I drink a cup of coffee or two in the morning just to pick up my energy a bit. I know some people say that coffee is not good as it raises your blood pressure but I get tested faitly often and my blood pressure is ok.

Anyway, have you ever tried the pick me up of caffiend before a workout? I used to have sugary drinks years ago before a workout but one of the problems is that with a drink like that is that you can feel gassy or bloated during your workout and that is never good. Same applies to a lot of those re bull type energy drinks with tons of sugar in them.  I like to feel like I have a pretty empty stomach when I am working out.

Anyway this week coming up I am going to try coffee or expresso before my workout just to get that bit of an energy boost.

Have you done this? Has it worked out well for you?

Looking to make a change and lose some weight? I have reviewed the top diet on the internet and you can go and read over 200 comments people have made about why this diet has worked well for them, as well as some of the problems.

I have written about HIIT before but it is something that I really do prescribe to instead of just another workout alternative. The idea to me of getting a good workout is to workout hard for a short period of time and really work the muscles. Lately I have been trying to concentrate even more on compound, or basic, exercises like bench press, squats, military press and rows.

Why do HIIT workouts?

The way that you do one of these workouts is to string all of your exercises together and do it as one long set with very little time between exercises. You do this one long set and then take a rest and then do it all over again.  This is the exact method that Tom has talked about in Burn the Fat and is the way to have a quick but very effective and very intense workout. I used to hate spending an hour training everyday and now I train my body in only 30-40 minutes instead. Nice time saving and I feel like I really worked hard after I am done. Read the rest of this entry »

I found this article last year about fall fitness written by Rob Williams of the Vancouver Province Newspaper. One of the things I have noticed this year is that I am really noticing the change of seasons and how it is affecting my attitude, energy, and workout patterns

Whether there are kids in the picture or not, September is a time when a lot of people do a mind-shift, putting the golf clubs, bikes and tennis rackets away for another year and establishing the habits and patterns that will shape their fall and winter schedules.

In fact, September is second only to January as a time when fitness springs to the top of the to-do list, with gyms and training studios buzzing with activity and motivated new members. At the same time, family and business commitments seem to increase, and the days get shorter and darker. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Golf, ipod, Rob Williams, Tennis

I have been pretty clear that I am just working most of my body in a single workout lately but there is of course another way. The split weight workout. With a split schedule you can do the same amount of work in one day but get twice the number of sets per workout. As you start lifting more and more weight and your body gets accustomed to the workouts you may start to get tired of and start not getting the results that you were getting before. If you are at that point than breaking up your workout may be just what you need to get to the next level.

Here is the classic 2 day split:

• Day 1 – Chest, Shoulders, Triceps, Hamstrings
• Day 2 – Back, Biceps, Quads, Calves

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: energy

Today I was feeling a little sluggish walking into the gym. I knew it was a day to do weights but I didn’t know if after the long weekend I would have the mental power to be able to push my sets to failure like I know that I have to. So I decided to change things up today.

As I have mentioned here before, I do all my weights in one day although I seem to be getting closer to going to a two days split. Normally I would do a circuit workout with a warmup set for each muscle group and then two sets to failure for each muscle group. This normally works great, especially if you can really push what failure means in a set.

Today instead of doing a warmup set I did a set of 50 reps to failure to start using bench/flyes (25 reps each), pulldowns to chest, lateral raises, tricep pushdowns, and alternating curls. After this I did just one set of low rep sets of 8-10 reps with the same exercises.

Then I did my post workout stretching. The whole workout took about 40 minutes.

After my workout I had a great pump and had trouble raising my arms in the shower but I will probably know better tomorrow how effective this workout was.

Tags: SET 50

What do you do for exercise? Do you bike or walk? Why not do that on the way or at least part of the way to work.

Walking or biking to work, even part way, is linked with fitness, but very few Americans do it, according to a study of more than 2,000 middle-aged city dwellers.

In what may be the first large U.S. study of health and commuting, the researchers found only about 17 percent of workers walked or bicycled any portion of their commute.

The new study is based on tests and questionnaires from 2,364 workers who were part of a larger federally funded study on heart disease risk. The participants lived in Chicago, Minneapolis, Birmingham, Ala., and Oakland, Calif. They were asked in 2005-2006 about their commuting habits in the past 12 months. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Alabama, Archives of Internal Medicine, Birmingham, California, Chapel Hill, Chicago, heart disease, James Sallis, Minneapolis, North Carolina, Oakland, obesity, Oregon, Penny Gordon-Larsen, Portland, San Diego State University, United States, University of North Carolina

I get asked often how hard you should be working out when you are working out. The simple answer for me is workout as hard as you can for as long as you can.

