I hate to harp so much on my newfound interest and joy in a sport that I used to do as a child with my grandfather and my little sister and my mom so often – ice skating. I know that there’s a lot of hype built around the sport now too because of the winter Olympic games and the still highly spectated sport of figure skating – which I still enjoy watching on tv immensely, I suppose it’s somewhat like a trip down memory lane for me to my younger days.

Definitely very sentimental and nostalgic thing for me, we used to watch it together as a family, and I guess it’s a very fond memory I have of our family actually having fun together times as a younger girl, before my parents got divorced when I was sixteen, so it definitely holds a special place in my heart. My mom, sister and I went when my sister was in town from California at an ice arena around where I grew up, and I had a blast.

Although I was really shaky and unsure of myself at the outset because I hadn’t been ice skating in several years, I quickly became reacqainted with the sport, and was whizzing by beginners in no time, enjoying feeling the cold breeze on my face and the feeling that I was gliding through the air.

My husband and I decided to go again, together, since after my sister mom and I went, he was anxious to get back out on the ice after a long hiatus from it. He had taken skating in college, and he hadn’t been ice skating in years either, so after we went, he said he’d like to go. We ended up going to the college ice arena, and we also had a ball.

It was PACKED though. Here in Ohio, we actually had a nice day with the sun out, which has been a rarity over the past few weeks with us getting hammered with snow nonstop, so people were out in full force, and I’m sure that the buzz about ice skating from the winter Olympics were definitely contributing to the popularity of the sport.

We had a few falls – well, mostly my husband did because he didn’t have the benefit of having just been skating like I did, and he ended up with a big knot on his knee from taking a nasty spill, but we both had fun and got a great workout, and worked muscles we’d forgotten we had. It was a really great, active bonding experience!

I live in Ohio. And, to top it off, I live near the greater Cleveland Akron area of Ohio. You know, that area that just got voted the top “most miserable city” to live in by some magazine or other? Yeah, aren’t we so proud! One of the reasons Cleveland was voted the top most miserable US city to live in is because of our long, cold, snowy winters, among other things like taxes and appearance.

All that aside, there are a lot of US areas that are snowbound in the winter, or greatly limited by the winter time because of frigid temperatures and icy conditions outside, which make it hard to get anywhere sometimes. Also, you have the factor of not wanting to go anywhere because you don’t want to step out of your nice cozy warm house, and you certainly don’t want to get out or your big cozy sweaters or sweatsuits to go out in the cold, no sir! At least I’m speaking for myself. Others may not be as big of a freeze baby as I am.

This is why it is SO important for you to keep your motivation to workout in the winter time. Not only is it freezing outside, but we often go into a sort of hibernation mentality and physical state that can cause depression and anxiety, which only worsens if you also happen to not be working out like you should be.

Not working out regularly, and it’s negative effects on the body and mind, are only compounded by the fact that you also aren’t getting outdoors and moving around as much as you probably normally do in the summer. Think about it, in the summer, even if you’re not naturally a really active person, you are leaving the house more, walking around more, doing yard work, going to events, going on vacations and weekend getaways, all that good stuff that gets you up and around.

It’s really easy to fall into a sedentary rut in the winter time because you think, well, what can I do anyways, I might as well just be a slug and lay around until the spring time hits? However, that makes it all that much harder for you to get fit and ready for the summer every year, and it really puts your poor body through a yo yo routine as far as loss of muscle tone and weight gain. It’s better to keep your workouts steadily going throughout the winter and the summer time. Be kind to your body and at least show it some consistency.

With all the excitement over the Olympics, and American’s continued interest in figure skating, but not as much as it used to be sadly before the scandals of unfair scoring came into view, there is a lot of attention on the sport of figure skating. Ice skating has always been a fun sport to engage in for me. Ever since I was a little girl, my grandpa, who was an avid ice skater (he passed away several years ago now), used to take me and my little sister ice skating all of the time.

We always enjoyed it, but I don’t think we appreciated the actual skating as much as we appreciated how much fun it was to get junk food at the snack bar! Hey, you just like different things when you’re a kid!

