Treadmill Sequence

January 22, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Try this fun sequence next time you’re on the treadmill to shake up your routine.  You’re going to need a set of dumbbells to get some upper body work in while you are walking. The upper body work won’t lead to a lot of strength gain but it will help to elevate your heart rate. The dumbbells should be light, 5-25 pounds depending on your strength.

Hold the dumbbells in your hands during the first part of the sequence.

Walk on the treadmill for 1 minute

                Speed 3MPH, Incline 3 degrees

The second minute you’ll perform alternating dumbbell curls

                Walk for 30 seconds with the dumbbells at your side

Then 1 minute of alternating overhead presses from the top

                Hold both dumbbells overhead as you alternate lowering and raising each arm

               Walk for 30 seconds

Then 1 minute of upright row (not alternating)

                With your palms facing your body, pull the dumbbells up to shoulder level. Leading the movement with your elbows. Your elbows should always be higher than the dumbbells.

                Walk for 30 seconds

Then 1 minute of alternating overhead triceps extensions

                Hold the dumbbells overhead in the same position as the overhead press. Alternate bending at one elbow and lowering the dumbbell behind your head, then extend back to the top.

                Walk for 30 seconds

 

Put the Dumbbells down

Now do 5 Intervals of 1 Minute of high Intensity and 30 seconds of rest.

Running

If you can run set the speed to 6MPH and leave the incline at 3 degrees. Run for 1 minute then step off to the side of the belt and rest for 30 seconds. Repeat 5 times.

Walking

If you can’t run, keep the speed at 3MPH and increase the incline to 6 degrees. Walk for 1 minute then step to the side of the belt and rest for 30 seconds. Repeat 5 times.

Cool Down

Walk for 2 minutes at 3MPH and an incline of 3 degrees

This entire Sequence will take 16.5  minutes.

Have fun and let me know what you think of this workout after you’ve done it. Leave your comments below.

 

Filed Under: Blog, Cardiovascular Exercise, Exercise and Fitness Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

One Of Our Members Has Been Seriously Mislead, And I Want To Help

September 12, 2011 by Leave a Comment

I’ve been a member of The National Business Experts for less than a month now. I haven’t totally figured out the culture of this group and how to give and get the most out of it. What I like about the group is that it seems the focus is on building real and genuine relationships.  Once that happens, then real and qualified referrals will take place. And those referrals come from each member’s own network of contacts.  This is different than other networking events and groups that I’ve attended in the past. In those groups it feels like everyone in attendance is trying to convince the other networkers to become their customers.

The National Business Experts is way better!

But I know this much, the word “Experts” is right there in the group name. And we can’t be experts in every field or industry. We have to trust when we are making a referral to another member of the group, that our contact will receive incredible service. But beyond that as members we have an additional benefit. We have direct access to top professionals from a huge variety of industries. None of us should ever experience a bad real estate transaction, have a website that doesn’t look and function the way we want,  have too much or too little insurance, have to represent ourselves in legal matters, etc.  I think it is our responsibility to each other, as members of The National Business Experts, to ensure that every member is provided with accurate information and advice in our respective areas of expertise.

And on that note I let a member down last week at The Five Families Mafia Style Networking event. Not because of any bad intentions on my part, but because I was so totally caught off guard by what she was telling me. I was shocked at what she was saying, that I was basically speechless for a few minutes. Want to know what it is? Ready for it? OK

Once she found out that I was a fitness professional she immediately told me that she gets all of the cardio that she needs because she wears 6 pound shoes.  Here’s a quote, she said, “That’s all I have to do.” She was wearing them that night and she even showed them to me. I’m sure she is a wonderful lady. In fact, she seemed like it. But she has no idea what she is talking about. She is wrong.

I regret that I didn’t tell her that last Wednesday. But I’m going to make things right, and tell her now.

