Health

Aug152018

5 Tips for Using Supplements

Many people love to take supplements as a way of improving their health and staying healthy. There are many types of dietary supplements available in the market today. As such, one needs to know exactly what is available and how useful it is to their bodies. You need to know that supplements come in different forms and they can be used for a number of health benefits. The fact that no side effects from Nerve Renew have been reported does not mean that all supplements do not have side effects. One should do research and know exactly what certain supplements do to your body. We shall learn a number of tips about supplements in this article.

Aug062018

Man Attacks Other Man During Deadlifts

This is, arguably, one of the worst instances of poor gym etiquette that you might ever find. A video documenting the situation is available for viewing below. Before you watch it, I will say that the commentator is a lawyer and fitness personality who usually provides caustic commentary on exercises done improperly. Some can find him offensive, but many find him quite entertaining. It may not be safe for work, so keep that in mind before playing the video.

Jul312018

Visualization Meditation (Audio!)

We have finally produced the second meditation in our meditation series! It’s a Hungry & Fit team effort–Fit writes and records the meditations and Hungry edits the video and adds effects. So we finally collaborated and got ‘er done and we’re quite happy with the result! You don’t need to watch the video, you just need to listen to it.

Jul282018

Exercise Spotlight: Reverse Curls

All you need for this exercise is either dumbells or a barbell (our example pictures are with a barbell). Or really any object that you can lift. Maybe your cats are the perfect weight to be your dumbbells! Just kidding (kinda, only if you’re gentle can you do that!). We’re all about doing a workout ANYWHERE so we encourage you to get (safely) creative. So, what exercise are we talking about today? Reverse curls.

What are reverse curls? Reverse curls and curls (lifting something toward you by extending your elbow), but flipped! What does that mean? Basically, instead of the soft (under) part of your arm facing you, your arms will be faced downward in their neutral position. To put it most simply: your palms are facing down instead of up. And then you latch those strong hands onto a weight and bend your elbow, bringing it toward your face/chin. You won’t be able to do as much weight this way, because it’s a bit harder on your muscles.

Jul262018

How to Properly Deal with Stubble Itch

While a stubble is believed to be a timeless look that never goes out of style, it has its own downsides too. Despite being easy to maintain and care of, it can give you a hard time if it gets itchy, which it does more often than you may think.

However, that’s no reason to ditch it. Instead, you can follow everything we mentioned below and the itchiness would go away and probably never trouble you again.

Why a Stubble is Typically Itchier?

New beards and stubbles are often much itchier than a longer or fully grown beard. This is because you have to shave very regularly when getting and maintaining a stubble.

When you shave or trim regularly, your short beard hair gets a sharp edge. And this sharp edge then causes friction with your hair follicles, as the hair grows after trimming. Naturally, you’d want a very good stubble trimmer to maintain the length even throughout.

Shaving is a primary cause of itchiness when growing or maintaining a stubble. In fact, it’s also one of the reasons the initial phase of growing a beard tends to be very challenging, as a new or short beard often turns itchy. Therefore, ditch the razor and use a trimmer instead.

Cleanliness is a Great First Step

Keeping your beard clean can go a long way in helping you tackle the itchiness common with a stubble. Be it a stubble or a longer beard, they all trap the dead skin cells that come off your skin, which then lead to issues like itchiness and irritation. This is especially if you have no plans to continue your stubble into grow into a longer beard.

However, dealing with this kind of itchiness is not as difficult as it might seem. In fact, simply making sure your beard remains clean throughout the day can make quite a difference.

But you need to understand that your beard hair is different than the hair on your head. It’s androgenic, which means it tends to get influenced by your testosterone levels. This calls for a more careful way of washing your beard hair.

First of all, this means that you shouldn’t be using your body soap or the shampoo you use for your head’s hair for your beard. They often cause more harm than you may think, which includes striping your beard hair of its natural oils that are essential for its health, drying out the skin underneath your beard, and of course, contributing to the itchiness.

A good beard wash can be a very effective cleaning product for your beard. However, you would need to get one with all natural ingredients, and no chemicals at all.

In fact, unless your beard has turned too itchy, simply cleaning with water may work well too. After washing your beard with water, use a good beard brush to just move it over your stubble, and make sure all the areas of your beard hair are covered. This would help get rid of the dead skin cells that may be trapped in your stubble, as well as dirt or other elements that are typically associated with an itchy beard.