We did love carousing around on the ice though, gliding effortlessly and doing fun, faster skating when you really started to feel more confident that you weren’t going to fall. What we didn’t realize then either was that we were getting a great physical workout by skating for those two hours during the public skates in Cleveland Ohio.

You often don’t understand that you got a lot of muscle conditioning from skating until the next day, when your lower back might be sore, and you calves might be sore, depending on how you balance yourself and what muscles you use most. You are really using a lot of your core muscles too, especially if your core (your abs and the surrounding area) is conditioned to begin with, because then your body is more conditioned to actually use the core instead of the back.

This is why you should try extra hard to condition your core, because then your back will ache a lot less since your core is doing most of the work, which is how it should be. One thing you want to be mindful of when you’re ice skating is to make sure your skates are laced up extra tight. This helps prevent sore ankles and arches, from straining to keep your body upright.

It provides extra support to these areas, and helps your body balance without trying so hard, so you can focus more on going faster and staying up than on balancing your feet on the ice.

What’s hilarious is when you get out on the ice during an open skate, you see children that are like 4 years old whizzing past everyone, doing fancy moves, and basically making everyone else look bad! Kids truly have no fear, we could definitely learn a thing or two from them as adults

Boy, I’m telling you, this is one of the worst cases of cabin fever I’ve had in quite a long time. Even though I know my husband and I can’t afford it right now, I’m so tempted to just book us a quick little trip to Mexico, I keep getting emails on these great deals to sunny, warm destinations where I could actually not be bundled up and be comfortable, how tempting!

Not only that, I just want to get outdoors, run, stretch my legs, and get physical. Maybe do some things out in the garden and get my hands dirty again, smell the earth and the new greenery growing and hear the birds chirp again. Oh yeah, and see that yellow disk in the sky that’s been so shy as of late.

If you have spring fever, then you can do a few things to try to get over it. You can go on a vacation where you can work out and jog outside if you want, lay on the beaches and hike in the warmth and be the physical creature that you want to be, or maybe you can pay to go in a sauna. We love our infrared sauna, it really helps us feel like we’re escaping the cold in the middle of the winter when you feel like you’re one big popsicle all day long.

Or, you can maybe get some great workout dvd’s that show tropical, outdoor scenery. It sounds kind of ridiculous and trivial, but I love watching the Gilad shows Total Body Sculpt and his other one too, because they are exercising outdoors in Hawaii. It sort of makes me feel like I’m there with them, and the moves they do certainly make me feel like I’m sweating it out on the beach.

Cabin fever is bound to take hold when you live in an area, like I do, where it snows a lot in the winter and the temperatures are cold enough to keep you indoors most of the time. However, if you choose the right outlets, you can escape the winter doldrums in your own home!

I saw an interesting headline that I just had to watch the other day on the news that said that exercise is actually not beneficial for some people in regards to helping them maintain or lose weight. Some people can exercise every day, and still look like they have never exercised, and the study that was originated in the UK wanted to look at why about 4 out of 5 people who work out do not really see any type of weight loss benefit or weight maintenance benefit from doing so.

The study though, I think puts the more important aspects of exercise aside, like how it makes you feel, how it gives you more energy, conditions your heart and lungs, and has a multitude of other health benefits, not just as use for losing weight or maintaining a certain said weight.

For example, my hour on the elliptical machine could be wasted if my only goal were to burn calories and control my weight if I belonged to this class of people who do not benefit that way from exercise, however, I do receive that benefit form exercise, I know I do because I am leaner and thinner when I am consistently exercising. Of course, I have to watch my diet as well, but still.

These 1 out of 5 people are apparently missing some piece of genetic makeup that allows them to aerobically burn off calories and oxygen, which is the key component to burning off calories and controlling your weight via cardio exercise. Because of this, they do not garner those benefits, but that does not mean they aren’t garnering many other benefits such as mood enhancement, cardiovascular conditioning and heart health, circulatory health, and even digestive system health benefits by following a regular exercise routine.

Exercising releases endorphins, it lowers stress hormones like cortisol in the body, and it conditions our bodies to be strong and more lean and also to be conditioned to go through strenuous, physically taxing situations. That right there is enough in itself to make you want to exercise, at least it is for me!