The truth is there have been thousands of studies done at accredited universities around the world. These studies are peer reviewed, double blind and follow accepted scientific methodologies. The result of these studies (and I’ve read a ton of them), is that we know exactly how the body responds and adapts to cardiovascular exercise.

Fact: If you want to improve your cardiovascular capacity, then you need to exercise at 55%-85%+ of your maximum heart rate for a specific period of time (typically between 15-120 minutes). Plus you’ll need to exercise 3-6 times per week. Wearing six pound shoes won’t do that.

Well at least no harm can come from wearing the six pound shoes, right? Wrong!

Here is the deal. This really nice lady thinks that she is deriving the benefits of cardiovascular exercise by wearing these 6 pound shoes, when she isn’t. She thinks that she is;

Reducing her risk of heart disease
Reducing her risk of stroke
Reducing her risk of some cancers
Reducing her risk of Adult Onset Diabetes
Increasing her lifespan
Improving her quality of life
Increasing her chances of maintaining an ideal body weight

Because she thinks that all of these great things are happening to her, she’s not really doing the things she should be doing. And her health is obviously important to her or she wouldn’t have bought the shoes in the first place. She is wasting both her time and money by wearing these shoes.

To make matters worse, wearing six pound shoes is going to distract (pull) her ankles, knees and hips. The result of this constant pulling on the joints of her lower body is that the ligaments that stabilize those joints will be stretched. When you stretch ligaments the joints become less stable. This increases the likelihood of injury to those joints.

The only person benefiting by her wearing these shoes is the person that sold them to her. And that person is running a scam.

There is so much misinformation in the fitness and weight loss (diet) industry. There is no way for you to know with certainty what is true and what is misleading. The good news is, that I’m now a member of The National Business Experts. So you don’t have to guess and hope that you’re doing the right things when it comes to fitness anymore.

Before you start an exercise or weight loss program, or if you have any questions about the things that you’re currently doing please call me or email me. Or just send a message on Facebook.

I’m here to help.

Cell – 602.999.4593
email – john@fitnessknowhowhq.com

John Preston
Your Fitness Tutor

 

 

Filed Under: Cardiovascular Exercise, WTF (Miscellaneous) Tagged With: ,

Cardiovascular Training

February 8, 2011 by Leave a Comment
Cardio

Cardiovascular exercise will benefit you in numerous ways.

 

What is Cardiovascular Training?

The goal of Cardiovascular Training or Aerobic Exercise is to elevate your heart for a specific period of time. The extent to which you elevate your heart rate and the total time you keep your heart rate elevated depends entirely on your own personal goals.

There are a variety of activities that you can choose from to develop cardiovascular fitness. The most common are walking, jogging, running, swimming and cycling.

Why Does Aerobic Exercise Work?

When you exercise at an appropriate level, you place stresses on the body beyond what your body is accustomed to. The great thing about our bodies is that they are so adaptable. When you place stress on your body, it begins to adapt. It does this so that the next time you ask your body to perform that task, your body is prepared for it and can accomplish the task without being stressed. That is how improvements in fitness occur.

When you perform cardiovascular exercise, all sorts of really cool physiological things occur. It can get really technical, but it’s important for you to understand, so I’ll explain the essential functions in basic terminology.

First of all, there are two terms that you should understand. The first is “Cardiovascular”. “Cardio” refers to your heart and “Vascular” refers to your veins and arteries (your circulatory system). The second is “Cardio Respiratory”, which is the relationship between your heart (cardio) and your lungs (respiratory). So when you perform aerobic exercise you are improving your heart, lungs and circulatory system.

Circulatory System

Your veins and arteries carry blood. Arteries carry oxygen rich blood to the muscles (cells) that are working and need oxygen to be able to continue. Veins carry oxygen depleted blood from the muscles back to the heart then to the lungs to be re-oxygenated.

Regular aerobic exercise will result in an increase of red blood cells, which carry oxygen to the cells. It also results in an increase of capillaries (the tiny blood vessels that deliver the blood to the tissues and cells). Therefore allowing more nutrients to be delivered to working muscles.

