I’m in love with a new buzzword in today’s modern exercise and workouts, and it’s called plyometrics. Plyometrics are the employment of fast, quick and sudden bursts that involve a lot of muscle power and a lot of stamina. A good example of a plyometric exercise is the power lunge plank, where you start out in the infamous yoga plank position, which is where you are basically positioning yourself in a push up position, and then you suddenly blast your feet backwards, lunging back like a rabbit would do (of course, only rabbits go forward when they do it), and then blasting your feet back up forward.

You use a lot of power and a lot of control when you do a plyometric move, which is why athletes use these types of moves when they are training to improve their speed and their endurance for their sport. They are an excellent exercise to integrate with your cardio blast workouts, as they continue to increase your breath rate and they also increase strength and stamina simultaneously. They also build muscle very quickly, as I have found out in the few exercise DVD’s I do on a regular basis which happen to include some plyometric moves, which attests to their popularity in the more modern exercise regimens.

What I particularly love about integrating plyometrics into my fitness routine is the power and grace that it seems to give you. It adds to your physical prowess by simultaneously increasing your muscle strength and your cardio endurance, making you feel very powerful, like you could really defend yourself if you had to. I also love the way it tones up problems areas very quickly by targeting fatty areas and also by giving your body a furnace blast of calorie burning power that you don’t get very often with many other types of regular exercise.

For this reason, it’s my opinion that plyometrics should be worked into any exercise routine to add that extra level of difficulty and also to add to the cross training aspect of any routine by incorporating moves that force the body to blast itself, willingly or unwillingly, in different directions. You do have to be careful though, you will need to make sure you do ankle rotations before hand as plyometrics are rough on the ankles, particularly for people who have a weak spot there to begin with.

Yes, when I say “staying regular” I mean the frequency and regularity with which you have an elimination of waste (when you go to the bathroom) is greater when you exercise vs. when you are a couch potato. Let’s talk about the reasons why, if you suffer from chronic or even periodic constipation, if you don’t already work out regularly then you should start. I’ve had problems on and off with constipation my whole life. Actually, my mom even said I was full of colic (gas) and was constipated a lot as a baby and a young child, so it must just be a weaker part of my physiology for some reason.

When I was younger, I started working out, I’d say at about the age of fifteen or sixteen years old, and I knew at that young of an age how much moving around and getting up and going benefitted my digestive system. If you think about it, it does make sense that moving around and being active helps to keep things moving. If you sit still a lot, you have a tendency to make things more stagnant within your body, including your intestines and your colon.

Inactive people actually suffer worse than active people with constipation and bowel irregularity because they are so sedentary, and they don’t give their organs a chance to be “massaged” internally by the movement on the outside, if that makes much sense.

In fact, if you visit any nursing home, they are always stocked with enemas and laxatives because a lot of nursing home patients live a very sedentary lifestyle and their bowels actually need to be stimulated in order for them to have a bowel movement. Couple that with the fact that as we age, our bowels don’t work as efficiently and we often need a nudge toward proper digestion and elimination via laxatives and enemas, just to have every day, normal bowel movements.

I already suffer from occasional constipation, so I can’t imagine what it would be like for me if I couldn’t work out intensely like I sometimes do. Heck, I don’t know how some people live a consistently sedentary life without being bound up all the time!

Well, it turns out that all this time I’ve argued with my boyfriend about static stretching (stretching in place and holding it for a period) being good for you before a cardio workout or something where you muscles are going to be moving and could build up lactic acid may be wrong.

I’ve stretched this way for years and never really had any issues with it, but some fitness experts say that you should not do static stretches before a workout, but instead warm up the body and get the blood pumping and blood going to the muscles by running in place or doing something like jumping jacks or other low impact but aerobic workouts before you do the “real workout”.

I learned this when we started doing the Jillian Michaels workouts and I noticed that we only do the static stretching when we cool down on her workout DVD’s. I wondered if this was the better way to do it, and discovered that I wasn’t really having a lot of muscle pulls or soreness so it must be ok to hold the static stretches for later after you’ve worked out your muscles. How does everyone else do it? If anyone has any knowledge they can share on this subject, please post it here. I’m still a little confused and up in the air about this whole stretching thing before your workout . I still feel like static stretching works for me and helps me prevent injury.

There’s a new study that may not make those of us that are hardcore workout manics too happy. But then again, it makes people like me, who like to exercise moderately, pretty darn happy. A new study is suggesting that working out too many hours in the gym or wherever else it is that you happen to pump iron and do your cardio, may actually make it harder for you to lose weight. The reason is that your body starts overcompensating for too many calories burned and over stressing the body, and it demands more calorie intake, which consequently sort of negates the impact that your exercise if having on your body since it makes you consume more calories.

While the study still concludes, as it should, that moderate working out helps in long term weight loss and healthy weight maintenance, it is important not to go overboard when you are actually trying to lose significant amounts of weight, because your body will start to become more hungry. There has been a lot of conflicting information on whether working out increases or decreases your appetite, but truthfully, it depends on the day for me. Some days I’ll eat just as much working out as I would if I hadn’t really been active at all, and some days I seem ravenous all day no matter what I’ve done, if I’ve worked out or not.

Working out is still extremely important because it does increase lean muscle mass, define the body, and more importantly, it still is vital to maintaining respiratory and cardio health for healthy lungs and other organs that are vital to us staying alive and well, including our heart. Not to mention exercise’s powerful impact on our mental well being. This can be proven by taking a look at the weeks you work out and your mood vs the weeks you don’t work out and your mood. You’ll be able to see a difference right away in all your cognitive functions, and there is even a lot of evidence that it can ward off aging of the brain and the body.

