Lose Weight and Improve Fitness Through Cardiovascular Exercise

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Modern day lifestyle with its fast and processed foods, and the tendency to drink more alcohol than we should, has led to an epidemic of obesity. But there is one other factor that many people tend to overlook, and that is lack of exercise. Because many of us tend to live our lives in the fast lane, dashing hither and thither at 100 miles an hour, we just don’t have time to exercise. But it’s something that we should be making time for!

The obesity crisis and the publicity that it has received has driven many people over to the diet culture. It is well known that eating a well-balanced, low-fat diet will help us to prevent putting weight on. But in order to lose weight effectively, diet itself is not really enough. You also need to develop an exercise regime, and in terms of weight loss, the best form of exercise is cardiovascular.

Improving Your Metabolic Rate

Many exercises are designed to improve your muscles and sculpt your body. Cardiovascular exercise is primarily targeted at increasing your body’s metabolic rate. Your metabolism dictates the rate at which your body burns off fat. By increasing this rate, you also increase the amount of fat you can shed.

So if you think about it you could starve yourself to lose weight, or you could train your body to burn more fat naturally. Think about it, t is almost like you are losing weight while doing nothing at all. Who does not want that?

Sleeping-off Fat

Cardiovascular exercise is aimed at the circulatory system. In other words it targets your heart, your lungs, and your blood vessels. By increasing the fitness of these body parts, your body will become much more efficient, which not only means that you will become fitter, but it also means that you will have a higher resistance to heart attack and/or stroke. But the great thing about cardio is that it not only elevates your metabolic rate, but all the time that you maintain your exercise regime, your metabolism will function at a higher rate, even while you are asleep. In other words, your body will be burning fat when you sleep!

The Secret to Health and Fitness

Cardiovascular exercises include walking, running, cycling, and swimming. In fact, doing one or more of these sizes for as little as 20 minutes every day will raise your metabolic rate. It does not have to be overly strenuous. Doing regular cardio, and following a low fat diet will help to keep you fit and healthy.

Hyper-hydration Tips For Fitness Training

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What is Hyper-Hydration?

I just received a note from my buddy, Shane ‘The People’s Chemist’ Ellison, about the importance of hyper-hydration for athletes. He posted on this topic his blog, ThePeoplesChemist.com, under the title, Blazing Fast Hyper-Hydration for Athletes and More. Shane’s approach is like mine, since he is also a scientist. He insists on presenting information based on the real science behind advice for fitness training, so I consider him to be a credible source of information.

The first thing I thought was that this is a nutty idea from sports drinks manufacturers to promote their crappy drinks. However, with a little digging, I found that sports physiologists have been doing some real research on this topic and have come up with a way to boost physical performance by increasing an athlete’s percentage of total body water above baseline. This is what they refer to as hyper-hydration.

One of the key features of this research is that it involves oral formulas, not intravenous ones. Another key feature is that, as I have learned many times over, water alone is not effective for boosting percent total body water. In fact, you can suffer from taking in too much water if it contains nothing except water.

In a nutshell, here is the formula that Shane presented:

1 pint of purified water
1 teaspoon salt
3 teaspoons of sugar
1 tablespoon of glycerin (also called glycerol)

You may, if you wish, take this formula at face value and go ahead and use it as is. I suspect, though, that inquiring minds will want to know more about what is behind it, what to expect from it, and how to improve on it. In fact, these are the reasons why I dug into this topic.

Sugar and Salt – Keys to Hydration

Dehydration, of course, is not just a loss of water. It also entails a loss of salt (specifically, sodium) and other electrolytes. Water and salt, therefore, are obvious components of any formula for rehydration – meaning the reversal of dehydration. The importance of sugar (sucrose, or table sugar) in this kind of formula is based on the discovery that glucose (one of the two simple sugars comprising sucrose, the other being fructose) acts as a co-transporter for salt. In fact, sodium uptake in the intestines requires either glucose or galactose (one of the two simple sugars of milk sugar, lactose, the other being glucose), without which intestinal sodium will not be absorbed.

Lots of details on the importance of salt and glucose for rehydration are also provided here on Wikipedia under Oral rehydration therapy. The complete story on Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT) involves reversing what used to be the main killer of children worldwide – i.e., dehydration. The discovery of effective ORT formulas has relegated dehydration to Number 2 (behind pneumonia) as a killer of children around the world. Lots more good stuff on this topic is available online from the World Health Organization and UNICEF, under Oral Rehydration Salts (ORS) with reduced osmolarity.

