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.

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!

It’s officially coming near the end of the first month of the new year (new decade, that is!), and I think that it’s time for us all to evaluate how we are coming thus far in our new year’s promises to ourselves when it comes to fitness. Even if you don’t believe in New Year’s Resolutions, per se, you still have in the back of your head where you want to head in various areas of your life for the new year, and you wonder what the new year will bring for your personally, professionally and opportunity wise.

For me, I can tell you that my new year has started off right when it comes to working out. I promised myself that I would get the weight off that I put on over the holidays, indulging in the most delicious foods several days a week, that I normally only allow myself every once in a blue moon when I’m being my normal self and disciplining my eating habits. The good thing about doing this and only having the “bad” foods that taste oh so good only every once in a while as a treat is that you REALLY appreciate it all that much more when you actually indulge in that deli steak sandwich and french fries, ice cream, or big slice of pizza. You dig?

Anyways, I knew that the new year would be much more easy for me to work out regularly because one variable, the fact that the gym at work was closed for renovations for over a month, reopened at the beginning of January, allowing for me to get my much needed workouts in during the day instead of having to wait until I got home at 6:30 in the evening when it was dark outside, and the last thing I wanted to do was jump into a workout DVD, but the first thing I wanted to do was get dinner on.

Also, I think that as I have aged (I’m now 35 years old), and as my body has changed noticeably, I realize how important it is to keep up the working out and the eating right, because I realize that your body can change for the worse so much more easily with age. You have decreased secretion of the youth hormone which gives you more lean muscle mass and less body fat, and you have a variety of other factors and degeneration of healthy cells working against you, so it’s all that much more important to get your exercise in regularly.

So far, so good for me this year as far as my fitness level and goals go. How about you!?

I love working out, I really do. So when I’m down for the count with a cold, it sort of starts to make me a bit stir crazy. Like right now. I’ve had a pretty bad cold ever since we came back from Las Vegas for our wedding. We had a lot of people going with us, so it was a little bit stressful, but all in all it wasn’t too bad, so I do think that my immunity levels were down, and I caught some sort of nasty bug either in Las Vegas (who’d doubt it with the millions of people milling around and the dirty slot machines that you are constantly touching) or possibly on the plane, which wouldn’t be doubtful either since they use recycled air for you to breathe.

I have not worked out now for about two full weeks, and it’s starting to make me a little nuts, however as soon as I even physically exert myself even a little bit, I have so much phlegm in my lungs that I start to wheeze since I also happen to have asthma. I’ve been using that Mucinex stuff, but that can only go so far when your body is constantly producing phlegm to protect your lungs from the foreign invaders constantly.

In these situations, all you can really do is wait, especially since many times when you are sick you don’t really feel well enough to actually eat the right foods, or to eat enough food to be considered fuel for your body. I think I’ve been on ten consecutive days of chicken noodle soup, some veggies and some grilled cheese sandwiches here and there, and I’m not consuming enough calories per day or nutrients to be burned through in a rigorous workout, which is the type that I like to do.

I can only imagine how much pain I’m going to be in when I finally do venture down in the basement or downstairs on the tv to do a workout video, I probably won’t be able to move a muscle the next day because I’ve probably already gotten somewhat out of shape just from not working out or really exerting myself too much for the past several days. It’s amazing how fast you lose muscle tone, but I must say that due to muscle memory and the amazing reparative powers of the human body, it does return easily too.

We’ve all had those moments where we feel like we’re going to literally explode if we don’t get some much needed aggression out.  I just had a moment like that. Actually, while I’m being honest, it was a minor tiff that my fiance and I got into.  I won’t even go into what it was over, but let’s just say that it wasn’t worth the level of fighting we got into, me specifically, I think because I was just stressed out about the wedding and all kinds of other stuff that has come up recently and it all just seems like too much to handle.  I literally felt like I was going to explode, or cry, or do both.

These are the moments when you definitely need to work out, and work out hard, and aerobically. Weight lifting just won’t do by itself.  It’s those times when you need butt busting aerobics combined with some tough muscle stuff too, and the combination is exactly the right cocktail for getting pent up frustration and aggression out of your system.  Multiple studies have shown that exercise helps to release calming, pleasure – based chemicals in your blood stream, and to reduce that nasty hormone called cortisol which is responsible for most mood explosions and many other forms of anxiety and exhibit themselves in a not so attractive fashion.

When I’m feeling that way, the only thing that will do is a hard workout. Unfortunately, things like yoga, which are otherwise great for stress reduction, just don’t work for me that way. I like to use yoga one or two days a week specifically for reducing stress, but it’s usually done when I”m not on the verge of tears of feeling I’m about to rip someone’s head off, so it’s a cumulative, preventive effect that’s used as more of a medicine along the way instead of a remedy after the problem occurs.

I’m very much undecided on this question, whether you should continue to work out with intensity during those periods when you are really trying to lose weight.  I know that you should always at least moderately exercise when losing weight, but I question whether doing those back breaking, high intensity cardio workouts when you are on a serious calorie cutting phase of losing weight is a good idea.  Here’s why.

When you work out very intensely, it can really make you ravenous.  I’ve noticed sometimes that working out to vigorously actually sabotages my weight loss goals at times, because it makes me so hungry because it burned so many calories, that I end up almost bingeing out of desperation to regain those calories back and stabilize my blood sugar so that I actually feel human again.

