Showing posts with label fitness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fitness. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Online Aerobics, Burning Fat Conveniently

Aerobics online is fast becoming a very popular tool for exercising and getting in shape. It offers the opportunity to have professional guidance and programming combined with the convenience of working out on your time, and in your own home. Technology now allows for trainers and members to communicate to ensure the online aerobic fitness programs are executed correctly, consistently, and members can be held accountable for what they have done. Online Aerobic fitness can be accurately measured and monitored with a heart rate monitor. This tool provides specific feedback and allows you to communicate with your trainer about the program so you can reach your fitness goals.

In the past and still commonly done today, cardiovascular training is assessed by guessing intensity based on how you felt during a workout, and duration measured by time. This form of exercise while effective, still never truly allowed us to see the results of our efforts. Heart rate training, as a part of online aerobic fitness involves using a heart rate monitor to measure cardiac output, and the intensity and duration of your workout with specific data reports that can be charted to ensure progress.

Your heart rate is the measuring tool for cardiovascular training, and a heart rate monitor accurately records this data for every workout. Now imagine that you can transfer this data into a PC and email your results to a trainer. Now, no matter where you are, you and your trainer can communicate regarding your workouts, taking out all of the guess work. The result is measuring this specific data is improved cardiovascular fitness, endurance, stamina, rate of recovery and fat burning!

Online aerobic training plans can be specifically designed for individual needs. Those who want to lose weight can accurately measure their fat burning capability and optimize their results. Endurance athletes training for marathons and triathlons can improve race times and recovery. Athletes such as football players, soccer players and basketball players can maximize their VO2 capabilities and recovery so they will be the most well conditioned athletes on the field.

These online programs are designed by personal trainers and can be accessed through your own online account. Once your level of fitness is revealed and goals are established, online personal trainers can create cardiovascular conditioning programs for you to print or download into an IPOD. All you need to do then is execute!

Take the guesswork out of aerobic conditioning! Stop measuring your workouts by time and distance exclusively and start getting the results you want. Whether you are a sedentary beginner fitness enthusiast looking to lose weight, or an athlete wanting to get an extra inning out of your arm, you can find the right online program for you and optimize your results! Liveleantoday.com is the home for online aerobic and cardiovascular conditioning programs. There you can find an extensive array of online fitness plans that will help you optimize your results with an efficient and effective program.


Find the latest probiotic, supplements, fitness, and diet information at LiveLeanToday.com.

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Cardio Threshold Training - Medium Intensity Days

The Plan: The threshold workout or medium intensity workout is the #1 workout that most cardio athletes and enthusiasts miss in their programs. The goal of the threshold workouts is to work at the max at which your aerobic metabolism produces energy. Because you have another energy source called your anaerobic metabolism, you have the ability to train harder or faster than a proper threshold workout. Most people thinking that they need to be killing themselves to be getting a good workout never slow down enough to train their body effectively.

Your aerobic metabolism is the way your body burns fat and carbs as energy with the use of oxygen. The only way to optimally perform in cardio or endurance races, as well as, achieve your weight loss goals is to train your aerobic metabolism to be as fast as it can. The perfect workout for weight loss, 5k training, and running a marathon.

How do we find the proper intensity to train at? The only way to know for sure that you are training at the right intensity is through having your own personal heart rate profile. With Live Lean Today's online fitness plans, you receive your own heart rate zones to optimize each workout. Most people not watching their heart rate are way off to what they think their heart rate is to what it actually is.

Threshold workouts range from 15-30 min. in total session time. With Live Lean Today, your online personal trainer will work with you to create the right program and progression for your threshold workouts. If you can go longer than 30 min than we need to go faster. What is important is highest rate of energy and heart rate that you can sustain for the entire threshold workout.

The Results: Threshold hold workouts train your body to burn more fat and carbohydrates as energy. This is another way of saying you have a faster metabolism. As it relates to performance, with threshold training you create a faster pace. Especially, if you have found that you can't seem to increase your running pace, threshold workouts are needed in your program.

After effective threshold workouts, the biggest difference you will instantly feel is how much faster you perform at lower heart rates. Your heart rate profile will change as you progress and improve. This is why it is so important for a cardio expert to be monitoring your progress and making adjustments. You now have the ability to run faster for the same distances and times that were once a struggle.

Your weight loss results occur while you are resting. If you have ever said you wanted a faster metabolism than threshold workout are for you. Your body will burn more calories of fat 24 hours a day 7 days a week after your body improves from threshold workouts.

