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!

We all know that a couch potato existence is no good for our health and overall longevity, but now there is even more evidence that shows that sitting for long periods of time, even if you do habitually work out, is not good for your health, and triggers dangerous chain reactions in your body that send signals to your heart and other major organs to stop working as effectively.

Your blood sugar and blood pressure may also be affected. This is for all people with desk jobs by the way, even if you do happen to work out periodically, since most people with desk jobs happen to sit for long periods of four or more hours at a time.

Think about how bad this is for your circulation. At least try to get up every hour on the hour and take a brisk walk to get those heart and circulatory functions going again, like you’re alive instead of a person on the brink of death, which is basically what sitting for long periods of time tells your body to do. It goes into a sort of conservation mode, so it slows the metabolism and other key functions that help you to maintain your health and keep your body running optimally.

I have had a desk job now for ten years. It was really hard for me to get used to this lifestyle because up until I started this job in my twenties, I was used to having very active jobs, like waitressing and restaurant work where you were constantly running your tookus off to get people things, set tables, run and grab food, make food, you name it, for customers.

When I started such an inactive job, I was really fidgety and found that I was exhausted at night on the way home, even though I had not physically exerted myself at all during the day. Sitting all day or the majority of the day has the opposite expected effect on your energy. It actually takes it away. You’d think you were “conserving” your energy by sitting all day, but what really happens is counterintuitive, you become more tired and less energetic and focused.

Sitting really is a no win situation. Sure, it’s something we all crave and like to do, but if you make this sedentary position the majority of your life, then you may pay the health price for it dearly.

I am a huge believer in the therapeutic benefits of massage. Not only massage, but touch in general. I believe that touch, particularly relaxing, premeditated, specific manipulation of the muscles type of touching, such as is done in professional massage, is extremely beneficial to the human body. Massage is especially good for working out muscles in people that exercise and may push them a little too hard one way or another.

I personally try to get one at least once a month, and I actually belong to a membership where I get one once a month for a fixed cost, and I love it In general, I get excellent massages and excellent service from this place of business, and have nothing but nice things to say about the establishment.

Of course, they can’t help all the massage therapists that you get, and of course, you may happen to get one once that just isn’t your style or generally does a really crappy job at manipulating your muscles and at relaxing you, which is the whole point of it. Their style may fit someone else’s taste, but it may not be for you at all. I had one such massage the other day. I booked double appointments, one for me and one for my sister, who was in from out of town.

Since I was booking them fairly last minute, and booking for two people, I wasn’t able to get any of the girls that I normally use. I actually, for the first time there, was assigned to a male therapist. Now, nothing against guys, I’m sure there are tons of very talented male massage therapists out there, but this massage experience was not good. First of all, he started the massage late, and also let me out early, ripping me off of about ten total minutes, which I wasn’t happy about since I like to enjoy every last second of my experience.

Second, he used way too much lubricant to massage. I’ve never had someone pause so much to re-oil or cream their hands. This made it so there wasn’t enough grip, and it ended up being more like one of those generic swedish massages where you don’t even feel like you’re getting any therapeutic benefit from it because it doesn’t cause any sort of releasing of pressure, which can border on pain and pleasure, it’s just a constant, boring, light massage.

I was glad that my sister got a therapist that worked for her, but I had to admit, a little peeved that mine was a total waste of time. For once I actually tipped the minimum, and I’m usually a really generous tipper, I just felt like he didn’t really try and he also cut my experience short, so I felt that deserved less “recognition” in the form of a gratuity.