Lets go into some detail.

Lets take doing weights for an example. I start my workout with a focus and goal of what I want to have happen. I want my weight workout to end with nothing left so I structure my workout this way. As I have mentioned before, lately I have been doing three sets per exercise and one exercise per muscle group. I will do the first set knowing that I will be stretched out and tired at the end of each set. I do 12 reps and finish probably having gone to about 70% of my possible set.

On the next two sets of my exercise I go to 100% of my possible set. I try to make sure that these sets push my body as far as I can. To get more out of the set than normally possible I will use a weight that will only allow me to do 6 reps. After I have done these reps I will drop the weight by 10 pounds or so and immediately get another couple of reps out. I will finally drop the weight another 20 pounds and get another couple of reps out. At this point I have nothing left. Read the rest of this entry »

Building muscle is done primarily though confusing your muscles into growth. When you keep changing your sets, weights, exercises then your muscle grow to accommodate the changing stress of the workout.

One of my favorite ways to train the upper-body is using push-pull super-sets. Not only am I getting a complete upper-body work, but I’m saving a ton of time and maximizing my “training economy”.

But these aren’t your typical universal machine super-sets! Too many people get stuck in their training and perform the same movements week after week, and wonder why they’re not making progress or why they start to HATE going to the gym. Strength training doesn’t have to be boring, and once you start incorporating a variety of movements, your sessions not only become more productive, but you’ll actually start having FUN again and feel like you did when you bought your first barbell set.

With these super-sets, you are going to perform your upper-body pushing movement and then immediately work your upper-body pulling movement. Rest only after both movements have been completed. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Dips, Dustin Lebel, Matt Kroczaleski, Parallel bar, Push Pull Supersets Building

Health magazine has these quick tips to help you get motivated to run a race. I know that it has been a goal of mine to run a 10k for a long time but pushing through that tough training and having my body heal between workouts is the tough part.

Need help in the motivation department? Sign up for a 5K or 10K. Suddenly, your exercise routine becomes “training” and every workout has a purpose. Plus, your competitive spirit is bound to keep you fired up and help you push past what you thought was impossible. Here’s how to ace the race.

Find your ideal race. If you usually do 1- to 2-mile runs, try a 5K (just over 3 miles). If you can comfortably do 3 to 4 miles, go for a 10K (a little more than 6 miles). Find a race online at Active.com or by checking with a local running store (expect to pay around $25 to enter). Leave plenty of time to train; 8 to 10 weeks is ideal. Then tell everyone about it—better yet, ask them to join you. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: USD

High intensity interval training (HIIT) is a great way to both improve performance and to also lose weight quickly. HIIT is a different way of doing cardio with just a couple of rules to remember:

First, your running session should only be 15-30 minutes.

Secondly, sessions should have a 2:1 ratio in terms of time. so a session may be something as 60 seconds jog, 30 seconds sprint alternating

An example of a HIIT session may be as follows: Begin with a five minute warm up jog at about a medium intensity followed by a couple of minutes of stretching. Then start with a jog at about medium intensity for 60 seconds and then sprint hard for 30 to 60  seconds. Keep alternating this for 20 minutes or so and then at the end you can do some lower level jogging for 5 minutes as a cooldown.

This kind of workout is very difficult, especially the first few times that you try it and so it would be a good idea to only do it every second day and gauge how you are recovering from the workouts.

There have been a lot of studies on the high intensity interval training over the last few years and they seem to show that this is a very effective method for improving fitness as well as a nice change from regular running and workouts. One of the most important reasons that High intensity interval training works is because when you stress your body at the highest level you will burn a lot more fat then when running at a lower level jog.

Some proponents of HIIT say that to drop weight faster you would want to do this training on an empty stomach and I would have to agree with that. The idea is that since your body has no available calories to burn that it would replace muscle glycogen by burning fat. I would love to see more studies on this since it seems to make sense but there is not much evidence of it except for people saying that it seems to work.

Recently it has been shown that two weeks of HIIT can substantially improve insulin action in young healthy men. HIIT may therefore represent a viable method for prevention of type-2 diabetes.

Tags: diabetes