So, I’ve been seeing more and more short, intense workouts being marketed. And this makes me very, very happy as a busy woman with a career and many other outside interests. I never had any interested in spending over an hour at the gym, unless I was also soaking in the sauna at the end of my workout.

Not to mention, there were many times when I’d spend an hour or more at the gym and not feel like I really worked out that hard. I wouldn’t be really sore the next day, and I wouldn’t feel that ridiculous burn that I feel with so many of these shorter, more intense workouts that are out today.

After a good half hour of hard, intense cardio and muscle work, I feel like I really got something accomplished. AND I didn’t waste a good chunk of my day doing it, which for me is the key to keeping me working out long term.

I know that I can give up a half hour a few days a week, however, once you bump that to an hour or more, you are taking up a significant chunk of my time to get other things done, and I’m a busy person.

I love the fact that I can get a head to toe, complete and challenging workout that conditions my heart and my cardio system to really be in good shape, as well as sculpts lean, beautiful muscle on my problem areas instead of a bunch of fat.

One that I just purchased which I had wanted to for Christmas but didn’t get was Jackie Warner’s Xtreme Timesaver head to toe workout. I’m excited to try it because the reviews I’ve read say it is extremely challenging, and it clocks in at almost exactly a half hour, which fits right in to my busy schedule.

I’ll have a review of this one for you soon.

I don’t think that anyone will argue that your workouts should consist primarily of exercises designed to work out your cardiovascular system.

You should always incorporate aerobic activity into your fitness routine no matter what.

However, what most people don’t know is that flexibility and stretching is also incredibly important, especially as they age.

Guess what gives you the best flexibility and stretching exercise?  Yoga!

Not only does yoga give your body excellent lesson in flexibility, but it can also be used as a cardio workout. Some of my favorite workouts are on yoga workout dvd’s that I’ve owned for a while. They help keep my routine fresh by working in unique poses and different exercises.

Ashtanga yoga style is one that incorporates a lot of fast, dynamic movement that really gets the heart rate up. It also simultaneously tones the muscles and helps to aid in flexibility.

As we age, flexibility becomes more and more important. We become more prone to stiffness, and we also become more prone to conditions like arthritis. Keeping your muscles and joints flexible and healthy will also keep you mobile and able to be very active, well into your older age.

Have you ever seen older people who move very slowly? Almost like it’s painful to move about? Well doing yoga on a regular basis can help keep your muscles “lubricated” and ready to roll at a moment’s notice, just like they are when you’re younger.

It also adds a great stress releasing activity to your overall health and wellness routine. Yoga is almost like a mental workout for me personally.

It helps me to maintain balance and focus when I’m stressed out, and it really helps me to put things in perspective by helping to quiet my mind by focusing on immersing myself in a pose instead of letting my mind wander in a hundred different directions of worries that I have in my life at the moment.

For this reason, I view yoga as more of  mental and physical workout, not just mindlessly moving around to blow off some steam like other workouts.  I think that you should seriously consider working it into your regular fitness routine in this new year so you can garner maximum benefit, both physically and mentally.

So, I saw a few videos on a popular health and alternative news and fitness website about how interval training goes a lot further than consistent cardio activity at the gym. In fact, just three days a week with 20 minute intense workouts is supposed to be better than just going at a constant pace for that same period of time.

Of course, you still sprinkle in your normal workouts for good measure, but adding these short burst intervals are a great way to actually torch fat and calories, as well as to build cardio endurance very quickly.

My primary interest was to burn mega calories since I like to make sure that when I’m at work, where there is a gym, I am getting up and burning calories and being active instead of sitting like a lump on a log all day long and not burning any calories or getting my blood pumping and my heart working.

The videos and instructions I saw for intense short burst interval training were very simple, and you can do them most easily on a recumbent bike. However, you can also probably try this on a treadmill or an elliptical, it is just easier to speed up and slow down on a recumbent bike in my opinion.  Plus, the manual and interval programs on a bike are just better for this purpose, I’ve found.

Here’s what you do. You warm up for three minutes. This is just a moderate pace cycling motion, just like you’d be doing any other time. It’s not slow, it’s just moderate, you feel your heart beating and your body warming up.

Next, what you do for the next eight intervals is you cycle REALLY hard, as fast as you can go, until you feel like you probably can’t go any longer, for thirty seconds.  You should feel your heart pounding out of your chest, and you should feel your body temperature rise very quickly in this thirty second period.