If is seems as though I am digressing, then I am. However, taking just a cursory peek at the WHO-ORT formula reveals that potassium is an equally important ingredient for rehydration. In fact, from what I know about human physiology, this is obvious. Cell membranes have what are called sodium-potassium pumps, which means that these two electrolytes work together and depend on one another for transporting substances into and out of cells. You’ve got to have them both.

By the way, before I get ahead of myself: If you are looking for ingredients for formulating your own formulas, then here are two sources that may not be obvious. 1) Glucose is available very inexpensively at any brewery supply store (I think I paid seven dollars for five pounds); 2) potassium is available as potassium chloride in ‘no-salt’ salt in any grocery store. Ask for it if you don’t find it (our local store has it next to regular salt, near the spice section). And don’t overdo the potassium, since too much at one time has negative side effects.

Oh, another thing is that glucose is better than table sugar, by about double. Table sugar (sucrose) includes a molecule of fructose for every molecule of glucose. The extra fructose adds unnecessary calories to your diet.

Rehydration and Hyper-Hydration Are Not the Same Thing

This is where the body of research on hydration seems to make a fork in the road. Rehydration treats dehydration. Hyper-hydration boosts total body water percent over your baseline level. Both are important for fitness. However, most folks are unaware of the importance of boosting pre-exercise total body water or how to do it. And I can tell you right now that I could find nothing in the research literature on using ORT, or some equivalent, in sports medicine other than for rehydration.

Glycerin is the Key Ingredient

The use of glycerin/glycerol (available in pharmacies or nutrition stores) for enhancing endurance has been a key topic in sports medicine for many years. The main points on the use of glycerin are based on research that I found in my favorite medical database, PubMed. I came up with 40 articles there by using the search phrase ‘hyperhydration AND glycerol’. The most succinct of these offered guidelines from an article that appeared in the journal, Sports Medicine, Vol. 40 (no. 2): pp. 113-129 (Feb 1, 2010), titled: Guidelines for glycerol use in hyperhydration and rehydration associated with exercise.

Here’s what these guidelines entail:

To increase your body water content by 1 liter:

Over a period of 60 minutes, for every kilogram of your body mass, drink 26 milliliters of water containing 1.2 grams of glycerol. THIS IS A HUGE AMOUNT! For my size (198 lbs, or 90 kilograms), this would mean 90 x 26 milliters = 2340 (i.e., 2.34 liters, or just under 2.5 quarts – more than a half a gallon!), containing a total of 108 grams of glycerol (a little over 17 teaspoons).

WHEW! No wonder stomach cramps are one of the side effects! Drinking more than a half a gallon of pure water in an hour might cause stomach cramps all by itself.

To delay dehydration during exercise:

This seems simpler. Drink glycerol, 0.125 g/kg BW in a volume equal to 5 mL/kg BW. No time frame given. For me, this would be 11.25 grams of glycerol in 450 milliliters. Drinking this much liquid when I am running would mean stopping to drink, which would be fine. Based on the research that I have seen, this would only be important for exercise that lasts an hour or more.

To rehydrate after exercise:

Add 1.0 g/kg BW to each 1.5 L of fluid consumed after a workout. DOUBLE WOW! For me this would be 90 grams of glycerol in 1.5 liters (versus 108 grams in 2.34 liters for hyper-hydration ahead of time). Glycerol is what we call osmotically active, which means that it attracts water. The bottom line is that 90 grams of glycerol in just 1.5 liters of water would pull so much water into my gut that I would almost certainly get runny diarrhea. This seems counterproductive, doesn’t it?

Comparing Formulas

Shane’s original formula above, which launched me down this path in the first place, comes out to 3 teaspoons in 473 milliters of water, which is about 87 percent as concentrated as the guideline for pre-exercise hyper-hydration in the Sports Medicine article. His formula, however, would advise me to drink only about 20 percent of the recommended volume according to the published guidelines (i.e., 473 vs. 2,340 milliliters).

The Unknowns

We don’t know how effective a combination of the ORT formula is with glycerin, as recommended by The People’s Chemist. We simply have no research on it. The sports medicine people and the world health people are simply not on the same page. Here is where personal experimentation is required. Specifically, I suggest that you see what happens to your percent total body water using different combinations of the ingredients that I’ve presented here. Don’t use your exercise performance to measure your response. This is too subjective.

You would do better to purchase a bathroom scale that offers total body water as one of the measurements. Any common floor-model bioelectric impedance device will do. I found a good one at my local Target for about 40 dollars (endorsed by Weight Watchers … how good is that?).

