Fitness & Wellness

For some people, starting a new workout routine can be intimidating. You alternatively could be the type of person who jumps in feet first without question. Regardless of your personality, you need to know what to ask if you’re starting a new workout routine, especially if you were a couch potato previously. Whether you join a group, hire a trainer, join a new gym, or workout at home, learning the basics, especially proper form, is imperative.

See if you enjoy the new workout.

Whether you’re signing up for a class or working out at a new facility, do a thorough inspection before you sign up. Ask for a tour of the gym or monitor one of the classes. If you’re using a personal trainer, talk to the trainer to find out what to expect from his services. Locking into something before investigating everything about it can put you in a position of hating every minute.

Can you consistently schedule the same time for the program every day?

Check your schedule before you start any fitness program. You may be able to fit it in at first, but is that time conducive to next week or next month? You want consistency. Scheduling your workout at the same time each day creates a habit. Habits are hard to break. Is the gym or location of your workout convenient or do you have to drive a distance? Identify all the physical issues that might limit your participation.

Is the program right for your fitness level?

You wouldn’t enter a program for physics geniuses with years of experience if you haven’t conquered basic science. The same is true for fitness. If you are a beginner, make sure your program is for beginners. If it isn’t, you’ll struggle and feel like a failure. If you’re too advanced for the class, you’ll get bored. A personal trainer will ensure you have the workout appropriate for your fitness level.

• Check whether it’s a complete fitness program that works on all types of fitness, strength, flexibility, endurance, and balance. You need to work on all four types of fitness.
• Ensure the program you choose has a warm-up and cool-down section. Warm your muscles before you start working out to help prevent injury. Both warm-up and cool-down can help speed recovery.
• Identify if the program is pushing you too fast. Start slowly and gradually work toward maximum capacity. Always check with your healthcare professional before starting any program.
• At Rising Fitness, our personal trainers will help guide you past each hurdle. They’ll create a program specifically for your needs, limitations, and goals.

For more information, contact us today at Rising Fitness Gym

If you feel like your day is out of control and you need some stress relief, consider doing yoga. Yoga offers many benefits. You can use it any time of day and help reduce the tension in your body. Yoga relieves stress in several ways. Controlled breathing can slow your heart rate and lower blood pressure. It reduces the impact of your stress mechanism and your body’s reaction to stress and calms your mind. It stretches the muscles and helps them relax.

The child pose is simple and well worth the effort for stress relief.

Start with your weight resting on the palms of your hands and knees with the front of your legs touching the floor. As you exhale, lower your bottom until it touches your heels. Extend your arms until your chest touches your thighs, your forehead is on the ground, and your arms are stretched out in front. Hold this pose until you feel the stress melt away.

Do part of a combination or the whole thing to relieve stress.

Two poses that bring stress relief are the cat pose and the cow pose. Combine them to relieve stress and back pain. The cat pose starts on your hands and knees. You move your head down as you arch your back like an angry cat. Hold for a few seconds and then release. The cow position starts on the hands and knees, too. Instead of lowering your head, you raise your head, dropping your belly instead of arching your back. Doing the two together almost massages your back.

Doing a cobra pose can bring stress relief.

A cobra pose starts by laying on the stomach with the tops of the feet on the floor. Your hands are under your shoulders and your arms are close to your body. Your elbow is bent with your fingers pointing forward. As you press your lower body from the ribs down onto the floor, you push your upper body up with your hands, exhaling as you do it. Straighten your arms and hold for 30 seconds.

• Three-part breathing can calm you. Breathe in through the nose, filling your lungs first then your belly. Have one hand on your chest and the other on your belly. Feel the belly grow smaller as you exhale, then empty the lungs.
• Many traditional bodyweight exercises are also yoga poses. Do a bridge or plank to bring stress relief as it builds core muscles. Both are yoga poses. When you end the pose, you’ll feel your body relax.
• The uttanasana is an intense toe-touching style exercise. You need to warm your muscles first, so it should be at the end of the poses. You bend at the waist and touch the floor palms down. Bend as far as you comfortably can.
• The legs-up-the-wall pose starts seated with your body close to the wall. Lay your upper body back and put your legs on the wall with your knees straight. Scoot your bottom as close to the wall with one hand on your belly and the other on your chest. Hold for up to 15 minutes.

For more information, contact us today at Rising Fitness Gym

It’s normal to want to maximize the benefits of any workout, especially when it’s cardio. Many cardio activities can require a longer workout. Running, walking, and riding a bike riding a bike are examples of a few that require more time to get the maximum benefit. That is, unless you use a HIIT—high intensity interval training—technique. There are other ways to max out your cardio and get more from every minute in the gym.

What is a HIIT workout?

The more intense your workout, the more you’ll benefit from it. HIIT workouts add to that theory. HIIT isn’t a specific workout but a way of doing any workout. You start at a moderate recovery pace for a short time, move to your peak intensity for half that time, and then go back to the recovery pace. By alternating intensity, you can go at peak intensity longer. You can use it with running, walking, or any type of cardio. Just continuously alter the pace. It builds endurance faster and burns more calories.

Use kettlebells during your workout.

Kettlebells provide four different types of workouts. They’re good for strength, flexibility, balance, and cardio. Swinging the kettlebell not only uses the muscles for breathing but also makes them work harder. The kettlebell isn’t centered, making the core muscles work harder to maintain balance. Kettlebell workouts also burn tons of calories, provide a total body workout, and are fun.

Don’t do the same old cardio workouts.

It might feel more comfortable doing the same type of cardio continuously, but it won’t give you the maximum results. If you only run as your cardio workout, your body becomes more efficient at it. That means it burns fewer calories. It also becomes a bit boring and less challenging. Alternate cardio workouts among several. Riding a bike, dancercising, running, walking, or rowing are a few ways.

