The Fit Blog

“How can I fit into this dress in just a couple of weeks?”
“How can I lose 5 lbs before I go down South?”
“Reunion next month. Can I lose 10 lbs?”

These are questions that I hear all the time. And testimonials can be found all over the Internet and Television suggesting that it’s actually possible to lose obscene amounts of weight quickly and easily.

Well, is it true?  Can you lose weight fast?  Yes you can! As unbelievable as it may be, you can lose weight quickly and astonishingly enough, without sacrificing  hours per day and without starving yourself.

Unfortunately there are such things as unrealistic goals.  Those testimonials where people lose 10 lbs in one week are either extreme cases or incredibly exaggerated.  But, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strive to lose the weight or inches that you want to lose in order to meet a short term goal.

Here are some tips to lose weight quickly.

Increase your metabolism.  Amazing things can happen when you simply spread your eating out through the day.  Eat 5 to 6 times during the day instead of your usual three.  Keep feeding yourself and your metabolism will work harder to keep up.  Many people find that simply eating the same types of food that they usually do but spreading it out into 5 to 6 smaller meals throughout the day causes their metabolism to increase and fat is lost.

A good suggestion is to eat 6 times per day, every 3 hours.  Maybe at 6am, 9am, 12pm, 3pm, 6pm and 9pm.  Even if not hungry, it’s important to eat.  Not eating and instead starving yourself will cause your body to go into a starvation mode in which your body may attempt to hold on to fat, rather than lose it.

Work large muscle groups.  Do squats or lunges which impact your quads.  If you don’t feel comfortable with barbell squats, do dumbbell squats or even air squats.  Leg presses are also useful for working the hamstrings and quadriceps muscles. Core exercises – leg lifts, sit-ups, planks also work large sets of muscles.  Working larger muscle groups will burn more calories.  It also enables greater caloric burn in less time, helping to maximize the effectiveness of a single workout.

Perform circuits.  Put 2 or three different exercises together and do them back to back with a medium to high intensity.  This sort of high intensity circuit training will cause increase caloric burn during the workout, enable you to get in and out of the gym quickly and an abundance of evidence exists suggesting that your metabolic rate increases and remains high for hours after your workout, well into a resting state.

Eat a balanced diet.  Many suggest to focus on protein, but ultimately, that can cause unbalanced hormones and can lead to feeling pretty blah.  Skip the sugar completely.  And skip foods that easily turn into sugar.  Sugar causes insulin to rise and as such an unbalanced hormonal state in which fat is easily stored and held.  skip out on simple breads.  Whole wheat if anything.  Eat lots of veggies and small amounts of protein at every meal.  Chicken or fish preferably.  Stay away from super high fat foods simply because of the high calories that come with them.  But don’t shy away from fat all together.  Fat from things like nuts and olives are very healthy and can help give you a feeling of satiety during a meal.

Personally, I try to avoid eating out as much as possible and I have some staple meals that take virtually no time to prepare.  Salads can be purchased pre-made at most grocery stores in a variety of various styles.  I also like to get pre-cooked chicken strips.  Nitrate and preservative free packages have also recently come out on the market.  Apples and berries also help supplement my morning Kashi cereal with low fat milk.  Egg whites, hard boiled eggs and lots and lots of frozen veggies. Did I already mention the frozen veggies?  Having apples close at hand are good for the inevitable snack craving.

Get your sleep!  An often overlooked but essential part of dieting is sleeping.  Evidence exists that suggests poor sleeping patterns or inefficient amounts of sleep can lead to complications in weight loss.  Get at least 7 hours of sleep and if you sleep in til 9am on Sunday, you’re actually doing your body good.

With these tips and a good exercise program, losing weight quickly may not actually be that out of your reach.

No Comments | In: diet | | #

I did this little exercise in a gymnastics certification last year. It’s a great parallette workout combining both pushups and dips on the parallettes, with some additional core and cardio effort.

Check out a related post for making your own parallettes here.

No Comments | In: Uncategorized | | #

Box jumps – one heck of a plyometric exercise that can be added into virtually any circuit or interval workout. However, technique plays a huge role in affecting the level of effectiveness of this wonderful (and wonderfully simple) exercise.

Many people who do box jumps cheat a little bit. One of the fundamental components of the box jump is the hip extension and here’s where the cheaters cut the corner.

Take a look at the following sequence:

If you notice, the person doing the box jump doesn’t do a full hip extension when he lands on the box. A full extension can be reached either through completely standing up (hips over feet) at the top of the box or through a powerful leg/hip explosion off the box that causes the legs and hips to straighten out and extend.

