Tag: exercise
Learning to Listen to Your Body
Rest is one of the most often overlooked components of staying in shape. It is hard to know when to work through pain, and when to listen to your body and back off and rest. Rest usually isn’t even considered a component to staying in shape. But rest is essential if you want to continue to exercise.
How much time should you take off? Do you take the time off completely? Will you lose conditioning if you take too much time off? These are all valid questions that can be hard to answer, even if you know about exercise.
You Are What You Eat
You’ve heard the saying you are what you eat.
Well, it might just be more true than you think.
Your New At Home Workout
If you’re like most of us, you hate going to the gym. You want to get fit, but joining a gym is too expensive, too inconvenient, or maybe you’re just the independent type.
No gym? No problem. I’m here to tell you that you don’t need fancy, expensive exercise equipment to get your body back into shape. All you need is to know how to work out properly, and which exercises are proper for your body. If you know what you are doing then you can perform more than enough exercises at home to get you into shape, and to keep you there.
A Healthy Relationship with Exercise
It seems that I spend most of my time in my practice trying to either convince patients to exercise, or to convince them to back off from exercise.
Most people don’t exercise enough. Many people come into my office with a health issue that’s been coming on for years, they haven’t done anything to manage it or help it out, and they want me to fix it in one treatment.
On the other end of the spectrum I get people in my office who exercise too much. Their bodies are in a state of chronic overuse which makes them much more injury prone. When a muscle is overused, it is tight, irritated and inflamed. A muscle in this state is primed for injury. When a muscle is in this state, it doesn’t take much to injure it.
Disproving the Most Popular Rule of Weight Loss
Just like one calorie does not equal another calorie, losing 3,500 calories does not equal to losing a pound.
A calorie of broccoli is not the same as a calorie of potato chips. The calorie of broccoli is more nutritious; it has more vitamins and minerals and nutrients than the calorie of potato chips.
You can survive longer on broccoli than you can on potato chips.
It used to be thought that in order to lose a pound of fat, all you had to do was to cut out 3,500 calories from your diet. Conventional wisdom was that if you cut back 500 calories per day for 1 week you would lose a pound.
Turns out that is an extreme simplification of weight loss.
Continue reading “Disproving the Most Popular Rule of Weight Loss”
Faux Nutrition & Fitness Fads
It is easy to scare people with the unknown. Even if you have training in exercise or nutrition they can be confusing, intimidating, and create a sense of the unknown.
To complicate matters, there are many charlatans and snake oil salesmen who create misinformation to sell people their usually worthless, products.
Take It Easy: Exercise Shouldn’t Be So Tough
Why does exercise have to be so tough?
This is a common question that I hear from patients of mine.
It is a common topic of discussion with friends of mine who are in the exercise profession, and with patients of mine.
At times it seems that people are looking for permission to not beat themselves up. They need the reassurance that it is alright to go easy.
Continue reading “Take It Easy: Exercise Shouldn’t Be So Tough”