Because you are not phoning this in, you are concentrating very hard, and going very fast.  You may even want to turn up the resistence a bit on this one.

Then, after that thirty seconds is over, you return to a normal, moderate pace for the next 90 seconds (one and a half minutes). Believe me, those ninety seconds go very quickly, so don’t start reading a magazine or anything or else you’ll screw your timing up.

You continue this cycle of 30 seconds hard and fast, 90 seconds moderate for about 8-9 times one the recumbent bike, totaling about 20 minutes all together.  When it’s all said and done, you won’t believe how quickly it’s over, it goes by very fast, and you also won’t believe the results you get in building your endurance!

Honestly, I’m not sure if Monkey Yoga is an actual, recognized practice, or just some catchy thing that a yoga studio in Oakland, CA came up with to get students to come in and try something fairly new and challenging out, yet still get their body stretched and limber like traditional yoga does.

Monkey yoga, which I tried when I was out in California, is a sort of fusion of regular yoga and cardio moves, so it gives you that great yoga relaxation and stretching experience, but it also keeps you on your toes like Ashtanga yoga does, while conditioning your heart aerobically with moves that sort of mimic a monkey’s moves at times (which is I believe where the name partly comes from perhaps).

I’ll tell you something, the yoga instructor that we had was very in shape, and he could do some moves that I had never seen any other instructor do – like the stuff you see yogis do on TV, but have never really seen one do up close, where they are balancing all of their weight on their arms, for instance, and their legs are splayed above their heads, crazy stuff like that, which I know I realistically may never be able to do unless I practiced yoga as my exclusive form of exercise, which I don’t believe in doing.

Among some of the moves we did that I can share with you, there were a lot of back bends.  The room was heated to a higher temperature, so my muscles were more limber, but I was still sore the next day. It’s not every day you do back bends, after all!  But these were the kind that you start off with on your back, then push yourself off the floor into a back bend, so that made it a bit easier on my body and my fear level of falling backwards when you do a normal back bend starting in the upright standing position.

We also did a lot of ab work toward the end of the workout.  It was constantly flowing ab work too, so I really felt it the next day since that’s not what my abs are conditioned to do.  We did a lot of warrior poses and a TON of downward dog. The instructor came over and shoved my heels down the floor, which really helped me stretch the back of my legs out, and BOY did I feel that more than I normally do in my half ass downward dogs!

Overall, Monkey Yoga was a great workout. It combined a great cardio workout with muscle sculpting and stretching. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

So, as I mentioned in my last post, I went out to Berkeley, CA to visit my sister recently. One of the things we did that she had been wanting me to try since she started it just a few months ago, was a martial art/dance type of practice called Capoeira. I had never heard of this practice until my sister told me about it. That’s the advantage of having a sibling that lives somewhere more cultural and up on certain things, you actually get to hear about these things sooner rather than later!

She was really excited about it, and so it got me interested too, since I knew I would be trying this sport when I went out to visit her. So I looked it up on Youtube. And of course I got a little scared and intimidated. Because Capoeira is a somewhat social sport, and I’m not all that social.

In fact I’m pretty shy and a little on the reserved side, so I prefer to do solo workouts where as few people are watching me as possible. But that’s also what siblings are for. To push you out of your comfort zone both physically and mentally, especially when you are polar opposites (she’s a Gemini and I’m a Virgo, you don’t get much  more on the opposite social spectrum than that).

So we went to this Capoeira studio near where she lives in Berkeley. It was a simple studio, with one big floor that had a simple rubber mat down. you do the moves without socks or shoes on, so it does get a little rough on the bottoms of your feet, but you would build up tough skin after a while, so it probably wouldn’t be such a big deal after a while.

I did things that I hadn’t done in years – ever since I stopped doing gymnastics in the fifth grade.  I did cartwheels, half hand stands, and all kinds of other acrobatic types of things. Of course, they didn’t look like acrobatics since I was way out of practice, but that was the general gist of the moves.

They also had us sparring with eachother (I can’t remember the technical term they used for this), in a back and forth kind of dance motion, covering our faces the whole time for protection with our fists.  In the end, what you have is a dance themed martial art, where you are doing something that looks very acrobatic and graceful at the same time, and yet the moves are designed so you can actually defend yourself if you had to.

I had a great time, and it was an AWESOME workout. I had sweat  coming out everywhere, and I was sore the next day in muscles that I had forgotten I had.  I definitely enjoyed it, however I definitely was out of my comfort zone when they had their circle at the end while playing Brazilian drums and music and I had to go out and spar with someone twice in front of everyone. For someone like me, that’s intimidating, so it was a sport of both the mental and physical kind for me!