Then simply establish your baseline values (‘euhydration’ level) over a few days, at different times of the day, after different meals, after workouts, etc. Then play around with the formulas until you see some changes. Your status will be different from mine or from anyone else’s because your euhydration level, and your responses to any hydration formulas, depend on many variables – age, body fat percent and lean body mass, fitness level, types and extent of endurance workouts, health conditions, and many more.

Muscle Hydration is Crucial

While most of the work on hyper-hydration entails boosting plasma volume for endurance fitness, it is equally important to pay attention to muscle hydration. The simplest and most effective way to address this issue is to supplement with creatine. However, I don’t recommend that you seek advice on this topic from bodybuilding or other fitness sites. The real research behind this topic is phenomenal enough without subjecting yourself to marketing hype.

I’ve written a couple of posts that will bring you up to speed on muscle hydration and how to accomplish it with creatine. To pique your interest on this topic, I’ll just say for the moment that hydrating muscles makes them BIGGER! This isn’t the only reason that muscle hydration is important, although it is a nice side benefit.

Reaching Your Fitness Goals With Some Simple Advice

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It can be very difficult to find straightforward, easy-to-understand online advice about fitness programs. There’s a lot of information to look through, and if you try to read everything, you won’t have any time to apply that knowledge. Fortunately, this article contains some of the most effective guidelines available.

If you suffer an injury to one limb, you can maintain fitness and increase healing by continuing to perform exercises with the opposite limb. Interestingly, exercising the healthy limb actually stimulates blood flow and maintains the muscle tone in the unused, injured limb. This will help you keep up your strength, muscle mass and fitness even after facing an injury.

The benefits of fitness are not only physical. Regular exercise can also bring emotional benefits. Workouts release feel-good hormones known as endorphins, which can lead to euphoric feelings. When you get fit, you help yourself feel better about the way you look and improve your overall self-esteem. In some ways, just a couple of routines stand between you and contentment.

Have you ever thought how chin-ups could be made easier? Most people who exercise dread doing chin-ups, so it is important to redirect your thoughts about them. Imagine you’re pulling the elbows lower instead of pulling your whole body up. Chin ups will seem easier and this mind trick will help you do a lot more of them.

Each time you lift weights, flex your glutes. This will exercise your butt and is a safer way of working out in general. That position greatly stabilizes your spine.

Are you working to gain fitness? Grab a jump rope! Jump ropes are portable, so you can stop whatever you happen to be doing to get a quick workout. You burn as many calories in each minute of jumping rope than in three minutes of other types of exercise. What this means is that jumping rope for only 10 short minutes burns off the same amount of calories as a half-hour workout!

Work on your abdominals to establish a solid core for your body. A good goal is to work your core at least a few times a week.

To help prevent deep vein thrombosis at work, you should periodically take short breaks throughout the day. Approximately every 20 minute, you should get up and move. Try stretching your limbs to increase your circulation. Just a little light exercise several times a day will make a big difference in your fitness level.

Surround yourself with supportive associates. Engage your friends in your activities, or find some people to exercise with at the gym. Exercising with others is fun and can build a sense of competition that fosters increased dedication. Find others that have goals that are similar to yours so that you can reach them together.

You should give you body the appropriate amount of rest. Some trainers say you should avoid resting except after particular exercises or when changing from one exercise to another. It is safer, however, to view these recommendations as general rules of thumb. Only you can assess how your body is responding to your specific workout. When your body sends you a message to rest, you should rest. If you keep on pushing when your body is worn out, you are likely to injure yourself.

Fitness Equipment Johnny G Krankcycle By Matrix

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Johnny G has transformed the way we see cardiovascular fitness equipment. A bicycle lover at an early age, Johnny developed a deep spiritual and philosophical connection with this sport. On account of this, he was capable of building completely original system to indoor stationary bicycle exercise, the Spinning bike. This equipment that was imagined being applied to training ultra-distance cycling races surpassed all anticipation as it soared to almost impossible triumph. This machine and exercise system has left a tremendous impact on the world. In 2004 a deadly virus had severely damaged Johnny’s heart, and took away his most prized possession the ability to ride a bike. Nonetheless, refusing to allow this predicament to influence his abiding affection for the sport, a thought came to his mind which made him optimistic. He recalled back in 2002 when he tried out a homespun hand-cycle created by a physically challenged athlete. Then, the Krankcycle came into existence.