Your Lungs

With exercise, your lungs will increase their capacity, and they will be able to hold more air. The more air that you can breathe in, the more oxygen that is available to your cells. Your lungs will also increase the ability to pull oxygen from the air and deliver it to the blood. This occurs because more alveoli (tiny sacks in your lungs that transfer the oxygen from the air and deliver it to the red blood cells) are exposed to the increased volume of air/oxygen in your lungs.

Your Heart

Your heart is a muscle, so it will become bigger and stronger. You will increase the amount of blood the heart can hold. And the heart will pump a higher percentage of its blood each time it beats. It will pump more blood with every beat. This will allow you to deliver more blood to the body via your arteries. Your heart is muscle tissue and it will also benefit from an increase in capillaries, more oxygen rich red blood cells, just as your skeletal muscles will. As a result, it will become more efficient.

End Result

More air in your lungs
More oxygen delivered to the red blood cells
More red blood cells
A more efficient heart pumping more blood
More capillaries delivering oxygen to the cells
More efficient cells utilizing the oxygen
A More Awesome YOU!

How Aerobic Exercise Will Help You

Moderate physical (aerobic) activities will yield tremendous physical benefits. Those benefits include decreased risk of heart disease and certain cancers and improvement in blood pressure and cholesterol levels. The increase in physical activity will result in increased energy (caloric) expenditure which will help to decrease your body fat percentage. Your metabolism will improve not only during exercise but also for a short period after activity. Improvements in aerobic capacity will help to make all of your activities of daily living easier, resulting in more energy throughout the day.

Here is a short list of more benefits of Cardiovascular/Aerobic Exercise

1. Instant feel-good. You will feel invigorated for hours after training
2. Train your heart. The heart is a muscle and cardio is its strength training
3. Increased endurance and stamina. Get through your day without a cat-nap.
4. Increased confidence right away!
5. Healthy lungs
6. Increases metabolism for up to 24 hours
7. Improves immune system. Being sick less equals more days to work out!
8. Reduces stress
9. Improves circulation. You will be less sore after weight training
10. Sleep better
11. Relief from depression and anxiety
12. Reduced risk of some cancers
13. Reduced risk of heart disease
14. Lower blood pressure
15. Lowers cholesterol
16. Live longer
17. It’s something great you can do for yourself to improve your health!

Filed Under: Cardiovascular Exercise, Exercise and Fitness, featured Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Fitness Tip #19 of #31 Get Your Cardiovascular Exercise

October 19, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Ok I know you’ve been walking for an hour each and every day. And that definitely counts as cardio. But we’re going to ramp things up a bit and develop a more structured cardio program for you. The goal with this structured, intentional cardiovascular program is to begin to increase the amount of time spent with an elevated heart rate. By increasing the intensity of your program you’ll really begin to realize the benefits of being aerobically fit. Here’s how we are going to do it.

You’ll still go for one hour walks every other day. On the day that you don’t go on the walk you’ll add and shorter (20-30 minute) workout at an increased intensity. So how are we going to measure intensity?

Easy, with your heart rate.

This can get a little bit technical but I’ll keep it very simple for you.

Here are some general guideline for you to follow.

Moderate intensity = 50%-65% of your max heart rate
Medium Intensity = 65%-75% of your max heart rate
High Intensity = 75%-85% of your max heart rate

How do you figure your exercise heart rate? Use this formula;

220 – (Your age) X (% of Max heart rate) = Target Heart Rate (THR)

Follow this Example, A 42 year old who wants to exercise at 65% of Max

(220 – 42) X .65 (65%) = THR
178 X .65 = 115

So a 42 year old should exercise  with a heart rate (THR) of 115 beats/minute if the goal is to workout at 65% of maximum.

