Health

Nov292017

Cardio and Core Workout: Get It!

Happy Workout Wednesday, everyone, and welcome to one of our favorite workouts! Everyone has a different approach to training, and it may take a trial with every single one of those to find out what works for you, but one popular tactic is taking care of two important aspects at once. Combining core and cardio can be effective, since they’re extremely important to overall health, but can be painstakingly boring. It’s like vacuuming and scooping litter at the same time, in a way.

Now, to be clear, core refers to exercises that will help strengthen muscles throughout your abdomen, on your front and back. That means, you’ll be working your abs, obliques, lower back, hips and even glutes since they all work closely with one another when you’re performing more complex, or demanding, exercises and activities. Cardio is a misunderstood and overused word that we’ll use today to refer to exercises that will help you elevate your heart rate significantly in an effort to either burn fat or increase your athletic performance by building endurance. I hope that explanation makes sense.

Nov282017

Should You Try a Free Week at CorePower Yoga?

I started working from home just a few weeks ago and this meant a lot of changes to my lifestyle. I no longer had delicious (but often unhealthy) catered meals for lunch (and often leftovers for dinner) which means I now have to cook my own lunch. Although perhaps not as exciting, I was looking forward to this. I am so much healthier at home than when catered food is in front of me. I made plans to make and eat egg salad, tuna salad, and salmon cakes. My snacks are healthy too: carrots with peanut butter, protein bars, and smoothies. Workout plans had to change too: I no longer had a gym right in my workspace. Instead, I have to think of other options. I belong to a YMCA, but it’s not quite walking distance. Thus, I wanted to try a few places walking distance to my now-home office. I saw that the Hollywood CorePower Yoga offered a free week. Perfect!

Fun story: the first CorePower class I went to was a hot yoga class. I thought, there must be some mistake–it didn’t say that on the schedule! Boy, was I in for a surprise. I don’t like saunas, I don’t like being in overly hot areas, it’s miserable to me. Thus, I have never wanted to go to a hot yoga class…ever. To me, yoga is more of a spiritual exercise than a physical one. However, I ended up in this hot yoga class and I wasn’t going to turn back now. Thankfully, I brought water. I entered the room and was hit in the face with sweltering heat and could hear the heaters turn on, pouring more torture into the room (why?!). By the end of the class, I had taken my shirt off and I was pouring sweat. It was definitely one of the sweatiest I had ever been. As the teacher asked us to sit lower into chair pose, I mentally threw insults at him in a very non-yogic way. However, my mentality shifted from workout class to survival class. If I treated it like I needed to survive through torturous heat, I could actually do it. I even found more focus through that and could drop deeper into poses. Who knew. Whew, I made it through my hot yoga class–and hopefully the last!

My reaction to accidentally going to hot yoga

Nov252017

Advanced Boxing Tips

Jose James Hyland is an amateur boxer with a college degree, multiple certifications and years of experience as a personal trainer. He has worked with dozens of paraplegic and quadriplegic through the AXIS Project, helping them find their own form of fitness through boxing, with him as their coach. For those of you that aren’t working with a coach, but have practiced enough to no longer be considered a beginner, here are some more advanced tips to improve your technique. Essentially, if you’re just starting and don’t have the knack for boxing yet, you shouldn’t burden yourself with these more advanced ideas.

(Also, please remember that an amateur boxer has more experience than an expert. By that, I mean, an expert in the gym with no fight experience, hasn’t competed at the level of an amateur boxer. It takes a lot of time and effort to become an amateur. Unless you’ve been registered, fought in the ring with a referee, and even seen your face on an official poster for the card of a legitimate organization, you are not an amateur boxer.)

You can check out more tips from Jose at Flexing Fitness but until then, enjoy!

Nov242017

4 Tips on Treating a Hangnail Infection

One of the most annoying things one can experience when nails and cuticles are not properly taken care of is a hangnail. A hangnail is a small piece of skin that has been separated from the side of one’s fingernail or toe-nail. They can easily get torn off and could cause small bleeding wounds. If you are not careful, they can easily get infected. A hangnail can happen due to several causes such as nail biting, cold weather, frequent immersion in water, and more. It could get swollen and painful and sometimes, may emit pus. It is highly advised that you seek treatment as soon as possible when this happens. You can also do a lot of preventive measures such as moisturizing your hands and fingernails regularly.

Here are four tips for treating a hangnail infection.