Average Rating: 10 of 10 stars

Main Components:

Features sleek revolutionary design
Crank arms can be moved separate from each other for better range of movements
Crank arm offers pivoting height modification for larger choice of muscle activation
Offers transferable seat for complex movements and room for wheelchair access
Ergonomic saddle designed for easy transition between seating and standing exercises
Crank and flywheel are made for forward and backward rotary motion
Crank axis is narrow enough to allow higher RPMS for increasing speed and endurance

Cost: Close to 2,035.14 – 2,344.95

Product Description:

The Johnny G Krankcycle by Matrix offers unique upper body cross training program unlike you’ve never seen before and is ideal for all athletes. The Krankcycle is innovative fitness equipment that has been researched to improve cardiovascular fitness. In addition, it tones core muscles for might and solidity. In the year 2010, this astonishing fitness equipment bagged the IDEA Honourable Mention Award.

Product Specifics:

Built with chain drive system
Steel frame base that has case iron drive finished with polyester powder and zinc oxide
Max User Capacity: 350 pounds
Size: 56.5 x 26.8 x 41.5 (L, W, and H respectively) when assembled
Equipment Weight: 142.4 pounds

Product Features:

Johnny G Krankcycle is the original fitness equipment for centring on the upper body and toning up your cardiovascular fitness. This is also the first fitness equipment that opens the doors for mobility challenged individuals. Currently folks that have particular circumstance, like disabled people, those who have been injured, de-conditioned athletes, overweight and also pregnant moms can visit the health clubs or gyms with a group.

Warranty:
six months Wearable items
Five years on frame
One year on Bearings and tension knob structure
2 years for Cranks, brackets and flywheel
Labour is 90 days

Closing:

The Johnny G Krankcycle can be explicated with its motto, Competes with nothing, complements with everything. Upper body ergometers, a.k.a. UBEs were patented 73 years ago; they first were deemed rehabilitation equipment. Johnny G overpowered that idea with the Krankcycle. It’s the Ipod of up-to-the-minute cardio fitness equipment. Go out and get one!

Using the Life fitness X5 elliptical trainer in your own home, may give you an excellent all over workout

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Utilizing the Life fitness X5 elliptical trainer in your individual home, can provide you an incredible full body session Life fitness X5 elliptical trainer review has not likely gone mad in spite of the “whacky headline” as there is a completely reasonable explanation and it has to do with my creaky worn out knee caps. Actually it’s my whole knee joints..

If you’re anything like me and have bother with things like your knee joints or the small of your back if you attempt “going for a run” on a treadmill then you might want to buy Life fitness X5 elliptical coach, or to be extra exact an ellptical cross trainer.

Actually you simply need to train on one…

You can go to a gymnasium which will certainly cost you or you may borrow one, but lets face it who needs to hang around for thier “go” at the gymnasium and give the health club proprietor money which is perhaps more suitably invested elsewhere..

Like inside your very own residence for example…

Utilizing the Life fitness X5 elliptical trainer in your own residence, can provide you a fantastic all over session for those who observe a structured session and vary push and pull train for both upper and lower body. The elliptical movement of the machine helps you keep away from the thumping affect of your heels smashing into the ground you’d get with pounding the pavement, and the compression you’d get within the lumbar back in particular. In my experience…

You can get as “fit” as the proverbial butchers dog however utterly keep away from those form of problems with an elliptical cross trainer, as a result of it is smooooth… If you already know you should keep away from making your knee’s worse or it’s essential to keep away from making your again worse, take it from me. I fractured my back and then started doing yoga, now I train yoga too. (Typically) I discovered I can preserve my posture “under control” on the elliptical trainer in a manner that I might by no means have the ability to do on the open track or on a treadmill. That smoooth motion allowed me to concentrate on holding my tailbone tucked in and my hips pointing forwards.. taking a great deal of stress off my knees and my lumbar back. On the upper body it focussed the strengthening action to the core muscle tissue particularly well. It gave me the possibility to work to my very own strengths so I look relatively buff… for a guy my age….

Buy a life fitness x5 Elliptical cross trainer and train with a little bit of mindfullness, particularly if you have creaky old knee’s or a bad back injury like me go at your own pace, and then build up if you must so that you could start to follow the set routines and know that you can gently improve what you can do.. and so avoid making things any worse by means of unneccessary excessive impact exercise.

The life fitness x5 Elliptical cross trainer has my full endorsement. Let the one impression you experience be on your optimistic well being and development.