The Difference: Live Lean Today is the only online personal trainer program to have precise heart rate training programs to optimize your results. Training in the right heart rate zone makes each workout as effective as it can be. The fastest way to your results is through proper heart rate training and progression.


Find the best online fitness trainers and LG Science products at LIveLeanToday.com

Thursday, February 1, 2007

Weight Loss Stats

What is takes to be successful at weight loss takes both diet and exercise. For those that lost more than 30 pounds and kept their weight off for more than a year 89% of them did it with a combination of diet and exercise.

10% kept their weight off by dieting alone and only 1% by exercising as their only form of weight loss.

If you want to play the percentages it is time to take care of diet and exercise. So when you are setting up your program or having a professional do it for you make sure you are taking care of both aspects and not just one.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Taking Your Workout On The Road

I know there are many of you out there who have been in the same position I find myself frequently. You have just had 3 great weeks of creating a routine in your workout program and are feeling and seeing results, and now you have to leave town for a week long conference. This leaves you feeling like you have interrupted your flow, and are a little frustrated with feeling like you will have lost a step when you return. What should you do? How can you keep the momentum going?

In my career I have had the opportunity to travel frequently for work, and have worked with many clients who spend much of their time on the road. Some clients are traveling as much as 12-15 days a month. We often have the conversation about the hurdles they face in trying to maintain consistency in their workout programs while traveling. Long days are spent in meetings or at trade shows, followed by dinner with colleagues or clients that fill your day until bedtime and then you start over again. Does any of this sound familiar?

So the most frequently asked questions are, “What can I do that is going to be effective?” and “How can my workout program be managed in my busy schedule while on the road?” Well, there are always solutions. One solution is to make you a priority and schedule your workouts into your travel itinerary. You may not have the hour that you’re used to at home, but if you can manage 20-30 minutes, you’ll find yourself feeling good about maintaining your consistency.

Try bringing some resistance tubing with you on your trip and workout in your room. It fits easily into a suitcase and can offer a lot of variety to your workout program. Instead of doing a series of sets with rest, try doing a circuit. This will allow you to manage your workout time and maintain your volume. You can try body weight exercises such as pushups, abdominal bridges, prisoner squats and lunges. With your tubing you can do a series of movements such as shoulder press, bicep curl, row and cable twist. Do 8-10 exercises and run through the series twice at about 30-60 seconds per exercise, moving from one directly into the next with little to no rest between your sets. Don’t forget to do a warm up and cool down with some flexibility exercises and stretches before and after as well. Alternate these resistance workouts with your cardio workout days and you should have a plan that will allow you to complete a quality workout in 30 minutes or less. I have found that even the busiest of traveling business men and women are able to manage a 30 minute workout program while away from home.

Just because you are going to be traveling, it doesn’t mean you have to lose your consistency. Make it a priority to schedule your workouts, and execute them. You might even find yourself more alert and effective in those afternoon meetings.

Bryan Ashbaugh has a Masters in Exercise and Sports Science and is Co-Founder and CEO of www.liveleantoday.com. He has authored many fitness and nutrition articles. He has been in professional fitness for 8 years. If you want more information on other topics and a fitness and nutrition plan for you go to www.liveleantoday.com.

Article Source: BlueArticles.com

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Top 10 Tips for Running Your Best Marathon

Marathons are becoming more and more popular these days. Marathons in large cities around the United States have started lotteries to pick the participants because of overwhelming registrations. At Liveleantoday.com, we wanted to support people with their marathon training programs. If you are going to make the commitment to train for a marathon lets make the effort count.

1. Proper Running Shoes: The most important decision you can make is proper running shoes for the biomechanics (way your foot moves) of your feet. The number one cause of injuries while training is improper shoes. There are three types of running shoes: stability, cushion, and motion control. Stability shoes are designed for those that have neutral to slight pronation (rolling your foot inward) during running. Cushion shoes are designed for people with high arches, and motion control shoes are designed for people that over pronate or roll their feet too far inward. Find a running shoe store that can test your biomechanics and recommend proper shoes for you.

2. Eat carbs: We don't need to over eat carbs, just make them 60% of your daily diet. Carbs don't make you fat, they are actually your major source of energy. Often people running marathons for weight loss don't eat enough total calories for the amount of exercise they are doing. This puts them into an exercise starvation mode that shuts their bodies' fat burning properties off and people actually store more fat. If you are not losing weight with your marathon there is a good chance you are not eating enough. Use a heart rate monitor to measure your calories you are burning and add every calorie burned over 500 back into your diet.