Nov222017

3 Thyroid Problems That You Should Be Aware Of

The thyroid gland is a small butterfly-shaped organ that’s part of the endocrine system. It’s responsible for releasing essential hormones that regulate our body’s metabolism. Several body functions are reliant on the hormones that the thyroid gland produces. This includes our body weight, breathing, heart rate, body temperature and more.

There’s no denying the importance of the thyroid gland in the overall health of our bodies. It’s important to properly take care of it, and be aware of the many problems it could face such as cretinism, goiter, and Grave’s disease.

This article will discuss those 3 thyroid problems so we can be aware of it, as well their corresponding diagnosis and treatment. Read on to learn more.

Nov092017

How Your Mattress Can Help You Stay in Shape

Usually, we associate getting fit with getting active because it’s only when we’re running around during the day that we burn off those calories, are capable of losing weight and can strengthen our bodies, right? Wrong. In fact, one of the key times in which we can get fit is actually when we’re horizontal. Nope, I’m not talking about leg lifts or chin ups. (Phew, says you.) I’m talking about night-time, when we’re getting our snooze on.

Getting enough, good-quality sleep is one of the best things we can do for our bodies and our minds. It can improve our memory, help us to lose weight, and reduce anxiety. It even lets us live longer! Sleeping properly makes us happier, healthier people and a little bit better at everything we do. And yep, that includes working out.

Here’s how sleep can help you become a workout machine… (Not literally. That’d be weird.)

Image source

Nov082017

Why You Aren’t Getting a Six Pack!

Recently, someone in the gym asked us about an exercise we were performing, specifically inquiring if it was targeting our abs and then questioning how it differs from the abdominal crunch machine he was using. We explained that this particular variation of the abdominal crunch would activate more muscles in his core, since the weight could force his body left or right as well.

When he showed obvious frustration and explained how he’d been using the machine for years with no progress, we asked how he was using the machine, specifically referring to how many reps and sets he was doing. When he told us that he performed 30-40 reps per set, we asked him if he was happy with his upper arms. When he said that he was indeed happy with that body part, we asked him how he trained his arms, specifically referring to how many reps and sets he was doing. When he told us that he performed 8-12 reps per set, we presented the question: why are you training your abs differently?

Nov072017

Tips for a Better Rest and a Good Night’s Sleep

Getting a good night’s sleep is an essential component of maintaining your emotional and physical health, but with all the stresses and obligations of modern life, it isn’t always easy to get a good and restful night’s sleep. Psychological therapies to help reset our sleep cycles take time to have an effect and the pharmaceutical sleep aids are addictive in the long term.

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Oct262017

What Men NEED to Wear!

Okay, okay… I know what you’re thinking. Men are (generally) far more comfortable in the gym than women, but we’re not talking about that. Ladies, imagine if we told you how important it is to wear a good sports bra during a workout. Wouldn’t you agree with us? Well, for men, it is equally important to make sure the body is kept under control during a hardcore training session. The sweat stinging your eyes and that burning feeling in your throat is distracting enough, right?

Personally, I used to wear your typical briefs growing up and back then they only had them in one color… white. While all the other boys started wearing boxers, I stayed true to my briefs since I was an athlete and was most comfortable in them. Can you even imagine boxers under baseball pants? Yikes! Then, I came across boxer briefs and my world was changed. If you look in my underwear drawer, you’ll only find boxer briefs and trunks, which we’ll say are just slightly shorter than boxer briefs.

Now, we’ve all seen compression shorts gaining popularity over the past decade through exposure on social media. Since everyone wants to be like they’re favorite athlete, they start by dressing like them, but compression shorts are not only very expensive, but also aren’t necessarily built to last very long. Professional athletes can afford them, but not all of us have those huge contracts. So, we look elsewhere and find boxer briefs that provide us with that compression. That way, we don’t have to worry about shopping for so many different items and packing one of each in our work or gym bags.

Oct252017

Is a Ketogenic Diet Healthy For You?

Once you read this post, you’ll get to know about this little secret that majority of the famous diets which are touted to help you lose weight, from the Mediterranean to Vegetarian to the Paleo diet; they all share the same principle. All the diets recommend people to consume whole foods instead of processed and packaged foods and taking abundance of healthy fats, protein, complex carbs, minerals, vitamins and vegetables which are rich in fiber.

The only difference between such diets is that each of them proposes a different path which leads to accomplishing the same goal of losing weight and staying healthy. If you don’t know what Ketogenic diet is, we’re here to help you with the details of what you should eat and what you shouldn’t if you’re following this particular diet.