Whether you are a seasoned and experienced runner, or you are just beginning to enjoy the fruits of this incredibly addictive sport and pastime, you need to train if you are going to run a marathon.  There are several marathons happening during the year. They occur in major cities and smaller cities. They can be hundreds of runners, or literally thousands of runners.

The Chicago marathon usually has about 40,000 participants believe it or not. These are not all seasoned runners either. Often times they are people who have signed up for the challenge and camradery of it all. They like to see what their body can do.

But if you are serious about running a marathon without crippling yourself for a couple days with soreness, or being too winded to keep going, then you should really start on some sort of training program. Often times training to run a marathon starts off with slow joffing and lighter distances, so that the body can slowly adjust itself to running.

Experts usually recommend you start off slowly so you don’t injure yourself or go too far and get so sore that you can’t even get out of bed the next morning, making training almost impossible.

A lot of marathon runners say that it’s more the mind than the body that gets you through the toughest parts of a marathon. If you’re strong of mind and heart, then you can push yourself mentally and physically into the next stratosphere of distance, or speed even.

Training for a marathon helps you train both your mind and body. It’s also all about building confidence in yourself that you can indeed do this thing that may have seemed totally daunting or nearly impossible for you at first.  Once you see what your body is capable of doing, it’s easier to talk your mind in to sticking with it.

I’ve used this theory on myself a lot when I’m doing a simple jog down the road in my outdoor jogs. I put a challenge out there for myself. I make landmarks for myself. I’ll say, ok if I can make it all the way down to such and such road, then I’m even better than I was yesterday. Or if I can run as fast as I can for five full minutes, then I’m really building my speed and stamina.

Things like that really help push you to the next level .But you should never write checks that your body can’t cash. Make sure you are doing things that aren’t going to jeopardize your body for the next week or two. You want discomfort, but you don’t want to be doubled over in pain or simply unable to continue on a physical level. That is just too much.

Take it slow, but make little goals for yourself every day.  As long as you keep doing that, then you will be built up to a full on marathoner in no time.

One thing that I’ll admit I don’t work out often enough, is my back muscles. I don’t do it as often as I should because quite frankly, I don’t think about my lower back needing to “look good” so I often forget and instead do things that are really major problems for me, like my outer and inner thighs and upper arms.

Hey, a woman’s got priorities, and while I love to feel great and be healthy, I’m also very cognizant that the primary reason I started working out was because I wanted to shape and whittle my body into something that appeared sexy and desirable.

One back exercise that I’ve done before, which always makes a difference in my lower back strength are Supermans.  These are literally where you lay with your belly on the floor, and your arms outstretched like you are flying like Superman.

You then extend one arm and then extend the opposite leg at the same time, and keep it up in the air for a few seconds. This actually does a couple things, not just your back. It helps tone the backs of the legs, including the hamstrings.  It also helps to tone the butt, although this is very secondary.

Strengthening and sculpting your lower back helps you in a few ways, and it’s not all just about strength. It can make your back look a lot more attractive, more sculpted, especially when you are wearing a low scoop neck dress. It also helps you to strengthen this delicate part of the back which rarely gets worked out.

This helps to strengthen your belly, and also helps you to improve your posture. Improving your posture without even thinking about it is paramount in how the body looks when you are standing. It can make you look much leaner and taller.

This is probably a main reason why celebrity trainers have their clients do this particular exercise. It can help you to stand taller, and look more graceful, more balanced, and a lot more toned and lean.

Let’s face it, these celebrities aren’t paying their trainers just to help them get healthy and feel better - they wants (and need) to look HOT and screen ready!

I read one of the best books I’ve read in a long time about the body’s natural healing abilities, and natural ways to help keep your body healthy, energetic, and vital well into your older age. It’s by a well known holistic doctor, Dr. Andrew Weil, and it was actually written several years ago.

It will still be a relevant book many years from now even though, in my humble opinion. It’s called “Spontaneous Healing”. It is not only an eye opening and educational read about how to keep your body healthy using nature, but it is also an incredibly entertaining and well written book for a man who is not by trade a writer. 

One of the many useful tips he gave was one that had to do with energizing the body and clearing the natural breathing passageways by doing a very simple breathing exercise that you can do at home in front of your own mirror.

Lord knows we can all use energy boosts where we can get them. This exercise is one you can perform at work during the day in the bathroom stall or even in your cubicle, without drawing too many weird looks, for an instant pick me up.

It also can help to regulate your breathing when you’re having a lot of stress and anxiety, which will help you to manage your stress levels better.

Stand in front of a mirror if you’d like so you can see if you’re doing it right. Put your arms straight out from your body, so you look like a cross, with your palms facing down to the floor.  Hold your arms out as long as you can, almost until your arms start to get a little bit sore if you can.

Once they start to burn a little, slowly, very slowly, raise your palms up to the ceiling, and bring your arms down very slowly and deliberatly toward the floor. 

This is supposed to help open the breathing passageways in the lungs, and helps you to breathe more deeply and completely, which energizes the whole body with pure oxygen, and pure energy!