I remember reading a curious fact about some body builders, and even some models, who use diuretics a few days before photo shoots simply so they can lose a little bit of water weight which theoretically will allow their muscles to show through a little more. However, there are some serious drawbacks to using diuretics when you’re not on them for a medically legitimate and necessary reason.

First off, you can make yourself more prone to an electrolyte imbalance by using diuretics improperly. This is because you can become dehydrated. That’s what diuretics do. They make you pee constantly, basically peeing away a lot of the water and other fluids that you drink, which reduces the amount of water your cells hold, and dehydrates you. Also, diuretics actually make you more thirsty because you feel dehydrated all the time, which makes you drink more water and fluids, which consequently makes you go to the bathroom more. It can even cause diarrhea in some people, which is obviously never pleasant.

Because diuretics literally dry you out, they can give you massive pounding headaches. I’ve tried them a few times in minor over the counter PMS remedies like Pamprin and Aquaban so that I can reduce the amount of water weight I gain with my period, and I’ve never had a good experience with these over the counter diuretics. I almost always get a really bad headache, and I feel like I constantly have dry mouth and want to drink water.

So, do diuretics actually help you to show your muscles off a little more? Well, that’s debatable, and if they do, then the result is very temporary, and you are risking throwing yourself in to dehydration as well as giving yourself an electrolyte imbalance which can lead to fatigue, unclear, foggy thinking and feeling in general like you want to sleep all day. Oh, they also can speed up your heart rate because of the dehydration aspect. My advice?  Instead try what I feel is the best muscle building protein powder.

Sports are a huge pastime here in the US, but they should be encouraged even more so with the obesity epidemic and problems with kids already becoming obese in their early childhood, a frightening trend in the quest to bring up healthier kids who usually grow into healthier adults. All you have to do is look at the immense popularity of shows like Biggest Loser and Celebrity Fit Club to see that obesity and weightloss are obsessions in themselves with Americans, along with the compulsive need to overeat and the encouragement of gargantuan food portions and lack of physical activity . I know, it all seems like it’s an oxymoron, but it’s true.

Many parents with kids enrolled in sports are concerned about their kids safety and welfare, and concerned that they may get a sports injury, and rightly so. There are thousands of kids sports injuries a year, and parents struggle with that. But you gotta let kids play, and you gotta let them participate in competitive sports, as it teaches them valuable life lessons and it also gives them the physical activity they may be lacking otherwise since computers and video games and TV watching have become so prevalent with kids these days. So, what can you do to help prevent these injuries, and also prevent, God forbid, something even worse happening to your child when they are involved in competitive organized sports?

Well, one thing you can do is get yearly physicals for your kids. This can help to identify any pre existing health issues that might prevent them from safely performing a sport. For example, if your child happens to have a heart abnormality, if they are involved in a sport, that could technically be very dangerous for them depending on what the problem is, so you should know about any potentially life threatening issues. This is usually very rare in children, but sometimes kids do have congenital health problems that don’t make themselves known until something bad happens while performing a sport.

Keep your kids active all year round. Their risk of injury greatly increases if they suddenly jump into a sport after being fairly inactive all winter long. The reason is that the muscles aren’t conditioned for certain types of movement, and they must be eased into it. When they aren’t, they can greatly increase odds of getting injured, torn, or pulled. Also, encourage your kids to play fairly and without unnecessary roughness.

If your kid is a good sport, and they play fair, then their likelihood of getting into some nasty collisions decreases. Lastly, encourage your child to stretch their muscles or ease into warming up before they perform their sport. This reduces likelihood of pulls because the muscles are already stretched, warmed up and ready for action.

We’ve all heard that exercising helps us to lower our cortisol levels, but what most people don’t know is that DURING exercise, your cortisol levels are actually elevated. This just is a way of your body helping to compensate and feed your muscles more to accomodate the strain on them. Cortisol is called the “stress hormone” because it occurs when you are either extremely emotionally distressed, but it also rises when your body is taxed physically. Excess cortisol levels are a bad thing. They lead to a chain reaction that eventually results in excess fat storage in the least desirable areas, not the least of which is the belly area.

Belly fat is especially dangerous because it has been linked with heart problems and may even be linked to other ailments such as cancer, but the jury is still sort of out on that. The reason? Because excess visceral fat, which is the fat that is found stored between your organs because it has no where else to go, and this causes undue stress on the organs, and hence on the heart, which can lead to heart disease and other heart strains.

Some people even advocate against very intense physical workouts because they say that they dangerously elevate cortisol levels. I’m not sure I agree with this, but I am one who is also against extremely taxing exercise just because I don’t think the body is meant to withstand this kind of beating up over and over again. Moderate exercise, however, where you are challenging yourself to the next level constantly is a good thing and actually has been shown to lower your overall cortisol hormone levels in the body over time when the body is at rest, which is key to healthy weight maintenance and overall health and wellness to boot.

I think short bursts of intensity are best, as they temporarily raise the cortisol levels, and then bring them back down when you are doing the less intense portions of the circuit training workout. This is my favorite regiment because you get the benefits of keeping the heart rate up the whole time without physcially pummeling your body the entire workout and fatiguing it beyond tired as well as raising the cortisol levels irrebersibly.