exercise – Betsy Schow

Fitness Tip: Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

You work out, you’re eating better. But the scale isn’t budging. A lot of times, it could be because you have a liar in your midst. The fitness equipment.

Often times the elliptical, treadmill, or cycle can overestimate the calories burned by 30-50%! Well, if you use that number to calculate you net calories, you might be blowing your budget without meaning too. Example: You are trying to budget for 1500 calories. If your elliptical says you burned 1000, then that means you have earned the additional 1000 calories. So you eat a total of 2500 calories for the day. And you are gaining weight. Because in reality you only burned 500 calories. And if this pattern keeps up everyday, the 500 calories over budget per day would make you gain one lb per week.

Fitness equipment is notorious for lying to make you feel good and get back to the gym. Here is a link that I like to use to calculate how many calories I’m REALLY burning.
http://www.webmd.com/diet/healthtool-fitness-calorie-counter

So if the scale is stuck, maybe you need to block out the info panel on the treadmill and recalculate your budget.

Fitness Tip: Make a schedule

Most of us don’t have a manual labor intensive job. That means that if we don’t set a piece of our day aside, the exercise often doesn’t get done.

Case in point. Last night I thought that it would be nice to run or walk a few miles today. If I got up early enough before school I would fit it in. I didn’t set my alarm. Do you think I rolled over naturally at 6 ready to move. Uh no.

Now it’s the end of the day. It’s hot. And there’s no one to watch my kids. All this adds to a day that I won’t fit it in unless I shift some stuff around.

It would have been so much easier if I had planned for it in the first place. Look at your calander, set aside an hour and pencil it in. Just like any other appointment. Then keep it. Because your health is everybody as important as lunch with your mother.

Full Body: Losing the Pooch

There are so many names for that area between the groin and the belly button. Pooch, Bunt, Kangaroo Pouch, etc. For women who have previously born a child, it can be puffy and one of the toughest areas to target.

But could the way you’re walking be preventing those lower abdominal muscles from strengthening — creating a nice vacation home for fat? Two common forms of posture for standing and walking, is hips tucked in or booty hanging out. That would be the first picture and the fourth picture.

When you walk and stand in the number one position, hips tucked in, your lower abdominal muscles engage and tone in a smaller straight alignment to the sacrum of the spine. Over time, these muscles will tone and squeeze out the fat between the layers of muscles.

Now go to the booty out picture in number 4. By sticking your butt out, you are not tightening you core muscles, you are actually puffing them out. The muscles can build and form in almost a convex curve as opposed to a straight tight fiber bundle. The fat then adheres and follows the shape — allowing for a more bulbous front then most of us would like.

So once again, the easiest way to a better shape over time… is posture. Tuck those hips in and soon you will continue to do so without effort. It’s not an overnight correction. It will take months. But walking with your butt hanging out is like undoing all those crunches and sit ups you do every day.

Muscle Bonus: If you want to tone that lower abdomen faster, here’s an exercise for you… heels to the heavens.

After this position, comes the crunch. Leaving the middle spine on the floor, bring the shoulders and chest up slightly and get your talbone up off the floor in short bursts. A modification for this would be leaving the shoulders back and arms on the ground and just raising the legs and the tailbone. Hence raising your heels to the heavens.

Tut, Tut, looks like rain

One of the writer’s in my critique group posed a question the other day. She was having trouble with character dialogue.All of her characters sound the same. She said, If it’s going to rain, wouldn’t the character just say that. “It’s going to rain. Or it’s raining”. No matter who they were.

The answer of course is…bzzzz… wrong. If every character had the same way of phrasing something, there would be no character at all. Here are a few examples.

“Tut, Tut, looks like rain”- Winnie-the -Pooh

“The nicest thing about rain is that it always stops. Eventually.” – Eeyore

“There’s a storm blowin’ up – a whopper, to speak in the vernacular of the peasantry” Professor Marvel, Wizard of OZ

“My breasts can always tell when its going to rain” Karen on Mean Girls

You get my drift. Characters are interesting and memorable because they have interesting and memorable things to say. A person is 3 dimensional, with a past and personality that colors their word choice.

Here’s an exercise. Your character needs to say they’re hungry.

Pooh would say “I’ve got a rumbly in my tumbly.”

How would a colonist from space say it?

A Farmer?

An 11 yr old?

Have fun and be creative!!

Fitness Tip: Go outside

Hopefully it’s starting to get warm wherever you are. Unless you’re my friend Bindi from Australia. In which case you should pull out the ski poles.

For everybody else, it’s time to start skipping the gym and start skipping outside. Switch up your normal workouts with frisbee and touch football

Once you remember to put on the sunscreen, the sun can be beneficial Not only does tan fat look better than white fish skin, but people have been using light therapy to treat mood disorders for years.

So shake off the last bits of the summer blues. Be like Sheryl Crow. Go soak up the sun.