One of the most powerful ab exercises that I have ever done, and ever felt the next day results from, are plank poses.  Not just the gentler version of the plank pose that you typically think of when you think of this yoga posture, but the more dynamic planks, where you are jumping and moving around, and really working deep into those ab muscles for maximum burn. And maximum pain the next day I might add!

But there is nothing better than that next day ab burn, where you still feel the effects of what you did the day before. That is the only time that I feel I have really pushed my abdominal muscles to their next levels of sculpting and fitness. This is because my abs have always been one of my naturally stronger and more muscular parts of my body.

I only recently started to see that I was getting some sagging in that area, but I figured that might be expected when you passed 35 years old. However, I also know that a huge part of keeping lean, sculpted abs is your diet. You can do all the crunches and plank poses that you want, and if your diet is too many calories and contains too much fat, well then you just can never “cover up” that layer of fat.

Or, more or less, that layer of fat is covering your ripped abs, is more like it!  But the plank poses are some of the best ab blasters I’ve ever done. I can do a hundred crunches very quickly and still not feel that burn that I would if I would have held a low plank position, with elbows on the ground, for that same period of time it took me to do the crunches.

The best plank pose is the one I mentioned, where you are only a few inches off the ground, because it is much harder this way than when you’re up further off the ground (or floor).  You should have your elbows on the ground as well, with your hands coming together at the front of your body.

When you are up in a full plank, where you are held up by your hands instead of your elbows, this is a little easier and works a different group of muscles, and not as deeply because your body is much harder to hold up when you’re lower down. It’s all got to do with center of gravity.

I’ve realized after years and years of doing various ab workouts, that it’s not the reps (repetitions), or the intensity or speed at which I work my abs that really helps me to build a six pack, or at least help it all to suck in all of the time, when standing or sitting so I don’t have a muffin top. It’s actually more the positions and angles that I’m at when I’m doing my ab workouts that makes the most impact on my results.

For example, if you’re always doing those straight-ahead sit ups, where your abs are always in and up and down, straight ahead sort of movement pattern, you will probably not see much improvement in the toning and strength of your abs once they get used to that particular movement and angle.  You also won’t enjoy the same chiseling effect that varied ab moves can give you, which means you won’t get that more ripped look that variances of ab exercises will give you.

Your abs are like any other muscle in the body. If you work it the same way all the time, then your muscle gets used to that. It no longer keeps changing it’s shape and evolving to suit the exercise. You reach a sort of plateau when your body is used to movements that it once found challenging and sculpting, and it stops giving your progressively better results. Instead, you have to ratchet it up all the time, providing your abs with different stimulations.

Try doing sideways crunches, where your knees are over to one side first, and then they sort of swivel over to the other side, so you are getting the transverse abodiminus muscles (the muscles on the sides of the abs), instead of just the lower “pooch” abs, or the upper abs, which are actually the easiest part of the abs to tone since they are the part of the abs that just naturally picks up a lot of the work that the abs have to do when they are called to action.

One of my favorites for my abs, because it is so versatile and you can really get toned abs fast doing this, and it also works your arms at the same time, are plank poses. I love the walking plank, which is where you alternate your hands up like a push up, then arms down, like an elbow plank. Talk about a down and dirty workout for both your upper and lower arms and your abs, man, you will be burning after that one!

I’ve been a bit obsessed with plank exercises as of late. Why, you ask? Well, because I find they are one of the most effective exercises to not only tone and define and sculpt the abdominal area, including the obliques, but they also tone the arms, legs and back while toning other trouble areas as well. They are kind of an all in one exercise for your body. They really test the boundaries of your strength too, as they are one of the hardest poses that you can put yourself in for any extended period of time.

I’ve found that when I’m doing a lot of plank exercises, I get my most toned and ripped looking. They tone my tummy better than most other abdominal crunches I do, and they also help to tone up the flab on the back of my arms, as well as shaped my back up.

There are so many different variations of plank that you can do. There is the plank twist, which works your abdominal muscles, with particular focus on the obliques, which are the muscles on the side of the tummy.  They are the ones that you target when you’re doing side to side abdominal exercises.

Plank twists are simply putting yourself in the plank position, then bringing your knee up, toward the  opposite arm, so you are performing a sort of twisting motion the opposite side of the body. You should feel it in the side, or the obliques.

You can also do some great cardio in the plank position. You can do plank jumping jacks, lunges, mountain climbers, and plank pushups. Plank pushups are awesome to get the backs of your arms toned. You just need to do a really straight plank position, and hold your arms out in front of you. Then, bend down and do a very straight pushup, but with your hands only about six inches from eachother on the floor, so you can feel it toning the backs of your arms.

You can also do a simple situp in plant, bringing your knees to the chest, and squeezing the abs as tight as you can for several repetitions. Planks actually get kind of fun once you get used to them and kind of experiment. It’s really cool when you can start to do more advanced holds, because then you know you’re pretty in shape!