Holiday Fitness Tips
December 17, 2009 by Gail Grannum
Filed under Blog, Exercise & Fitness
Holiday Fitness Tips
What are tips to keep fitness as part of your holiday? Plan ahead and be realistic. How can you enjoy yourself and not completely surrender?
Start the day with a brisk walk around your neighborhood. Be kind to yourself during the holidays, brief (15 minutes) routines are okay. Just don’t give up exercising each day. (If you need to…take a day off, just not two in a row, okay?)
- This is a great way to spend time with focusing your day or spending quality time with a rarely seen friend or family member.
- Also, you will feel great knowing you have raised your metabolism earlier in the day.
Did you know that if you eat right after exercising, it is not stored as fat?
Remember to hydrate with water. You will be tempted with other fluids during the holidays. So make sure you focus on including extra water. It helps flush your system.
Home Workout Alternatives
List five things you can do at home that will combine fitness with family time. This way you won’t beat yourself up if you really can’t get to the gym.
- How about squats and standing on toes while brushing teeth
- Arm exercises while watching TV
- Gentle stretches at the computer
Each person will have different needs and challenges. Just be active to the best of your ability. Enjoy your holidays without guilt or surrender!
Leave a comment, sharing examples of home holiday exercising alternatives. Thanks!
Recommended Reading:
Fit and Healthy On The Road: Keeping-Up With Fitness Goals While Traveling
9 Ways to Avoid Winter Weight Gain
Healthy Holiday Eating
Review: Jillian Michaels 30 Day Shred DVD
July 24, 2009 by Gail Grannum
Filed under Exercise & Fitness
Got 25 minutes? Spend it ’shredding’.
Most of us excuse ourselves from having a regular exercise regimen because of our busy schedule. But if you really want to establish a workable routine that will fit into your daily activities, then a short exercise video would be the easiest solution. Let’s look at a particular video – Jillian Michaels – 30 Day Shred (Amazon affiliate link) 
There are so many short exercise videos out there, specifically because trainers already know you’re busy and they want to give you no excuse not to work out. There’s that important question, though, of how effective a short exercise video can be.
The Biggest Loser trainer Jillian Michaels leads the workout in this video. It features workouts that are around 25 minutes long. It surely sounds like a short time but when you do it for the first few times, especially if you haven’t been working out for a long period of time, you’ll surely feel like you did an hour and a half’s worth of exercise.
- The effectiveness of this workout comes from the intensity, not the amount of time you spend doing it.
- You will have no chance of resting in between the routines. It is designed to move you to the next routine right after a previous one.
- Jillian stresses in the video that it’s better to really work your body in a shorter amount of time than spend hours faking it at the gym.
There are three parts to a work out. Every part is made of 3 minutes of strength training, 2 minutes of cardio and one minute abdominal exercises. The workouts involve movements that require larger muscles and more muscles at the same time. This adds to the intensity and fat burn.
Jillian Michaels – 30 Day Shred
- DVD is designed to take you through 30 days of workouts with progressing intensity.
- You spend the first ten days following Level 1.
- The next ten days will have you perform Level 2 and the last ten days will see you through Level 3.
- People who qualify themselves as intermediate exercisers or advanced exercisers might want to skip Level 1.
- However, it will do everybody good to start with Level 1. After all, you will not find the intensity of the workouts in Level 1 disappointing.
Jillian Michaels provides really great motivation. For most of the exercises, there are equivalent beginner moves so that you can still perform them if you’re a beginner. The difference for beginner moves is that there is a shorter range of motion. The workouts are doable but they are definitely not easy, enough to challenge you and shred your fats day by day.
After this short workout, you will definitely feel that you spent 25 minutes of your day wisely. In that short amount of time, which is easy to squeeze into your morning routine before going to the office or your evening routine after coming home from work, you will have worked your muscles enough to shred those pounds and shape your body into a healthy new form.
Review: Yoga for Beginners DVD by Barbara Benagh
June 26, 2009 by Gail Grannum
Filed under Beginner Yoga Poses, Exercise & Fitness
Yoga For Beginners
If you are a yoga beginner and have no clue how to begin practicing yoga, buy the DVD Yoga For Beginners
Yoga For Beginners (Amazon affiliate link)
- The first routine includes 10 minutes of backbends which are slow but aim at building intensity.
- The second routine includes 20 minutes of standing poses.
- he third routine is also of 20 minutes and is aimed at building strength and balance and teaches core strength breathing.
- The fourth routine is the 20 minutes sun salutation which is done smoothly and slowly.
- The fifth routine includes 30 minutes of seated hip openers which are performed entirely on the floor.
Whereas the idea behind the 5 basic routines is to get the yoga beginner comfortable performing the different yoga poses, the second part of the DVD includes the full workout sessions.
- Although it combines the 5 basic routines, it includes 3 new sequences. These are breathing and centering, restorative, and relaxation sequences.
- It includes 70 minutes of basics and includes breathing and centering, standing yoga poses, seated hip openers, and relaxation as its first routine.
- The second extended routine is the energizing routine and is 40 minutes long. It includes sun salutations, backbends, and relaxation.
- The strength routine is a more challenging one and includes sun salutations, standing poses, strength and balance poses, and relaxation.