I was just listlessly surfing the net, putting off my boring duties that I have to do every week like laundry, writing, doing bills, going to the grocery store, yada yada, and I came across a video of Jennifer Aniston’s most recent run in with the paparazzi. She was in one of her favorite places, Mexico, Cabo San lucas to be specific, at a private resort, when the annoying and ever intrusive paparazzo started to intrude, off the beach if you can believe it, in a boat.

The resort employees, to protect Jen’s privacy, which she deserves, actually held up mirrors to reflect the sun into their paparazzo’s lenses and to distract them, and they also had jet skis splashing water into their boat and generally, being an annoyance, like they are themselves, giving them a taste of their own medicine.

Jennifer was being interviewed while the ruckus was going on, and her composure amazed me. So did her ever so sculpted bikini beach bod, although it was covered up in a white tank top and sarong, but she just always looks so gosh darn toned! What is her secret to her toned, sleek physique anyways? A lot of women want to know her secret, and she’s very open that she really eats right, works out and takes care of herself.

She’s not one of these stars that acts like she never does anything to a achieve her body, that she just eats whatever she wants and doesn’t work out. That’s so annoying when thin, ripped starlets claim that. Because you know it’s probably not true.

Jennifer reportedly does a lot of yoga, and strenuous yoga, to keep her sleek arms and torso, and toned legs and thighs. She is short, so the yoga definitely helps to elongate her and make her look longer and leaner, which is something that all of us 5 foot five and under girls could use, including me, I’m five foot four.

Ms. Aniston is also known to be a runner, being snapped by paparazzi taking jogs around neighborhoods, and who knows, she may even run indoors on a treadmill as well. Running outdoors is notably better because you have more resistance and you enjoy the scenery and are getting outdoors of course! But, you can adjust your settings on a treadmill to make it more like outdoor running.

She’s a great example of taking care of yourself. Her skin glows and her hair always looks perfectly healthy, and her skin just always has a naturally healthy glow to it, a sure sign that someone eats right and works out, and she just seems to get better with age, which I think is just awesome.

Part of what I read about when I was reading about the PACE method of exercise, where you do shorter bursts of very intense physical activity to burn fat and help condition your heart and lungs, all in twenty minutes or under per day, I read about how exercises called Hindu Squats and Hindu Push Ups were supposed to be excellent for strength training and burning fat very quickly while conditioning the lungs and the heart.

So of course I went out and googled them, and came up with a great instructional video of a man doing both exercises for several in a row. The squats were fast squats that were just traditional squats where it looks like you are going to sit down in a chair, and the push ups were a bit more challenging, because they were a combination of the chataranga in yoga, which is one of my hardest yoga moves since you use a lot of upper body strength for them, but yet you should be trying to force it to happen, since yoga is about gentleness and just “letting things happen” instead of forcing them to happen within your body.

The Hindu push up goes like this, and I’ll try to explain it as best I can without showing a picture. But if you want to see a video of a guy doing these exercises, the best one I found was here on Youtube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v65uF0J0jDs.

I guess you start off in sort of a downward dog position, if you are familiar with yoga, but you have your feet spread wide apart as a solid base. You then lower yourself down into a sort of upward facing dog position, where you are looking up toward the sky, arching your neck backwards (be careful not to over do it), and then you wave back up to the starting position, which is downward dog again, so you end up again in an inverted triangle position.

These are great upper body strength builders, and they are also great for exerting yourself quickly and building up your lung capacity. Of course, they also look slightly erotic, just to let you know, so they might be something you only want to do in the privacy of your own home, but that’s just modest ol’ me talking

I came across an interesting method of exercise, believe it or not, through a promotional ad that I got through my email. I was going to delete it, but I figured I’d open it up and see what it was all about and if it was worth any investment of time or even money if it sounded like something I might want to try. I have to admit, I’m very curious about it since it involves something that I’ve come to believe has been incredibly effective for me changing my body composition, and that is short, intense bursts of exercise.