• Take up an active sport or other activity that requires good cardio endurance. Cardio workouts prepare you for these activities, but the activities also provide a cardio workout while having fun. Have a weekly tennis session with a friend or join a group activity.
• Make sure you use the proper form to do each exercise. Doing an exercise wrong can minimize the benefits and even cause injury.
• If you’re at a sedentary job, get up and move for a few minutes every hour. Sitting for longer periods can reduce the benefits you get from regular exercise. Set a timer to remind you. Do stretches or just walk around.
• Eat a pre-workout and post-workout snack. The pre-workout snack provides the energy to keep you going at maximum potential. The post-workout snack helps boost recovery.

For more information, contact us today at Rising Fitness Gym

You may be using winter as an excuse to cover every inch of your body with clothing, including your legs. Spring and summer are just around the corner. Before you know it, it’s short and swimsuit season again. That means it’s the perfect time to start toning your legs and give them more definition. These leg workouts are the way to do it. You’ll get great results if you’re consistent. You can trim your thighs, tone your calves, and get rid of cankles in less than an hour every other day.

You can reduce cellulite and tone your thighs for a slimmer look in shorts and jeans.

Cellulite won’t completely disappear from exercise, but you can make it far smoother and less noticeable when you strengthen and tone the muscle tissues. Squats and lunges can help you do that. There are all types of squats to work different muscles and work muscles on different planes. A goblet squat starts with feet wider. Instead of knees going straight ahead when you squat, you push them out to the side. They work the inner thighs and regular squats work the outer thighs and the rest of the legs. Lunges are also good for the thighs and have several variations, like the side lunge.

Tone all parts of your legs, front, back, and sides.

Doing jumping plyometric squats is hard, but well worth the effort. It’s a variation of the squat. Jump up, then drop down into a squat position. Immediately jump up again and repeat in rapid succession. You’ll be out of breath but will work every muscle in your leg. Jumping lunges are similar to walking lunges, but instead of walking forward in a lunge position, you jump as you switch the forward leg to the back and the back leg forward.

You can tone your calves while you tone your ankles.

Many of the same exercises for your calves also improve the ankles. Calf raises can help tone the ankles. Calf raises can be hard to do at first. Start with simple calf raises, standing with feet shoulder-width apart. Push your weight down onto the balls of your feet while raising your body by lifting your heels. Once you have the technique, you can hold weights for weighted calf raises or do calf raises on stairs. You can even do seated calf raises.

To work the entire leg, leg circles are excellent. Lay on your back with your legs straight. Lift one leg, pointing the toe toward the ceiling, and make large circles, first clockwise and then counterclockwise.

If you’re overweight, losing weight should be part of your program to tone your legs. No matter how toned your legs are, if you have excess weight, it will make it impossible to see your hard work.

You can tone your legs by taking the steps instead of the elevator. You’ll also burn calories and build aerobic endurance. Running up the stairs may seem difficult, but don’t be fooled. Running back down tones your legs too.

Jumping rope is another at-home leisure activity you can do to tone your legs. It helps tone the ankles, thighs, and calves. Planks are also excellent for leg toning and toning the entire body.

If you’re frustrated because you can’t seem to lose weight, even though you believe you’re doing everything right, your hormones might be interfering with your weight loss. In many cases, people simply don’t realize how much they’ve eaten, which is why an exercise and food diary is so important. In some cases, however, the problem can come from hormonal imbalances. You can realign most imbalances naturally to help weight loss begin again.

You have far more hormones than just sex hormones.

Most people think of estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone when they hear the word hormones, but there are far more than just those three sex hormones. Hormones are messengers that trigger a variety of responses. Most hormones have another hormone that does the opposite job. For instance, glucagon increases blood sugar levels, while insulin decreases it. Leptin is the satiety hormone that tells you that you’re full and ghrelin is the hunger hormone that keeps you eating. Too much of one type of hormone can affect all areas of your body, including your weight.

If you don’t get enough sleep, you’ll produce more ghrelin and less leptin.

Since ghrelin makes you hungry and leptin makes you feel full, you can see how an imbalance in those two can negatively affect weight loss. To rebalance, you need to get more sleep. Too much insulin can cause insulin resistance. That makes it harder to open the cells to uptake glucose and causes even more insulin to rush to the rescue. It makes the problem worse. Excess insulin can cause the accumulation of belly fat. Higher amounts of insulin allow the body to store fat better, which accumulates on the belly.

An excess of the stress hormone cortisol can also lead to belly fat.

Just like excess insulin, there’s a link to an excess of cortisol and belly fat. You can control both cortisol and insulin by exercising regularly. It doesn’t have to be strenuous, although you’ll burn more calories when you do a HIIT workout or lift heavier weights. Cortisol is part of the fight or flight response. It prepares the body to do both. Exercise mimics fighting or running, so it burns off the stress hormones. Changing either one can help you lose weight.

• Cutting sugar and food with added sugar from your diet can make a difference in hormones. A high-sugar diet affects insulin levels, cortisol, and the thyroid. It can slow metabolism and add to weight gain.
• Sex hormonal imbalances can occur during menopause. Eating a Mediterranean-style diet and exercising can help. Cutting out coffee and food with added sugar, increasing fruits and vegetables, and consuming healthy fat also helps.
• Stress can affect all the hormones in your body. Learning ways to reduce stress levels can improve weight loss. It may be one reason yoga helps and is a reason exercise works.
• Dehydration increases the risk of hormonal imbalances, particularly cortisol levels. Hydrate frequently. Water and green tea are good. Green tea aids in weight loss and contains L-theanine, which helps reduce stress hormones.

For more information, contact us today at Rising Fitness Gym