Fitness Tip: Which exercise burns the most calories?

The title of this post asks a question: Which exercise burns the most calories?

The answer is simple. And it’s the same no matter what new fangled gadgets come out or what experts say.

The exercise that burns the most calories is the one you actually do.

If you feel cheated, I apologize, but its true. Running burns more calories than riding the cycle. But if you hate to run, then what are the odds you’ll keep doing it?

The only way to lead an active life is to enjoy it. Back in the old days, I would go the gym for an hour and kill myself trying to burn as many calories as humanly possible. Of course I was so sore for the rest of the week that I couldn’t make myself get back there. So guess how long that lasted. Not long. Then it was back to riding the couch.

Generally, it’s pretty hard to do something for the rest of your life that makes you miserable. Find something you enjoy. Something you’ll look forward to. A walk, a hike, a bike ride. Maybe a zumba class or yoga.

Doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you keep doing it. And that’s how you’ll burn the most calories.

Exercise for the Soul: Yoga

So one of the things currently topping my To Finish list is getting certified to be an instructor in Yoga.

Yoga is something I discovered on my path to fitness and I fell in love. Yes that’s right, I tolerate running, but for me, yoga is an exercise I actually look forward to doing. And it is exercise. I can get more sore doing some practices of yoga than running 5 miles.

The word yoga is the Sanskrit to English translation, meaning yoke. To unite or join. That’s the purpose of yoga, to bind your mind and body together- working together in harmony.

I enjoy the idea of an endless path. There is no true mastery of yoga, no ideal end result. Just the journey and enjoying wherever you happen to be on it. If you can’t touch your toes, its ok. Just grab onto whatever you have. Try to inch a little farther each week.

What a great metaphor for life. There is no ideal end result that says, Yes this was the perfect example of a life well lived. All we can ask for in life is to do our best, and hope that gets a little better each day.

In the coming weeks, I want to share the poses I am learning. I would invite you to try them and find a community yoga class near you. You won’t regret it.

Fitness Tip: Chocolate Milk

Milk… does a body good. And for some athletes, chocolate milk can do your body even better.

Studies suggest that for some athletes, after an intensive cardio workout, (cycling, swimming, running) chocolate milk can be better for your body’s recovery than gatorade or the like. It has just the right mix of sugars and proteins to replenish sore muscles.

This is not for the “I just worked out for 15 minutes” crowd. But if you are dead beat after a 45 min or 60 workout, give some low fat chocolate milk a try. Say 6 oz. or 4 oz if you are trying to lose weight.

I’ve been doing this pretty religiously on anything 5 miles or higher. So far, I am able to run back to back days much easier, and my sore limping time has decreased. Give it a shot.

Here’s one of my sources for the article.
http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/03/08/chocolate-milk-wants-to-be-your-post-workout-drink/

Potpourri: Dark Chocolate

Don’t know if it’s true. I just found this quote and footnote. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Bring on the dark chocolate.

Exercisers can improve their performance by as much as 50 percent if they eat dark chocolate regularly.At least they can if they’re mice. Researchers fed mice the flavonol epicatechin, a key ingredient in dark chocolate, then put them through two weeks of treadmill tests and observed “an integrated response that includes structural and metabolic changes in skeletal and cardiac muscles resulting in greater endurance capacity.”

Leonardo Nogueira et al., “Epicatechin Enhances Fatigue Resistance and Oxidative Capacity in Mouse Muscle.” Journal of Physiology, 2011, doi: 10.1113/jphysiol.2011.20992.

The Long Run: Half Marathons

So today’s run is a little less than last week’s. Today I am running a half marathon. This is a fad that has really taken off in the past few years. It used to be all 5 and 10K and full marathons. The half is an excellent compromise and a great stepping stone on your way to a full marathon if you just can’t help yourself.

So 13.1 miles. Definitively easier than 26.2, but still not something you should just hop off the couch the day before to do. Here’s my official recommendation. If you are new to running, as in haven’t run to the mailbox in over a year, then plan on training for 4 months before tackling this bad boy. Even if you think your heart is up to the exertion, your bones and joints might not be. Running is a high impact exercise. I read that it takes 6 months to fully adjust your skeletal structure to the changes required to sustain that impact.

If you’ve been running for a few months, or jogging- let’s say even one mile per run- than I would give you a 9 week training program.

Either way, it’s not a good idea to see an ad for a race, that’s say next month, and sign up and think you’ll be ready. I like to stay in the kind of shape where I can pick up a half marathon even a week before. But it means staying in that kind of training mode year round. At least one run a week is 9 miles.

So if a half marathon sounds like something you want to achieve, go for it. You’ll probably get a really cool medal. Just make sure you plan ahead and give your body time to adjust to your own needs. For me, the sense of accomplishment was absolutely worth the training. And the knee pain.