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Posts Tagged ‘fitness’

Elliptical trainers are ideal for getting in shape and losing weight. When you workout on an elliptical trainer there are two important benefits:

• Low-Impact Exercise
• Upper and Lower Body Workout

It is for those reasons that elliptical trainers are growing in popularity. Treadmills sell more in total numbers, but elliptical sales are growing at a faster pace. They are particularly appealing to the baby boomer generation that is looking for an alternative form of exercise and workout that lessens the impact on aging joints.

Low-Impact Exercise

The two most popular forms of exercise are walking and running. But the facts are running, and to a lesser extent walking, cause stress to your body through continual impact. In fact, runners can apply as much as 2.5 times their body weight to their joints with each stride. This is why runners and walkers often suffer from ankle, knee, hip and back injuries. Especially if they workout outdoors on concrete or asphalt. With every step there is a degree of shock absorption. This shock can be felt throughout your entire body.

Elliptical trainers reduce impact through their elliptical motion. Your feet never leave the foot pedals. There is no reverse action, or significant impact. Consequently there is virtually no shock absorption to your joints. The motion of an elliptical trainer simulates the natural path of the ankle, knee and hip joints during walking, jogging or running. And yet you still get a weight bearing workout, which builds bone density, and inhibits the onset of osteoporosis.

With a treadmill you are constantly lifting your feet and impacting the treadbelt with every stride. Treadmills are designed to absorb some of the impact, but there is still that constant jolt to your joints.

Upper and Lower Body Workout

In addition to the low impact exercise, elliptical trainers workout both the upper and lower body simultaneously. By exercising several muscle groups at once you are able to optimize your workout. By involving more muscle mass in your aerobic workout you increase the efficiency of your workout.
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The following is an excerpt from the book The Shaolin Workout
by Sifu Shi Yan Ming
Published by Rodale; May 2006;$29.95US/$39.95CAN; 1-59486-400-4
Copyright © 2006 Sifu Shi Yan Ming

As I go through my day today, I will remind myself to relax. Stay loose.
Be flexible in my body and mind.

It’s most important to stay loose and relaxed in mind and body. To enjoy your life, you must be relaxed. When we were children, our bodies were loose, relaxed, and flexible. We could do splits, flips, jumps, and twists without thinking about it. We were pure mind in babies’ bodies.

But you’re never too old — we just get too tense, too stiff. We think too much. One of the most important lessons you can learn doing the Shaolin Workout is how to get back that childlike relaxation and flexibility — to be at home in your body again. It makes no difference if you are in your twenties, fifties, or eighties. Relax. Never feel old. Tell yourself you’re not getting older every year — you’re getting younger!

Sifu explains that there are two kinds of meditation: action meditation and no-action meditation. In the West, we’re most familiar with the no-action kind. We can all form images of Buddhist monks sitting with their legs crossed and their eyes closed, still and silent, for hours and hours, as they strive to achieve enlightenment.

The only problem is that too much no-action meditation can be as bad for your joints, your back, your neck, as sitting at a computer all day. This is what Da Mo saw happening to the monks at Shaolin. They spent so much time sitting in meditation that their bodies were as stiff as wooden dolls. He saw that Ba Tuo had not given them the proper tools to adapt Buddhism to Chinese life. Why do we meditate? To cleanse our minds and open our hearts. But if we burden our bodies with tension and pain, our minds and hearts can’t be cleansed. Your mind and your heart and your body are inseparable.
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1. Sport is for professionals. This idea applies only in the case of performance sports. The native qualities required for professional sportsmen (speed, skills, specific height, etc.) can only be developed, they can’t be formed by training. As long as the aim of a regular person is not performance, almost all sports can be practiced for keeping the body in a good shape. It’s all about dosing the training you chose, so that the benefits are bigger than wear and tear. Even the sports considered tough can be practiced in a ‘soft’ way (tae-bo, mini-triathlon, jogging, etc.).

2. Training is tiring. This idea is true as long as it refers to consuming all your energy (muscular and hepatic glycogen), but it doesn’t mean that training gets you into that state of exhaustion which would slow down the process of recovery of the body. Even in performance sports, the purpose is to have rather effective than exhausting training, so that the body can get the stimulation necessary to qualitative progress from one training to the next.

Even more than in other sports, in fitness the sportsman is spared overexerting. However, the training must not become ineffective. People can come to the gym tired after a work day and leave relaxed (physically and psychologically) and not more tired. This is extremely useful for people with sedentary jobs, but also for those who make physical effort at work. They could use the training by choosing a type of effort meant to compensate the one involved in their job.
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There is so much conflicting information out there when it comes to the topic of building muscle, and sometimes it can be very difficult to know where to start. If you’re an average beginner looking for some basic guidelines to follow in the gym, the following 8 points will start you off on the right track.

1) Train With Weights and Focus On Compound, Free Weight Movements.

If you want to make solid, noteworthy gains in muscle size and strength, you absolutely must train with free weights and focus on basic, compound exercises. A compound exercise is any lift that stimulates more than one muscle group at a time. Examples of these lifts are the squat, deadlift, bench press, chin up, barbell row, overhead press, dip and lunge. Compound movements allow you to handle the most weight and will stimulate the greatest amount of total muscle fibers.

2) Be Prepared To Train Hard.

One of the biggest factors that separates those who make modest gains from those who make serious gains is their level of training intensity. In order to stimulate your muscle fibers to their utmost potential, you must be willing to take every set you perform in the gym to the point of muscular failure.

Muscular Failure: The point at which no further repetitions can be completed using proper form.

Sub-maximal training intensity will leave you with sub-maximal results, plain and simple.

3) Track Your Progress In The Gym From Week To Week.

Our bodies build muscle because of an adaptive response to the environment. When you go to the gym, you break down your muscle fibers by training with weights. Your body senses this as a potential threat to its survival and will react accordingly by rebuilding the damaged fibers larger and stronger in order to protect against any possible future threat. Therefore, in order to make continual gains in muscle size and strength, you must always focus on progressing in the gym from week to week. This could mean performing 1 or 2 more reps for each exercise or adding more weight to the bar. Keep a detailed training log to track your progress as your strength increases over time.

4) Avoid Overtraining.

Overtraining is your number one enemy when it comes to building muscle size and strength. When most people begin a workout program, they are stuck with the misguided notion that more is better. They naturally assume that the more time they spend in the gym, the better results they will achieve. When it comes to building muscle, nothing could be farther from the truth! If you spend too much time in the gym, you will actually take yourself farther away from your goals rather than closer to them. Remember, your muscles do not grow in the gym; they grow out of the gym, while you are resting and eating. Recovery is absolutely vital to the muscle growth process. If you don’t provide your body with the proper recovery time in between workouts, your muscles will never have a chance to grow.
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