I have definitely seen the light when it comes to the benefits of interval training over long, hard workouts where you don’t really break at all, but instead, either keep up an intensity that is very high the whole time, or keep up a medium type of intensity the entire time.

I feel, at the end of a 27 minute interval workout, like I really just worked out for an hour, and yet, I didn’t waste all that time that I would have had I been going at a steady pace. I also like the results that interval training gives me a whole lot better than what my normal gym routine used to consist of on the elliptical machine or the recumbent bike, depending on what I was doing that day.

I started doing interval training in videos only, but then I translated it into my actual gym workouts as well since we have a gym at my job and I usually try to work out there a few days a week on my lunch break as well.  I figured I could get the same intense cardio benefits that I get in my DVD’s but only make up my own interval workout on gym equipment.

The benefit of interval training is that it helps your body to train itself to more quickly and effectively rid the muscles of lactic acid. Lactic acid is the stuff that builds up in the muscles during hard training, and results in muscle soreness and pain.  Interval training helps your muscles rid themselves of this toxic acid faster, because you get short recovery periods in between intense bursts of activity, where the body can clear itself of these acids more efficiently.

The way I do this interval training on my own in the gym on workout equipment, is I time my bursts of activity and my periods of lesser intense aerobic activity.  This way, I’m burning calories more efficiently, and I’m able to do more and work out harder because I have a recovery period in there. I’m also able to engage the muscles in these intense periods to burn more calories, because the intense bursts train those muscles that are responsible for a higher calorie burn.

I do one minute of hard intensity, followed by a minute and a half to two minutes of recovery.  Some people may do it a bit differently, like maybe thirty seconds intensity and 90 seconds of recovery, but I like to do the intense part a little longer as that just makes me feel like I’ve gotten a better workout in.  It really does work to cut fat off the body faster and help you lose weight quicker, I’ve found.

As I look at the workout DVD’s in department stores, and as I scroll through my beloved Fit TV listings for the day, I see a lot of the same common theme in fitness now – dance. Dance is becoming a great way for a lot of people to burn off calories and fat and get their cardio in, but more importantly, to have fun doing it.

Dance is not only a creative, free form of expression, but it also doesn’t feel so much like you’re working out, which makes it a little more likely that you’ll stick to it, and more importantly that you’ll actually ENJOY it. Who knew?!

I have only done a few of the true dance themed workouts, but I can tell you that I really enjoy workouts that are more like you’re dancing, like you’re creating moves that are actually attractive to look at, they’re a form of art, rather than a mechanical looking movement that is very utility in it’s goals.

It’s much more fun to feel sexy and alive when you work out, and that’s why I like workouts that are dynamic in their flow and take me to a place where I forget about the troubles of the day, or the week or the month for that matter.

Dance moves help you to do exactly that. There is even a growing trend in dance workouts for people in groups, like the martial art dance form called capoiera. These dance classes and dance move fitness workout DVD’s have really exploded since the dance shows on TV like “Dancing with the Stars” and “So You Think You Can Dance” have gained in popularity over the years.

It seems everyone wants to get their sultry, sexy, dynamic groove on when they’re sweating, and who can blame them. It’s a great form of cardio and muscle conditioning, especially if you move around a lot and use a lot of the larger muscles in your body when you are practicing.

Dance just makes you feel so good, so alive, and it really releases tension and frustration so you can go through your day invigorated and recharged. I can see why so many people have chosen this form of aerobic activity to work their bodies and keep in shape.

Breathing is generally our characteristic of existence, breathing equals living.  It is very close related to vital energy and other functions in the body. So, if we develop our breathing we will create conditions for better functioning of the body, to calm the emotions and to make a purification of the mind. We should aim to do this because the breathing is single automatic process in the body which we can control, speed or to maintain and deepen.

In the recent decades people more and more adopt the ancient knowledge about our body mixed with advanced methods. Under this philosophy, the physical body of the person is only the first level. The second one is the vital body composed of life energy that flows through us by invisible pathways. The third level is our mind, thought and emotions etc.

Each of the yoga techniques has its personal activity, and the aim of these techniques is to learn how to breathe properly, how to develop our breathing control so we can achieve the harmonization of the energy and the mental processes. There are different techniques of breathing, some of them clean the breathing flows and others balance the energy, the third ones create mental calm in the human body.