- Then there is the 30 minutes long rejuvenate routine which specifically aims at relaxing and includes breathing and centering, restorative, and relaxation yoga poses.
- The 55 minutes long quieting routine includes standing poses, seated hip openers, and relaxation.
Barbara provides clear instructions on how to do the different yoga poses. For a yoga beginner, some yoga asanas may prove to be difficult to perform, especially if you are highly inflexible. This is why Barbara gives some great pointers for adjusting poses based on your current level of flexibility.
And to top it all, the background in itself will make you feel peaceful, calm, and relaxed. For a yoga beginner,Yoga For Beginners (Amazon affiliate link)
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- Review: MyYogaOnline.com
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The Wonderful Benefits of Standing Yoga Poses
June 26, 2009 by Gail Grannum
Filed under Beginner Yoga Poses, Exercise & Fitness
It doesn’t matter whether you choose to practice the Hatha yoga style or the Ashtanga yoga style. Each type of yoga has its own advantages. Similarly, different types of yoga poses have different advantages. The standing yoga asanas include the forward and backward bends, the twists, and the balance yoga poses and it is important that you incorporate a few of these in your daily sessions. Standing postures strengthen your muscles and increase your flexibility. But if you regularly practice them, this is not all that you will get. Here are some of the additional benefits that you can expect:
Relaxation
People often equate relaxation with lying down. But, actually it is not always relaxing. This is because it’s the thoughts and images of your daily life that leave you all stressed out and prevents you from achieving that perfect state of relaxation that we all yearn for. Now, wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were yoga poses that could keep your mind off these daily life pressures?
Standing yoga asanas can do exactly that. In standing yoga poses, you learn to focus on a particular point and this helps in removing all these useless thoughts and images from your mind. In a standing yoga pose, your full concentration is on keeping yourself upright and balanced. So, you are basically reorganizing everything in your brain. When your ideas and thoughts are not scattered, you are more focused, your mental capacity increases, and you handle every situation in a much better manner.
Balance
If you want to improve your balance, then standing yoga poses are perfect for you. Although all standing yoga asanas require some amount of balancing, there are some which are particularly aimed at it. Although not all of us are great with balance, the wonderful thing is that the human body is able to balance itself quite naturally. Until and unless, of course, you have a medical condition that negatively affects your balance.
So, what is it that prevents you from balancing your body? Well, it is your brain. When it does a little too much thinking, it gets in the way. Here again, standing yoga poses come to the rescue. How? Standing yoga asanas require you to concentrate and focus. This means that the body takes over from the mind. The more you practice these poses, the easier it is to balance.
Improves posture and prevents back injuries
If improving posture is your objective, then there is nothing better than standing yoga poses. If back pain, headaches, and muscle spasms, have been troubling you, it’s quite possible that the reason is a poor posture. In fact, since poor posture puts excessive pressure on the internal organs, it could also cause constant digestive problems.
If your muscles are tight and not strong enough, you are bound to injure your back when you put strain on them. Standing yoga poses stretch your spine and require you to hold the position for some time. This straightens and strengthens the spine. Strong back muscles ensure that the spine is kept straight and it prevents the recurrence of any injuries. Standing yoga poses help in the proper alignment of the back, strengthen the back muscles, and increase your flexibility. All these factors are necessary for the complete health of your back and for preventing injuries.
So, make sure that you incorporate a few standing yoga poses in your daily workout. You will reduce the chances of injuring your back, your mind will be more relaxed, and your balance will improve drastically. So, which standing yoga poses are you planning on including in your daily yoga session?
If you enjoyed this article, please take the time and take our yoga survey so we may continue to research articles of interest. Click Here to take survey
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Review: Yoga Anatomy by Leslie Kaminoff
June 23, 2009 by Gail Grannum
Filed under Beginner Yoga Poses, Exercise & Fitness
Anyone who is a regular yoga practitioner or a yoga instructor wants to know which muscles are being stretched and exercised in which yoga poses. Yoga Anatomy (Amazon affiliate link) 
We all know that proper breathing is one of the main premises of yoga. Yoga Anatomy
After these beginning chapters about the essential aspects of yoga, the book goes into describing and illustrating the various muscles involved in different yoga poses. The book is divided into various sections based on the different types of yoga poses. You can just pick one of the poses, look at the pictures, and get a lot of information. You will be able to find out which muscles are involved in that pose, the various joint actions involved, which body parts are being lengthened by it, what obstacles you may encounter, and suggestions on where your breath should be focusing.
- What makes this book really unique are the wonderful illustrations and pictures. They very clearly show what exactly the muscles and the bones are doing in different yoga poses.
- For some poses, the organs and joints are also illustrated. And the pictures for some yoga asanas have been taken from very interesting angles.
- So, along with the usual side views and front and back views, you also get a bottom and top view.
- This provides the yoga enthusiast a very interesting view of some of the yoga poses which are missing in other yoga books. You can actually view the movement of some of the muscles which otherwise wouldn’t be possible.
And if you have always wondered about how to correctly pronounce those difficult Sanskrit names, this book will help. It gives the English names of the poses along with the Sanskrit names and also tells you how to correctly pronounce it.
In summary, if you want to know which muscles, bones, organs, and joints are involved in a yoga pose and why you may be having difficulties in performing it, Yoga Anatomy
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