3. Get electrolytes: Drinking water is good enough. Electrolytes we eat and drink absorb water to keep us hydrated. Especially running in heat people sweat out tons of electrolytes and without replenishing them stay dehydrated even if they drink water. Electrolytes are found in salty food, sports drinks, and many of the running gels you can purchase.

4. Interval Training: Most marathon training programs only put interval training into the advanced programs. Interval training is actually great for people at every level. Interval training is workouts where you repeat short durations of high intensity followed by short durations of low intensity running. Interval training is the most efficient way to increase your speed and your body's ability to produce more energy. With proper heart rate training any person can do optimal interval training.

5. One Long Day: You actually only need to do one long run a week. If you can do it once you can do it for your race. Most people do too many long runs each week, which puts too much extra toll on your body. This extra toll causes so many of the marathon training related injuries. Most injuries occur from people doing too many miles, not running to fast.

6. Plenty of Sleep: Your body needs the rest from all of your training. The best way to have a poor race is not to give your body adequate amounts of sleep. Getting rest the week before your race isn't good enough. To be in peak shape for your marathon you need to get a good nights sleep for the entire training program. One night of bad sleep isn't going to do anything though consistent lack of sleep will greatly damper your results.

7. Train with a Heart Rate Monitor: The best way to train at the correct pace for you is using a heart rate monitor. Training each week at different heart rate zones optimizes your speed and your body's ability to produce energy. Liveleantoday.com, an online personal trainer and dietician website, customizes your heart rate zones for optimal marathon race results. Secondly, noticing changes in your heart rate from day to day can tell you if you are overtraining, not getting enough sleep, or you are dehydrated.

8. Training Partner: To run your best marathon it is good to get a training partner. A person that will help you be accountable to your training program and get out of bed on some of those tough days. If you are unable to find a training partner on a regular basis, find a person you can do interval training workouts with to push you and challenge you to become faster.

9. Rest: You want to be in peak shape for your marathon race day. A good taper for a month before you race is ideal. A taper is a slow decrease in the mileage each week allowing your body to recover. You are not going to make any training improvements that will matter for your race, so give your body the rest and run the fastest race for you.

10. Start Slow: We all want to start fast and look good at the start of the race. Most people take off too fast and burn a high percentage of their stored energy in the first mile. Taking off to fast will drastically slow down your pace for the whole marathon. To run a fast time start even slower than you think and gradually pick up your pace until you get to a good pace for you. Starting slower will give you energy to go at a fast pace for the entire race and even go faster at the end. The greatest way to run a poor time is to be slowing down the whole second half of the marathon.

About The Author:

Bryan Ashbaugh, MS Exercise and Sports Science is CEO of LIVE, llc of www.liveleantoday.com - visit the website for more information on weight loss, core fitness programs, optimal diets, and online personal trainer and dietician services.

Article Source: A1-ArticleDirectory.com

Saturday, January 13, 2007

Why Core Fitness Is Important

If you’ve listened to the buzz around the fitness world lately or perused the latest workout books, you’ve probably heard the experts referencing core fitness in some shape or form. Traditionally, strength training has been dominated by exercises focused on isolating the muscles of the arms and legs. In fact, if you look at many of the weight machines that have become popular in modern gyms, you’ll notice that they require you to sit or recline while you use them.

While these machines will effectively help you build the muscles that they target, the problem is that, in real life, we don’t use our muscles that way. We lift a box from the floor to a shelf, swing a golf club, push our children on the swing set, or climb a rock wall. In fact, the vast majority of the things we do require all of the muscles in our bodies to function together and be coordinated through our mid-sections, or our “core.”

While those activities may make the use of core muscles seem very obvious, this area, made up of the muscles of our midsection, are actually responsible for quite a few of the more subtle functions as well, including posture, balance and stability.

A weakened core will often result in poor posture and stability, yet we don’t necessarily feel the results of it in areas that show us a direct cause and effect correlation. For example, poor posture, due to a weakened core, might allow our hips to slip out of alignment resulting in knee pain. In fact, quite a few of the chronic muscle and joint pain issues that

Americans are suffering with today stem from a weakened core.

It is no wonder, then, that exercise science has taken a dramatic shift in recent years to include the core in strength training regimes. Now, rather than using a machine to first exercise your legs and then your arms, trainers are suggesting that their clients use free weights or bands to combine exercises such as a squat to overhead press. By linking the two, people are forced to transition the exercise movement through their core, and the core muscles in turn help to maintain good posture throughout the exercise. The end result is that we are exercising in a fashion that mimics the movements that we use in everyday life, while creating better posture and increasing our stability and balance.