Finally, after being done with this process, you need to rinse your beard with warm water. Following this simple process alone may help you eliminate your itchiness to quite an extent.

Using a Good Beard Oil Product

A beard oil is not only for longer beards, but for a stubble as well. Even a stubble needs to be moisturized, and if you don’t use a solid beard oil product, the skin underneath your stubble will struggle to be hydrated enough to support your stubble well.

If the underneath skin lacks hydration, you will find it hard to keep the dandruff, dryness, irritation, itchiness and other similar issues at bay.

A beard oil offers many advantages, with the main ones being nourishing your stubble, keeping it and the skin underneath hydrated, as well as keeping the beard in an overall healthy condition. It’s important to note that as the beard and the skin underneath it rely on each other, it’s imperative for the latter to be hydrated and healthy as well.

And daily use of a good beard oil product helps you achieve that. Apart from that, it would also make your stubble softer, which would, in turn, help lower the friction between your stubble hair and your hair follicles.

As far as using the right amount of beard oil is concerned, a few drops would be more than enough for a stubble. The perfect amount, however, would vary from one man to another.

Start with a very small amount of beard oil, and avoid using in a quantity that makes your stubble feel greasy and oily.

Conditioning Your Beard

Just like the hair on your head, your beard hair can do with some conditioning as well. However, like what we said about washing your beard, using a hair conditioner on your beard is not a good idea too.

An ideal product for conditioning your beard would be a beard balm. But again, don’t forget what we told you about avoiding products containing chemicals.

Going for one that has Argan or Jojoba as its main ingredient would be a great choice. These two ingredients are known for softening and strengthening your beard, as well as tackling dandruff, which is one of the biggest reasons most men experience itching in their beard.

Other Useful Tips

Apart from the three main steps we explained above in detail, there are also some quick tips that might help get rid of the itching in your stubble for good.

Let’s take a look at them below.

Trim your beard when your stubble grows in an uneven way
Use a good razor; the cheap ones tend to cause temporary irritation and itchiness, which can occasionally turn into a bigger issue
If you experience itching right after shaving, soaking your beard area before trimming or shaving might help
When drying your beard, don’t use a hair dryer; gently pat your beard instead using a soft towel

Jul232018

Should You Use Sleeping Pills?

It depends! That is one of the most common answers in the health, wellness and fitness industries. Why? Every single person is unique and reacts differently to various stimuli. That is why there is not a universal training program that works for everyone. That is why there is not a certain diet that works for everyone. In this situation, it really depends first and foremost on whether you’re having trouble sleeping or not. There are countless sleep-based research studies that have been conducted. Private companies trying to promote their revolutionary, or not so revolutionary, products often conduct their own studies. Universities and wellness institutes do the same since sleep is often considered the most crucial way to recover, and recovery is seen as one of the three core competencies when it comes to your general health. (The other two are physical activity and what you consume.)

In college, I operated at an extremely high level while sleeping four hours or so a night. At the time, I did take a mid-day nap for about an hour. I was training nearly six hours a day and consuming well over 12,000 calories a day. While I was completely drug free, I would take a multi-vitamin everyday and also took some supplements, including fish oils, glucosamine and even melatonin. Melatonin is the most common sleep aid on the market. It is made by many companies and its single ingredient nature makes it less intimidating to most consumers. First, will melatonin make a difference in your sleep and second, how much do you personally need to take?

Even after you find the right amount, any supplement to your health routine might not necessarily maintain its effectiveness over time. You can often build tolerances and find that you need a higher dosage to feel the same outcome. Even if you find it to make a positive difference, the cost over time might outweigh how much better you’re sleeping. It becomes a question of whether you’re willing to make a small investment at first, in order to see if you can sleep better. Those investments can come in many forms, other than pills or tablets. I’ve tried buying expensive pillows, fancy sheets, using a fan at night to stay cool, sleeping with ice packs under my lower back and shoulders, playing sleep music throughout the room, using blackout curtains and more. I’ve tried Neuro’s sleep drink and also Ronnie Coleman’s Resurrection supplement. Why? Because I understand the importance of optimizing recovery.