It’s ok if you have the self control of an ox, but for those of us that can’t stand feeling hungry and shaky, working out too hard may be the kiss of death for our calorie restriction goals. Also, not to mention, you don’t want to be burning off everything that you ate thus far that day, or putting too much stress on the body, which often results in a fight or flight response and the body just shuts down .

You also don’t want to over do and get so sore that you can’t work out for the several days afterward.  I think that during weight loss, moderate aerobic activity is good, but there should probably be more focus on the muscle workouts, so that you can not burn so many crazy calories but still be toning up and sculpting, as well as creating lean muscle mass that helps to burn off excess fat and calories when your body is where you want it to be again, weight wise.

If you search in any body building site or blog, body builders, who are professionals at manipulating their bodies muscle and weight, will tell you that you shouldn’t over do it on the cardio during weight loss phase, it’s more of something you should do when you’re at your ideal weight and you’re just trying to maintain that weight from here on out.  They say that it does tend to sabotage calorie cutting too often by over doing it on increasing the appetite.

Some people use the excuse that they don’t exercise because they don’t like how it increases their appetite.  Well, that’s a shame, because even though exercising does tend to increase your appetite somewhat, there are so many other numerous health benefits that you are missing out on by skipping the exercise that you might as well cash in some of the benefits it offers for longevity, depression and anxiety relief, and the multiple health benefits it offers for so many other aspects and facets of a happy, healthy existence.

I also happen to believe that while exercise may very temporarily increase your appetite in the short term, it may actually help to dramatically decrease and control and regulate your appetite on more of a constant basis when you start doing it more often.  An example is if you’ve been running and weight lifting for several months, you should start to notice that your constant appetite simply isn’t what it used to be, and you actually may even start craving more of the “right” foods versus the wrong ones, because exercise triggers something mentally that makes you want to eat better, at least for me, on both a conscious and subconscious level.

For that reason alone, along with the numerous other benefits that exercise offers for your life, like increased energy levels, increased mood elevation, and eventual appetite control, exercise is truly still one of the best things you can do for your mind, body and soul.

There are little ways that you can keep your metabolism burning on high all day. One of them is frequently getting up and doing short bursts of activity, like jumping jacks or a quick sprint around the house for example.

You can also eat small amounts of food throughout the day, which helps keep the metabolism from stalling and going into hibernation.  Instead, this keeps the metabolism going all day long, and makes it so that you are constantly burning off calories all day since your body always has something that it is working on and something that is fueling it. Of course, this doesn’t mean to just eat junk all day long, oh no, far from it.

But fueling your body all day on things like almonds, light popcorn, fruits that are high in fiber, veggies, and whole grains that really are whole grains and not just white flour products disguised as whole grain that are only partially whole grain, are a surefire way to keep your metabolism revved up.  You can’t overeat though, you need to eat just to the point of satiety, and let yourself draw back, for maximum effectiveness.  Another way to keep the burn going all day long is to walk around with weights around your ankles and/or your arms.

This actually puts a bit more stress on the body, and forces your body to adapt to the extra weight it is carrying around.  This of course won’t, in and of itself, give you bulging biceps or majestic looking triceps or anything like that, but it will definitely help your body to force itself to adapt to more of a burden by forcing more calorie burn into your daily routine.

It’s sort of like the concept of wearing ankle and wrist weights during a workout, you are just adding another facet of difficulty to the workout, which inches up the intensity and breaks the calorie burning barriers.  You’ve seen those workouts where it says for beginners to not use any weights or in other words just use the resistance of their body weight, and then to move up in the world, you have to start using weights, and from there you can use heavier and heavier weights to keep breaking the resistance point.

This is the same idea, only it is putting a slight bit more pressure on your body to adapt to normal, every day activities, which makes them into a calorie burning activity.

There are a lot of things that regular exercise helps me with, but one of them, which is clearly related to it’s ability to dissipate anxiety and stress, is the ability to help me to breathe much easier and not be short of breath of breathing irregularly. I actually have asthma, and so my breathing is really hinged on my levels of anxiety.  For example, if I feel really stressed out or have a lot of anxiety about an upcoming event, I tend to feel like I have large rubber bands around my lungs. It feels like I can’t properly inflate and deflate my lungs.  It’s like I can’t get a normal breathing rhythm going or something.

When I’m working out regularly, I notice this breathing difficulty less and less.  I can breathe much more easily and evenly, and I don’t have as much of that feeling of having a vice around my lungs when I’m at rest.  I can feel this way, short of breath, right up until I work out, and working out almost instantly makes it go away. I think that a lot of people with asthma would benefit immensely from working out, especially from cardio and circuit training.

Too many people with breathing problems tend to think that exercise actually makes it worse, but in fact, inactivity over time makes it harder for your lungs to adjust to even the slightest bit of stress (meaning physical activity).  There are of course some people that are not recommended to exercise very much by their doctors, but these are people who are diagnosed with very serious diseases, and it’s rare that a doctor would actually want someone to consistenly limit their physical activity.

Exercise is so beneficial for your breathing, most people don’t realize it until they’ve been working out for a while that it actually helps you breathe much easier.  In fact, over time, it can help you to eradicate and/or dramatically lessen common breathing problems like asthma.  I’ve been working out since I was like 14 years old, and I could never imagine not doing it at all or not making it a part of my lifestyle.  It’s so vital to not only your breathing but your mental and physical well being that it should be like brushing your teeth every day.