It’s easy to get swept up in the holiday season. This combination of religious and national celebrations can help keep the cold winter away. But the feasts and parties that mark it can tax the arteries and strain the waistline. By eating just 200 extra calories a day — a piece of pecan pie and a tumbler of eggnog here, a couple latkes and some butter cookies there — you could pack on two to three pounds over this five- to six-week period. That doesn’t sound like much, except few people shed that extra weight in the following months and years.
Enjoy these holiday healthy eating tips to keep you on track to your fitness goals...
Tips on how to deadlift properly
Joints connect bone to bone that work together to allow functional movement patterns in which we perform on a daily basis. This is the kinetic chain. When one part of the chain is not moving efficiently, other parts of the chains are affected. Thus, throwing off our movement patterns. For instance, when we have back pain, it rarely is an issue originating from the back. Read More.
Did you know? You inhale and exhale about 26,000 times every day! That comes down to over a thousand times per hour, or almost twenty times each minute. Because you breathe so often (and need to do it to live!) you tend not to think about the way you breathe – even if your respiration patterns are less than optimal. Read More.
Eat Without Guilt: Healthy Eating tips
Foam rolling for myofascial release
MOvement mechanics
Strategies for better sleep
Better breathing
After an intense bout of exercise, foam rolling is thought to alleviate muscle fatigue and soreness (ie, delayed onset muscle soreness [DOMS]) and improve muscular performance. Potentially, foam rolling may be an effective therapeutic modality to reduce DOMS while enhancing the recovery of muscular performance.
The research suggests that both foam rolling and the roller massage may offer short‐term benefits for increasing sit and reach scores and joint ROM at the hip, knee, and ankle without affecting muscle performance.
The hip hinge is one of the fundamental movements of a lot of programs, and one of the most effective ways of building lower body strength. The conventional deadlift, (shown) is one of the best ways to increase strength in the hip extensors (glutes and hamstrings) as full hip extension is necessary to deadlift with a proper form.
The gluteal complex of muscles (i.e., gluteus maximus, medius and minimus) plays a key role in helping take stress off the spine during multiplanar movements. That’s because these muscles help control movements of the torso, pelvis, hips and legs. Increased glute strength has been shown to alleviate chronic low back and knee pain. The hinge movement pattern is required for essential activities of daily living such as sitting, lifting and most sporting activities. It is also a staple exercise in training regimens designed to enhance performance and to build injury resilience...
Hierarchy of Sleep Optimization
This hierarchy was put in place to guide and give you a structure of things you could do to increase your sleep health. Information presented in this email follows that of the hierarchy where the most focus is placed upon the foundation and framework “Behaviors” and concluded at the top with “Lifestyle” factors.