To illustrate, take a look at another sequence:

The full hip extension is one of the most powerful movements that the human body is capable of. Many compound movements, such as the squat, deadlift, clean, or simply standing up or moving into a sprint from the starters position – all are based on the hip extension. As such, it is important to complete a box jump with a full hip extension and work those muscles to the max. Doing so will work the quads, hamstrings and glutes all that much more while increasing the energy requirements of the movement and causing increased cardiovascular stress.

1 Comment | In: exercise, fit tip, fitness | | #

Everyone’s favourite iPhone interval timer, WOD Timer, now has a new home on the web! Go on and take a peek at the site in all its Web 2.0 glory. We spared no expense at getting this setup. Well, actually I did it myself over the weekend. I’m still fairly proud of it though. And please, as always, I’m looking for feedback. And if you want some promo codes for the iPhone version, let me know as I’ve been known to give a few away.

Check the site out at www.wodtimer.com.

No Comments | In: Uncategorized | | #

Here’s a muscle-up sequence from December 2008. Just found it buried in a folder. Thought I did a pretty good job of putting this sequence together. Not entirely sure why I never published it before. Think the music does a nice job of adding an ominous feel. I mean, filming myself doing muscle ups in my ghetto basement gym at night in the middle of December isn’t creepy enough.

No Comments | In: muscle-ups | | #

Well, in all truthfulness, WOD Timer v1.1 was actually available several days ago.  It’s true, I finally fixed most of the glaring bugs and added a couple new features.

Some of the new features include vocal audio cues, interval time progress bar, UI updates and changes and additional settings.

For more information, check out the video below.  And please, if (or when) you download the app, leave some feedback in the app store!

1 Comment | In: Uncategorized | | #

What are parallettes? Parallettes are essentially a pair of bars used to simulate the muck larger parallel bars used in gymnastics.   Parallettes are also a great piece of equipment that can be made easily and very inexpensively.  Parallettes can be used for a variety of bodyweight exercises that are perfect for strengthening the upper body and core and will help develop better balance.  They are similar to pushup bars but generally a little bit longer.

You can, of course, purchase parallettes, but they can easily be made with some PVC pipe and a tiny bit of time.

To start, you will need the following items from the local hardware store (I purchased mine at Home Depot).

• About 6 feet of PVC pipe about 1 to 1 1/2 inches in diameter.  I used 1 1/2 for mine and the size is perfect for my grip.
• 4 x PVC  T joints
• 4 x PVC  pipe caps
• 4 x PVC  90 degree joints
• PVC glue (please use in a well ventilated area as this stuff is really smelly)

Instructions for one parallette:

1. Cut a section of PVC about 14 to 16 inches
2. Glue a 90 degree joint to each end of the section
3. Cut two sections of PVC about 4 to 6 inches
4. Glue one small section to each of the 90 degree joints
5. Glue a T joint onto each of the ends
6. Cut 4 4 inch sections of PVC
7. Glue one 4 inch section to both sides of each T joint
8. Glue on caps at each end of the 4 inch section

That’s it!  Here’s a diagram of the sections of the parallette

And here is one of my parallettes:

4 Comments | In: Uncategorized | | #

Awesome video compilation featuring various feats of strength. Serious lifting going on in this video. Unbelievable stuff. I’m unsure of the original source on this one. If you know, please let us know in the comments!

1 Comment | In: Uncategorized | | #

Simple – cut some cheese strings in half, dip them in egg, cover them in flax seed (they should be as eggy and flax seedy as possible) and fry them in canola oil (or oil of choice). Don’t let the oil get too hot. Probably best just when it’s about to smoke. Fry them only until the outside is getting a little crispy or the cheese is really starting to ooze. Turn often and keep a close eye on them. Takes only about a minute or two.

No Comments | In: Uncategorized | | #

TheFitBlog.net has just released a Google Gadget for calculating body mass index (BMI). This gadget can super easily be embedded on a web page or your iGoogle site.

Download the BMI Calculator gadget.

No Comments | In: Uncategorized | | #

I try not to let things that bother me get to me.  In fact, for the most part I try to keep completely ambivalent about what other people are doing when those things would otherwise fire me up.  But at the gym, it’s a different story.  I’m not sure if it’s due to a chemical change around my brain from heavy weight lifting or if it’s maybe the confined spaces that the gym often presents, but I get my gitch all in a knot when I see someone exercising in a way that, IMHO, is a waste of time.

I am aware of the consequences, of course, for expressing my frustration to another individual – that he or she is spending their time at the gym wastefully.  Not everyone who does this is a skinny, off the bus freshman.  There are times when I watch an obviously serious muscle-head doing something that baffles my mind.  But let’s just say that I know how to pick my battles.

And I don’t only see in-gym time wasting by members.  Amazingly enough, these things happen quite often with an assumingly well equipped and experienced trainer at their side.  Good grief!  It’s no wonder why so many people get discouraged by their efforts. Yes, ladies and gents – it’s likely because what they are doing at the gym is simply wasting their time.