Most people aim for 6-8 hours of sleep a night. Those are the recommended numbers, according to most sleep research studies. I don’t care as much about the number of hours that I lay in bed at night. My focus is getting in bed, immediately falling asleep, not waking up in the middle of the night and waking up fresh enough that I can instantly roll out of bed at 5:30 in the morning and get right to work. My goal, with my current life schedule, is to be in bed from 10:30 pm-5:30 am and do nothing other than get quality recovery time. Right now, in an effort to do so, with the blistering temperatures and lack of air conditioning in our LA apartment, as well as my insanely, unimaginably impossible schedule, I’ve started using a new product called Sleep Complex by ORB. They reached out to us to see if we would like to try out their product. For honesty purposes, we were paid for this post, but that won’t stop us from giving our honest opinion.

Jul112018

4 Workout Ideas for Leg Curls

Leg curls are exercises that are focused on the hamstrings. Most fitness buffs mainly focus on their arms and other parts of their body but forget just how important it is to exercise their legs. When they fail to do so, it will result in an imbalanced look, or what people call chicken legs.

Jun242018

Why It’s Important to Take a Recovery Day

Note that I didn’t say rest. There are some people out there (looking at you, Hungry) who believe in zero rest days and that’s okay as long as they balance properly. I (Fit here) go for one rest day a week and sometimes it’s a rest and recovery day.

What is a recovery day? A recovery day could mean a full rest day where you don’t workout, letting your muscles recover. Other forms of recovery days include yin yoga to really stretch, massage (self or professional), using heat (like a bath or heating pad), self myofascial release (think: rolling out muscles with a hard object), incredibly light lifting to just get your joints loose, or maybe a long walk or easy hike. As you can tell, a recovery day is really up to you. It’s about what you need that day after a week (or a few days) of workouts. It’s about getting in tune with your body and actually listening to it rather than forcing it. For example, my recovery day today consisted of a short yoga session focused on upper back stretches and using a massager on my back. If you can’t tell, my upper back is bugging me.

Jun132018

Full Body Bodybuilding Workout

Yesterday, we talked about one aspect of a lot of our recent life changes; we’ve been going to Fortune Gym for a few months. Hungry has been recovering from two (new) significant injuries over the past year: a torn quad/adductor in his right hip girdle and a torn soleus/gastroc in his left calf. Therapy has only yielded minimal results and rehab workouts have been hindered by a lack of consistency. Finally, after having some success, Hungry has decided to transition his full rehab training plan into one that is a bit more dynamic. While the full workout split hasn’t been completed yet, since today was only day three (started Monday), and it takes weeks/months to make sure a performance based program is created properly, Hungry was relatively happy with his full body bodybuilding session today, so he wanted to share it.

It is approximately 60 minutes long, with no warm up or cool down. Rest is minimal in between sets and it isn’t truly a bodybuilding workout. It is bodybuilding-inspired in the movements, but mainly focuses on accessory lifts to complement weightlifting exercises performed on Mondays and powerlifting exercises performed Friday. The sets and reps vary between 3 sets of 20 reps or 4 sets of 12-10-8-6 reps depending on the exercises. We’re still working out those details, but here are the exercises that were performed.

Jun122018

The Best Gym in LA!

There are more fitness facilities in LA than anyone would ever want to count. When I managed a very large fitness facility in West Los Angeles, we had dozens of significant competitors in walking distance. It was brutal and trying to offer the same classes that these specialized locations hosted was a massive challenge. With such an impressive selection, there isn’t ever going to be a consensus best “gym in LA” or anything along those lines, but there are certainly places that are undisputed gems.

We’ve talked about, on the blog or in person, some of the best deals in LA. Whether that means off-the-wall places like Tempest, amazing communities such as Barbell Brigade, cost-free natural selections including the Santa Monica Rings/Runyon Canyon or the unmatched intensity you’ll find at Gold’s Venice, LA has something for everyone. As Hungry & Fit, we do, however, need to give an edge to the facility that we personally use. Obviously, that says a lot about a place.

Since we do fairly well and are fiscally responsible, we don’t limit ourselves to budget options/chains including 24 Hour Fitness, LA Fitness, Planet Fitness and the YMCA (though we do love the Y!). We prefer to pay more and avoid dealing with people who aren’t serious about their training; we don’t want to fight people who are on their phone while sitting on equipment. Also, we like to avoid budget options since they often have higher traffic; we don’t want to wait for equipment, in order to keep our workout intensity higher.