To calculate your heart beat, simply take your pulse for 15 seconds and multiply by 4. It’s actually easier to double that number twice. So if you take your pulse for 15 seconds and you double it twice you want to end up with a heart rate of 140 beats per minute (in our example, your THR will vary).

So here is the goal for you for this tip. Increase your cardiovascular fitness so that you can maintain a THR of 65% for 30 full minutes. If you can’t do that then I want you to do intervals until you can.

Here is the interval plan

Week 1 Four minutes at your normal walking pace one minute at 65%
Week 2 Three minutes at your normal walking pace 2 minutes at 65%
Week 3 two minutes at normal waking pace 3 minutes at 65%
Week 4 one minute at normal walking pace four minutes at 65%
Week 5 30 minutes at 65%

Ok here the disclaimer

Always warm up for 5-10 minutes prior to the increased intensity exercise. You can stick with the same exercise just perform it at a lower intensity. The above schedule is just a general guideline it may be to conservative for some people and to aggressive for others. Use this strategy to know when it is time to move on. You’re heart rate should return to your normal walking level prior to the next bout of intense exercise. If it doesn’t keep working at that level before moving on.

What type of exercises should you be doing. The simple answer is anything you want.. If you’re walking you may find that you’ll need to jog or run to get your heart rate up to 65%. If you’re fine with running stick with it, just make sure you get a great pair of running shoes. If you want to avoid running then you should probably find a fitness center for your cardiovascular workouts. It’s easy to increase the resistance or elevation on cardio machine to increase your heart rate without running.

You can choose any type of exercise that you like. We’re training heart rate here not movement pattern so you can even do something different each time.

Here is a list of great CV exercises

1. Walking
2. Jogging/Running
3. Swimming
4. Cycling
5. Stair Climbing
6. Elliptical Trainer
7. Aerobic classes (will be tougher to regulate THR)

So pick an activity that you like and every other day you’ll replace your 1 hour walk with more intense cardiovascular exercise.

You’ll experience

1. Increased energy
2. Increase metabolism
3. improved lung function
4. Greater aerobic capacity
5. Decrease resting heart rate
6. All sorts of other really cool physiologically things!

Lets admit one thing here, this tip is awesome. And don’t worry, once you can walk every other day for one hour and do 30 minutes of cardio at 65% of your max you’ll still need to keep progressing. I’ll have a ton of info for you on the site to teach you how….

And I’ll be back tomorrow with fitness tip #20

Filed Under: Blog, Cardiovascular Exercise, Exercise and Fitness Tagged With: , , , ,

Fitness Tip #18 of #31 Proper Technique And Injury Prevention

October 18, 2010 by Leave a Comment

In my humble (OK, expert) opinion I would rank proper exercise form as the second most important factor in having success with your fitness goals. What’s the most important you ask? I’ll never tell! Ok, just kidding. The most important component to being successful is consistency. If you follow all my advice to the letter and have perfect form on every rep of every set on every exercise, but you only do it once or twice each month, you won’t see any results. Hopefully this is so obvious to you that you’ll understand why I didn’t even include it as a tip.

Anyway back to proper technique. When you perform an exercise incorrectly you end up emphasizing muscles other than were originally intended to be emphasized. The end result of this is that you’ll either develop strength and flexibility imbalances or you will exacerbate the imbalances you already have. When you have flexibility and or muscle imbalances you typically will have some pain, stiffness or muscle discomfort (think low back pain). Plus you put yourself at greater risk of injury when you engage in physical activities prior to addressing these imbalances.

Here’s the beauty of exercise. When done correctly it will fix your strength and flexibility imbalances. This will decrease your pain and also decrease the likelihood of experiencing an injury.

Not only will doing exercises incorrectly lead to imbalances: it can also create faulty movement patterns. Once faulty movement patters are established it can take a ton of work to correct. In fact you can develop a faulty movement pattern in as little as 300 repetitions. But it can take over 5000 repetitions to correct a faulty movement pattern.