So which exercises cause my stomach to turn inside out?  Here are three exercises that I commonly see at the gym that are more or less completely worthless.

1. Wrist Curls.  For the overwhelming majority of people, wrist curls are worthless.  Are you a professional arm wrestler?  Do you need to hold a dozen full beer steins in one hand?  Yes?  I’d first argue that you’d be better off with another exercise anyway, but it’s likely not the case, If you’re focus is in gaining overall mass, losing weight, getting ripped, etc… then spending 10 minutes of your precious hour at the gym on this is foolish.  Pullups, presses, cleans, kettle bell exercises – these are all things that provide a far more effective workout for a larger number of muscles, have significant;y more movement involved and also effect the same muscle groups,   I have never done a wrist curl in my life and when I setup in a false grip for a muscle-up, my forearms explode.
2. Behind the back… anything.  I see people occasionally doing behind the back wrist curls or what I could possibly compare to deadlifts.  And I’m dumbfounded.  The same reasoning applies as in #1 above, but with the addition of even more criticism.  When holding a barbell behind the back, your body will get into an entirely funkified position – poor posture, inappropriate stress on some joints, and the amount of possible movement for a behind the back exercise is significantly diffused.  For those of you thinking you’re stepping it up a notch by performing your <insert exercise here> behind the back, just a heads up that there are probably some other people at the gym watching you and thinking, WTF?  Is there a substitute for a behind the back exercise?  Yes – and that is virtually anything else, including drinking beer.
3. Shoulder shrugs.  Again – we’re looking at a very isolated, muscle specific exercise here.  If you’re doing shoulder shrugs, then I’m assuming you are a professional body builder, have completed every other exercise out there, it’s been a solid 4 hour workout and you have some extra time to kill.  If that category does not apply to you then here are some suggested substitutes: high pulls and cleans.  Those two exercises not only work the same muscles as the shoulder shrug, they require huge movement which works your entire body and provide some excellent cardiovascular stress at the same time.

The three above mentioned exercises all have the same thing in common – they are localized exercises and target very specific muscle groups.  The movement involved is minimal and the same muscle groups can be as effectively worked out during more compound exercises.

My take is simple – if an exercise involves a limited movement, constrained by body position or lack of leverage, it likely isn’t an exercise worth your time.  Concentrate on more compound exercises.  Not only will you see better results, but you will cut down the time it requires to get in a good workout.

11 Comments | In: exercise | tags: behing the back wrist curls, curls, exercise, wrist curls. | #

For those who don’t know, I have a thing for break dancing.  It’s just an incredible display of strength.  This video of Guy Junior is no exception.  Watch and be amazed.

1 Comment | In: Uncategorized | | #

Here’s my new fav workout.  Hit the exercises one after another any work with a medium to high intensity and not only with you feel great, you will be in and out of the gym in no time (barring waiting for the equipment – something that I had to do this evening).

The description:

1. warmup: 1 mile run medium to high intensity
2. combo: skipping (20 double unders) then 20 situps for 3 rounds.  Or could sub in 40 situps + 20 du’s then 30 situps + 40 du’s, then 20 situps + 60 du’s
3. combo: a take on a Crossfit oldie – body weight bench presses (as many reps as possible for a set – AMRAP) followed by Pullups (dead hangs or kipping, also as many reps as possible for a set – AMRAP) times 5 rounds.
4. Done.

No Comments | In: stick man workout | tags: stick man workout. | #

Going for a 5 or 10 km run is a fantastic aerobic exercise that will burn lots of calories. However, the normal run is generally a moderate intensity exercise.

Long bouts of moderate intensity exercise may actually preferentially burn more muscle tissue than one would like [1]. The goal, after all, is usually to burn calories from carbohydrate storage and maintain muscle.

Some studies have found that brief intervals of high intensity training are more effective at maintaining muscle and building their capacity for lactic acid oxidation [2].

Lactic acid builds up as muscles undergo intense strain. You may recognize this as the burning sensation you might sometimes feel as you’re trying to lift that last rep or trying to sprint the last 100m of a good jog. During the recovery from bout of the high intensity, lactic acid is broken down. This process uses energy from carbohydrate storage or fat [3]. Translation – interval training may be better than a moderate intensity run for losing fat and getting lean.

So next time you’re heading out for your weekly (or monthly or whenever you can get yourself off the couch) run, perhaps head down to the track instead and run 5 or 6 400m sprints, each followed by 2 minutes of rest. It may take less time than a 10k jog, but it may be just as effective.

No Comments | In: Uncategorized | tags: cardio, hiit, interval training, training, vo2. | #