I told you before that my husband lost around 30 pounds and I lost around 15 pounds when we started doing the short bursts of activity that were extremely intense in nature but never lasted more than 25 minutes or so, rather than slogging away at the gym for an hour or more, and what really clinched it for me was the fact that the short bursts of intense exercise that lasted about 20-25 minutes really didn’t seem to put my appetite into overdrive, like long bouts of cardio can sometimes do to me.

I remember leaving the gym at work after long periods of cardio on the elliptical (40 minutes or more) and feeling totally famished, and wanting to eat a house. Of course, I still believe that the elliptical is an amazingly effective piece of equipment, but with this new theory, you can switch between the elliptical and other intense movements for less time and still burn tons of fat.

I guess that the PACE method is very similar in thought process to this, and research has shown that people who use this PACE method of working out actually burned more fat off their bodies than those who did long cardio. Although an important point is that the long cardio group burned more calories, but not as much fat. I think the fat burning piece is more important personally, because you can always replace calories, but fat is harder to burn off.

The PACE method is never supposed to last more than 20 minutes per day, and can supposedly be as short as 12 minutes with amazing results. Does it really work? I don’t know, I haven’t tried it, but I do believe the basic theory behind it because I have seen this similar theory at work in my own experience.

Some exercises are just inherently really hard on your ankles. And if you happen to have somewhat weak ankles like I do (I’m one of those people who could just be walking along and suddenly their ankle just caves out or in on them), they really do require a little bit of extra attention and support if you are doing certain types of exercises.

One type of exercise that I have found is especially rough on my poor lil’ ankles are plyometrics. Why? Well, because you are usually forcing all of your body weight one way or another, and often times you are using the strength of your feet and legs to do that. Your ankles have to bear all that weight in a completely different way, which makes it hard for them to compensate.

You can try wrapping them in ace bandages if you think that may help, but really just being mindful of how hard you are landing, or perhaps just minimizing these types of exercises until your ankles get used to them, and only doing them in small doses is the best way to handle it I’ve found.

When your ankles get really messed up from a certain type of exercise, it many times can feel like you have swollen, or sprained ankles, and that can be painful and somewhat limiting in your next subsequent workouts if you are continuing to work out after you injure yourself.

My last problem with my ankles was when I did my first really hard plyometrics moves and it felt like my ankles were sprained for a quite a few days, so it took me a while to recover. I learned that I could only do them a little at a time, and I had to be extremely careful at how I was landing on them and made sure I was landing as softly as I could – like a cat!

If ever there were proof that exercising, and doing it on a regular basis instead of just when you feel like it or when you feel you have time to work it into your schedule, in other words, exercise as a way of life and a habit, like brushing your teeth in the morning, is vital to those of us that may suffer stress frequently in our lives.

Or if we have frequent stress because of our jobs or our livelihoods, it is vital that to maintain not only a working life without debilitating levels of stress and total lack of focus and ingenuity thanks to that stress, that we work out.

When I say I’m going to work out some stress and angst at the gym at my place of work, I mean it quite literally. I feel the stress melting off as I pedal faster on that recumbent bike or “run” faster on that elliptical machine or treadmill. When I’m stressed out, one of my most common side effects is shortness of breath. I feel like someone is standing on my chest and it becomes much harder to breathe at a normal pace when I’m under a lot of duress, and when I’m done working out, I literally feel like that weight has been lifted off of my chest.

Working out to prevent stress does seem counterintuitive, because you are actually putting stress on your body when you work out, but just sitting still actually places more stress on the body when you are filled with anxiety since you are not channeling that nervous energy elsewhere, it literally makes you feel like you’re going to implode.

I’ve experienced this myself so many hundreds of times that I know it’s real. I can see the difference in the way I look – healthier, a better color, more well rested, more spry, then when I am not working out, I look puffier, more tired, more haggard, and my skin doesn’t look so good – all biproducts of stress and a lifestyle that is full of anxiety.

Working out is truly a lifesaver for me when it comes to stress. It unwinds that telltale tightness in my body like nothing else, and I know that what I’m doing is good for my body because I feel myself growing stronger every day that I work out. It’s a great gift that we’ve been given, so I encourage everyone to take advantage of it – feel alive, and stress free!