Moreover, these breathing techniques bring more oxygen to the body which is very important for its health. Also, strengthens the immune system, helps lungs to purify, and improves the concentration and the working ability where breathing becomes deep and calm in everyday life.

Some of the techniques are easier, other require greater breathing control but for some it is important to study under the supervision of an experienced teacher. The basic techniques of breathing, from where every examination begins can be widely explained because it represents a vital part in every human life.

The correct way of breathing can never be completely understood but, anyway we have to respect some rules because if we do not do it right our muscles become weak or chronically stressed. Many of us lost the ability to breathe well. Mental and emotional stress made our breathing incorrectly and that affects our daily mood and our health in a long term.  Chronicle fatigue, respiratory infections and many allergies can be caused by a bad way of breathing.

Therefore, the largest contribution that Yoga can make to our lives and to our health is to bring back to us our natural breathing.

No matter how old you are or what you prefer for your favorite physical activity, you can almost always benefit from developing your balance. Improving your balance may not be number one on your priority list but, maybe it should be. Balance falls into the same category as flexibility, core strength, and mobility. These are all things our bodies need to function efficiently, but many of us do not actually do exercises to improve them.

If you exercise regularly, you already work on your balance without even knowing it. Nowadays many athletes are using balance training as an important part of their overall training programs, both for injury prevention and performance development. One of the ways to improve your balance is using stability balls, also known as balance balls or Swiss balls.

They can be incorporated into Pilates, weight training and many other fitness routines. Here are some exercises which will help you to improve your balance. Ball Balance: Position the ball under your abs and hips, hands on the floor and legs straight and off the floor.  Hold that position, keeping your body in a straight line, abs pulled in.  Working to stay balanced, slowly raise your right arm out to the side, taking care not to roll or allow any part of your body to collapse.

Hold briefly, lower the arm and repeat on the other side.  Repeat for 12-16 reps, alternating arms.  Ball Circles: Sit on the ball and place the hands on the ball for balance or place them behind your head.  Slowly begin to roll the hips in a circle towards the right, making small circles and then, as you get comfortable, larger circles.  Do 10-20 circles then repeat to the left. Hip Extension: Lie on floor with heels propped on ball. 

Keeping abs tight, slowly lift your hips off the floor (squeezing the buttocks) until body is in a straight line.  Hold for a few seconds and lower, repeating 10 to 15 times.  To make it easier, place ball under knees rather than under heels.  To make it harder, cross your arms over your chest.  Back Extension: Position the ball under your hips and lower torso with the knees straight or bent. 

With hands behind the head or behind back, slowly roll down the ball.  Lift your chest off the ball, bringing your shoulders up until your body is in a straight line.  Make sure your body is in alignment (i.e., head, neck, shoulders and back are in a straight line), your abs are pulled in and that do not hyper extend the back. Aim for 12-16 reps.

These exercises are just a small part of the huge variety of exercises with stability balls. Make a research on this workout. Bear it on mind, that you should always consult your doctor and trainer about your workout.

Some people will avoid walking the steps like the plague. Why though? Walking steps is one of the greatest ways to get a quick blast of heart pumping cardio work into your day. I personally try to take the stairs whenever I can at home and at work. At work, I only take the elevator if I’ve already worked out for the day and I’m just tired, or if I have a tons of bags I have to carry up and going up the steps is just too hard on my back.

Stairs are way harder than walking on normal, even ground. This is because your heart has to push blood to all of your major muscles, especially the biggest muscle in your legs, your quadriceps, in order to get them to force your body weight up the steps. This is excellent cardio work. It’s exactly the reason why you see people gasping for breath after even a few flights of stairs. Shoot, sometimes you even see totally healthy workout fiends out of breath after walking a few flights of steps, so you know that it’s a good workout.

I like having steps in my home anyways. It offers my husband and I a little more space from one another, and to feel more like we can get away into our own areas of our home when we are at eachothers throats or just feel like we need our own personal space. I personally would hate to have a one level home now that I’m so used to having two!

I remember when I was in high school Track, how we used to run the bleachers. I dreaded it because it was the hardest type of working out that our coach made us do. Even back then, in probably the best shape because of my age and my young heart, it made me feel like I was going to pass out from the exertion.

Stairs are hard because they don’t stop. You keep going, and your body is being pushed to propel you up, defying gravity, which is very difficult for your body to do. It’s using all these muscles in unison, which requires a lot more oxygen, and a lot more blood to be available to the muscles that supply the oomph behind movement. Steps are one of the best workouts you can have!