.

What are toxins and what are the symptoms of overload?

Our environment is filled with toxins. Whether it’s heavy metals like mercury or pollutants in the air, you face toxins every day. Even some of the food we eat contains toxins. The EWG has a list called the dirty dozen that lists the fruits and vegetables that contain contaminants and pesticides, so unless you’re eating organic from a farm or garden you trust, you’re even subject to toxins with healthy eating. These toxins can cause inflammation, producing symptoms like fatigue, headaches, depression, anxiety, joint pain, bloating and constipation.

There are several ways to detox.

You can go on a detox diet, focus on healthy eating and detox drinks or simply fast for short periods. Intermittent fasting has been proven to provide benefits, but not necessarily because of detoxing. Fasting for one to three days, which is different from intermittent fasting, is another way. Some detoxes include limiting your intake to drinking specific liquids like fresh fruit and vegetable juice or lemon juice and water. Some detox diets are elimination diets that often eliminate allergenic foods. Some just eliminate bad habits, like smoking, drinking coffee or alcohol or cutting out refined sugar.

There’s even a popular move toward detox water.

Drinking water is good for you. You need 8 eight-oz glasses a day, especially if you exercise and sweat it out. It helps prevent mild dehydration that can affect your overall performance, cause headaches, body aches, memory problems and if severe, even death. 60% of the body is water. It’s been noted that dehydration in seniors is often mistaken for dementia. That’s easy to understand since 73% of the brain is water. To make water more palatable and add extra benefits, you’ll find slices of lemon, herbs, apples and other fruits and vegetables added.

• Exercise is normally part of a detox program. Sweating is one way to get rid of toxins. Just make sure you drink plenty of water when you do.
• Constipation is one problem that detoxing can solve, particularly if detox drinks are used. It adds fluid to hard stools to soften them and make passing waste easier.
• One important benefit that detox water can offer is energy. It’s not necessarily the additives that help, but the water itself. Water is the quicker picker upper when you’re tired. It’s even better than coffee in most cases.
• Infused water, often called detox water, can be even more complicated with actual recipes for flavorful water. Cinnamon, apple slices and a touch of apple cider vinegar provides flavor, nutrients but no calories. Some people drink water with slices of lemon or cucumbers to aid weight loss.

For more information, contact us today at LIV Fitness

Getting physical and active can boost your mood and one simple way to get that benefit is by walking or running. Studies show that there’s a direct correlation between staying active and depression, so much so, many mental health care professionals use exercise as an adjunct treatment for people who are depressed. If you’ve ever experienced a day when you simply feel funky and a little depressed, but find that once you get going and get out, that mood seems to disappear, you understand how just moving and getting out can help.

Stress can cause depression and running or other physical activity helps burn off the hormones of stress.

Blame it on the caveman for that response. Way back when, that fight or flight response came in very handy. It prepared the body to take flight or stay and fight with enemies or predators. Today, stress has many faces. It can be a rude clerk and crowded stores when shopping, a traffic jam or just a crazy computer that has a mind of its own. Fighting or running just isn’t appropriate in these cases, but the brain still sends hormones that prepare the body to do just that. If those hormones aren’t burnt off by running or fighting, it can result in mental changes, such as depression or anxiety. Running is a great way to burn them off and get the beneficial rewards for good health in the process.

Don’t be surprised if your doctor or mental health care professional prescribes exercise.

Medical science is now looking into many of the wise beliefs that came from the past, but never proven. Studies are now showing it’s true. Not only can exercise, such as running, help lift the cloud of depression, it can also help prevent it from returning. It boosts energy levels, improves circulation and even aids in better sleep. Best of all, the only side effect exercise has is a healthier, fitter you.

What causes some cases of depression?

One cause of depression comes from low self-esteem. When you feel bad about yourself, it’s hard to put on a smile and face the world. When you go running, workout or even walk, it helps you look better and feel better physically. It aids in improving posture, while also improving self-esteem. That alone could be of benefit. Exercise does even more. It boosts the serotonin your body makes. Serotonin not only regulates your sleep, it also affects your appetite and your mood.

• Running, and other forms of exercise, boost the creation of endorphins, the feel good hormones. It slows the production of chemicals that affect your immune system, causing you to feel more depressed.
• Sticking with a regimen of exercise, even when you don’t want to do it, you start to feel you can accomplish more. Feeling that way starts you on the road to feeling better about yourself.
• Running gets you out of the house and often just changing your environment can make a difference. You’ll see people as you run and every block will help make depression melt away and take your mind off your worries.
• I can help you with a program of exercise that can also include running. Not only will the exercise make you feel great, the program will have specific goals and as you achieve each, you’ll feel even better.

For more information, contact us today at Liv Fitness

If you’re focused in on weight loss, you may have run across articles about programs where you burn 1000 calories in one workout. Is that at all possible. Well it is, but for a select few and not for everyone. Sometimes, it’s all about the math, where the calorie burning numbers come from a five-minute segment of the workout, then applied to every minute of the workout. If that short five minute segment has you burning 100 calories, then it’s deduced that 50 minutes would have you burning 1,000. However, the intensity doesn’t stay the same throughout that full 50 minutes. If it did, most people would have to quit midstream.

Your gender and body composition makes a difference in how many calories you burn.

No matter how much it’s protested, when it comes to losing weight, men have all the luck. That’s because men burn more calories doing the same activity as women. It comes from Mother Nature endowing them with more muscle mass, which grows even faster than women’s muscle mass when they’re both in a program of exercise. If you compared a man with a woman after one year of weight training, a man would have put on six to nine more pounds of muscle mass doing the same thing, including expending the same effort. Women tend to start out with less muscle, and the more muscle you have, the more calories you’ll burn. So their normal body composition works against them when it comes to burning that 1,000 calories.

Other factors determine how many calories you’ll burn.

Age plays a big role in how many calories you burn, so does how much you weigh and your genetics. The older someone is, the harder it is to build muscle and burn calories. That means not only will it take longer to build, but an older person will burn fewer calories while working out. Your present weight makes a difference. Think of carrying that extra 20 to 30-pounds like carrying a barbell or dumbbell of the same weight as you workout. You’d definitely burn more calories. Even genetics can work for you or against you when it comes to burning calories.

How intense the exercise is does make a difference.

As noted before, it’s all about the math. If the 1,000 calorie burner is based on an intense portion of the workout, then the calories burned will seem higher, even though it’s a false assumption. Choosing workouts that burn more calories such as weight training, will improve the number of calories burned, but it won’t get you to the 1,000 per workout if you’re the average person. That’s even when you’re going at it hard, with few breaks and heavier weight. However, it will burn more than a less intense workout.

• Types of workouts that burn a high amount of calories include HIIT—high intensity interval training—circuit training, intense cardio and kettlebells. While they may not burn 1,000 calories a session, you’ll still get many benefits.
• No matter how many calories you burn in a workout, you still have to eat healthy to lose weight. If you go to the gym, burn 1,000 calories and then eat a supersized double Big Mac meal that has 1580 calories, you’d still gain weight.
• Sprint interval training is another way to burn a lot of calories. You use a treadmill and vary your speed with fast walking, sprinting, back to fast walking and then cool down. You can use a weightlifting HIIT workout that provides afterburn, too.
• I not only help my clients with the workouts that will burn maximum calories, but also help them learn a healthy way of eating to reduce the caloric intake and lose weight faster.

For more information, contact us today at Liv Fitness