Bryan Ashbaugh has a Masters in Exercise and Sports Science and is Co-Founder and CEO of www.liveleantoday.com. He has authored many fitness and nutrition articles. He has been in professional fitness for 8 years. If you want more information on other topics and a fitness and nutrition plan for you go to www.liveleantoday.com.

Article Source: BlueArticles.com

Thursday, January 11, 2007

10 Steps, Obesity, Overcome Your Personal Battle

Fighting obesity can be difficult not only physically, but psychologically as well. Failed attempt at losing weight can take its toll on your body and mind and it is crucial to prepared mentally and physically in order to successfully lose weight. The Live programs and their support system focus not only on creating an excellent fitness program, but invest a lot of time working with clients on the psychological side of fighting obesity. The following is a set of steps, some in preparation and some to be used through out the program to ensure success.

1. Recognizing the programs that run you

What are the things that hold you back? What are the excuses you make? What are the behaviors you engage in that keep you from obtaining what you want? People always say “Commit to change.” Well easier said than done. It’s very difficult to commit to going somewhere when we don’t recognize where we are or where we’ve been. I learned that programs are the hard wiring within you that drives your thoughts and actions. Programs certainly can’t be changed overnight, but you can reflect on what hurdles you create that make it difficult for you to be successful with your weight loss goals. Lack of self confidence can lead to procrastination and excuses. This is a program that affects many. Recognize your programs, behaviors, and attitudes and you’ll better understand where you’ve been and where you are. Then you can move forward and begin reaching your goals.

2. Commit

Do what you say you are going to do. Have a plan and commit to executing it. Make your goals realistic, focus on short achievements, and celebrate small successes along the way. Have a goal of consistency. Your plan should include committing to consistent activity. Make a goal to drink 8 glasses of water a day or have a goal of adding a vegetable to every dinner meal during the weekdays. Success in these short term achievements will reap rewards in your long term weight loss goals.

3. Support system

Success is easy to attain when you have people around you. Tell your family, friends, co-workers that you have a weight loss goal, and let them help. Work with a Personal Trainer or Registered Dietician and let them help. A support system can come in the form of encouragement, companionship, and accountability, and can make your road to weight loss success much more enjoyable.

4. Sensible goals

Know your body, and be honesty with yourself about what is real. If you haven’t already, consult a physician regarding what is realistic. You can also test to rule out any obstacles medically related to weight loss such as under active thyroid or food allergies that could inhibit your weight loss.

5. Consistency

Most important to any exercise program is consistency. With a little consistency you can develop habits, and then you’ll be less likely to regress. You will reach your weight loss goals faster when you stay on track and don’t let your hurdles get in the way. This goes for your diet as well. It’s ok to have a cheat day, but make it just one. If you are consistent, you will get results.

6. Use portion control

5 small meals a day is the best way to speed up your metabolism, regulate blood sugar levels, curb hunger binges, and ultimately lose weight.

7. Eat fiber rich foods

Foods that are rich in fiber tend to be filling; therefore people will feel full and not eat as much. Studies have also found that a diet high in fiber can reduce the risk of heart disease, digestive problems and diabetes.

8. Cut calorie dense foods

Foods that have a high content of salt, sugar and flour can also be densely packed with calories. Twizzlers have over 250 calories in a small package, a half order of pasta with Alfredo sauce has 680 calories at many Italian chain restaurants, and a bagel has over 300 calories without cream cheese or butter. High salt content is found in calorie dense, low fiber, processed foods. Too much salt can lead to elevated blood pressure and is also associated with hindering weight loss.

9. Have an activity

There is no better way to maintain consistency in reaching your health and fitness goals than having an activity. When you enjoy doing something, it isn’t work anymore. Activities such as hiking, swimming, cycling, racquetball and rock climbing are great examples of activities that can add versatility to your fitness program.

10. Work Hard!

Losing any significant amount of weight is not easy. Any good program will have a nice mixture of high and low intensity workouts with rest cycles built in. But I have seen too many people going through the motions of a workout and they never even break a sweat. Your body will respond to the stimulus that you create and will respond to loads and intensity. To keep your body from hitting a plateau, you must constantly challenge your body and find new ways to create stimulation to adapt to. With constant stimulation and variety will come consistent results.

Bryan Ashbaugh, MS Exercise and Sports Science is CEO of LIVE, llc of www.liveleantoday.com Visit Live Lean Today for more information on weight loss, core fitness programs, optimal diets, and online personal trainer & dietician services.

Article Source: BlueArticles.com