So it’s always easier to learn proper technique when you are first starting to exercise. Trust me you’ll be rewarded for the rest of your life.

So how do you ensure that you’re doing things correctly. First of all listen and watch very closely to the videos I’ve included in this program. That is a great start. Second find a trained professional in your area and work with them for a short period of time. Tell them your goal up front. You are there to learn as much as you can about proper technique as fast as you can, then you plan to work out on your own.

Depending on your income level, personal trainers can be expensive. But the investment is well worth it.

Oh yeah! Check back periodically with Fitness Know How Headquarters, I’ll always be adding new information.

I’ll check back with you tomorrow with another tip…

Filed Under: Blog, Cardiovascular Exercise, Exercise and Fitness, Resistance Training Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Fitness Tip #15 of #31 Take The Stairs (No elevators/escalators)

October 15, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Hope your goal setting was an awesome experience for you yesterday. So you should be totally fired up about getting going today. This tip you’ve heard before, take the stairs instead of escalators and elevators. This is right in line with an earlier fitness tip (Park in the furthest parking spot every place you park). By taking the stairs you are going to increase your daily energy expenditure.

Now I know the extent at which you increase activity levels will vary considerably based on how often you encounter elevators and escalators in your daily life. If you don’t today is like a “free pass” day. But if you do your energy expenditure could go through the roof (not literally) with this tip.

Stairs are awesome. You’ll increase you aerobic function and you’ll build considerable strength in your legs just by changing this one habit.

If your co-workers ask what you’re doing, tell them. This will show them you’re serious about making positive changes in your life.

Have fun with this one…see you tomorrow

Filed Under: Blog, Cardiovascular Exercise, Exercise and Fitness, Resistance Training Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Fitness Tip #2 of #31 Take A One Hour Walk

October 2, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Moderate physical activities will yield tremendous physical benefits. Those benefits include decreased risk of heart disease and certain cancers. Improvement in blood pressure and cholesterol levels. The increase in physical activity will result increase energy (caloric) expenditure which will help to decrease your body fat percentage. Your metabolism will improve not only during exercise but also for a short period after activity. Improvements in aerobic capacity will help to make all of your activities of daily living easier, resulting in more energy throughout the day.

Here’s the deal…

Take a one hour walk today and every single day for the next 30 days. Push yourself a little. Select a pace that increases your breathing to the point that you’d be able to carry on a conversation, but you’d be unable to sing. Here are some modifications. If you can’t walk for 60 straight minutes, break it up into two 30 minute walks or four 15 minute walks. Or walk as long as you can and add 1-2 minutes each day. If you aren’t certain that you can  walk for 60 minutes please walk laps around your block (or a couple blocks), do not attempt to walk away from your home for 30 minutes only to find you can’t make it back. I’m not coming to get you!

 If you already do cardiovascular exercise of any type simply add a 60 minute walk on the days that you don’t participate in more vigorous exercise.

 If you can do vigorous aerobic activity for 60 minutes every day, then you already appreciate all the benefits of cardiovascular fitness. Rock On!

              Here is a short list of more benefits of Cardiovascular/Aerobic Exercise

1. Instant feel-good. You will feel invigorated for hours after training
2. Train your heart. The heart is a muscle and cardio is its strength training
3. Increased endurance and stamina. Get through your day without a cat-nap.
4. Increased confidence right away!
5. Healthy lungs
6. Increases metabolism for up to 24 hours
7. Improves immune system. Being sick less equals more days to work out!
8. Reduces stress
9. Improves circulation. You will be less sore after weight training
10. Sleep better
11. Relief from depression and anxiety
12. Reduced risk of some cancers
13. Reduced risk of heart disease
14. Lower blood pressure
15. Lowers cholesterol
16.. Live longer

Enjoy your walk! See you tomorrow for Fitness Tip #3

Filed Under: Blog, Cardiovascular Exercise, Exercise and Fitness Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,
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