Health

Nov242015

Meditation on Love

To continue our theme of thanks and giving, let’s do a short meditation on love. This will only take a few minutes and give you a great deal of happiness down the way. They say being grateful keeps us happy, but also healthy and I think it’s worth it no matter what. Being grateful makes you humble and thankful for what you have. That weeds out a lot of negative emotions. Negative emotions are like vines slowly wrapping around your body and neck, tightening until you can barely breathe. Love can combat that! Let’s get started.

Nov202015

Grateful Fridays

To continue on the aspect of being thankful, I wanted to talk about being grateful! My friend, Mary Kate, and I like to play a little “game.” It doesn’t really have a name so I’ll call it “3 Things.” Basically, randomly whenever you feel like it, you email a friend, a partner, a family member, three things you’re grateful for. It can be anything from something deep to something that’s simply an everyday thing. Mary Kate and I sometimes just do random days out of a month, or we might do it for days, weeks, or months at a time! It really helps to stop and think about what you’re grateful for. Here are mine today:

Nov172015

Fitness & Wellness Job Opening

While this isn’t a job opening to work with Hungry & Fit, we wanted to share this opportunity for anyone already in the LA area or anyone interested in moving to the LA area, specifically Santa Monica. The Santa Monica YMCA is a beautiful facility located right in the center of downtown Santa Monica, blocks away from the Promenade, a Yasiel Puig home run away from the beach and boardwalk.

It’s a unique space that has a basketball court, racquetball courts, group exercise studios, indoor cycling, an old school free weight area, cardio machines, a gymnastics room, two pools, a hot tub, sauna, steam room, an area with mats and a heavy bag, and much more. It’s not your standard gym, but it has everything from an old school t-bar row to a Versa Climber. In my opinion, there is a lot that can be done with this space.

A pic from us working out at the SM YMCA

Nov152015

Runyon Canyon Adventures

Runyon Canyon often gets a bad rap. This is because it can get very busy and socialites love to go there. So, people say, if you want to avoid a crowd, don’t hike at Runyon. That is true…to an extent. I was always wary of hiking at Runyon (I had never done so before) because of this reason. I didn’t want to be surrounded by rich Los Angelenos or clueless tourists during my outdoor fitness and peace time. We now live about a 15-minute walk away from Runyon. So, one day, Noke and I accidentally stumbled on it and said, “Why not? Let’s give it a go.” I had no idea about what trails there were, how long they were, difficulties, or anything. Like I said, I was new. As I’ve learned from previous experiences, Noke loves hiking. And we now both love our Runyon Canyon adventures.

Nov072015

NETA Group Exercise Workshop in Los Angeles

If you read our recent post about NASM’s effort to enter the Group Exercise market through their strategic acquisition of AFAA, you might remember we discussed the current hierarchy of certifications in the industry. While we didn’t give you the whole picture, you saw a glimpse and got an idea of who the heavy hitters were in group exercise. One organization we didn’t mention happens to currently be one of the only two that has NCCA Accreditation for both their personal trainer and group exercise instructor courses. In fact, I’ve looked through a lot of fitness professional catalogs and they might have the most diverse of all. They are NETA. (I spend at least ten minutes a day explaining acronyms in the fitness and aquatics industries to people.)

Source: NCCA

Nov062015

30-Day Yoga Program

Last week, I told you guys that I need to learn how to stretch again. I’m here to report I’m doing a fairly good job! What’s one of the best ways to stretch? Yoga! I wanted to restart my stiff, non-flexible body so that I could feel limber again and be able to touch my toes. I found that I had really isolated a big part of my physical health: my flexibility. These 30 (hopefully) consecutive days of yoga will open up my hips, my hamstrings, and overall help my flexibility. I learned the hard way that you can’t ignore one part of your fitness; each part of our physical health is important. If you ignore one part, something bad is going to creep up on you. I am happy and look forward to my yoga each day. But how did I pick one?

Nov052015

2015’s Best Protein Powder

While in Petco tonight, I was questioning my normal choice for dog food and needed assistance. Under great duress due to my indecisive nature and love for our animals, I decided to head over to a reliable website. While we might look to Amazon and Yelp for reviews or thumbs up on YouTube for that matter, we often forget that anyone can contribute to those ratings. The result is something far more subjective and far less consistency.

When I need to make a more important decision, I might head over to Cnet or review.com because I know that they are professionals, getting paid for what they are doing, and therefore to a certain degree, their lives depend on providing high quality and far more objective reviews. While I don’t know them personally, their reviews seem to be extremely in-depth and considerate of more than just, “we’ll give you some money to recommend our product.” Sadly that happens far too often, especially in the fitness and nutrition industries!

Gotta get our protein on to stay hungry and fit!

Nov042015

Join a Society of Strength

This is a post that I recently wrote for Society of Strength, a new organization trying to bring all strength sports together in one supportive group. The article is called “Defining Strength” and while you might read the post here, please visit Society of Strength after and look around! You never know what you might learn! Often I have seen individuals fall in love with powerlifting, strongman, Crossfit, and more. What’s even better is that more often that not, those individuals are not athletes but just average people who love the cooperative nature of those sports, as opposed to bodybuilding or some other disciplines that can be very lonely. Either way, your experience is what you make it! Read this and you’re already going to be one step closer to being hungry and fit!

Nov032015

Are You Working Out Hard Enough?

There are a few ways to measure whether you’re working hard or not. Well, there are a lot more than a few ways, but there are only so many that are relatively accurate. When it comes to exercise, the best way to measure progress is over time. We can watch our strength and conditioning grow as we can do more pull-ups or as we can see more abs in the mirror. As our mile time decreases and our lean muscle mass increases, we receive positive feedback from our body and it feels good. But what about during that painful workout? What can keep you going during the hard times?

Let’s go back to the first statement made in this post and reconsider the two most popular options. The first one is called perceived exertion, which basically makes you subjectively rate how hard you’re working on a scale of 1-10, or 1-20. It usually takes me a few minutes to explain it enough to your average fitness enthusiast before they get the general idea. It could take them weeks, months, or years at that point to fully understand it and apply it. It’s not reliable enough for most people. It’s too qualitative and not quantitative enough because of its subjectivity. So what is the second option?

Nov012015

What NASM’s Acquisition of AFAA Means Right Now

Yes, this is old news to most fitness professionals, but it came up in the office the other day and I realized that I never shared this with you! If you click on this link you will see that NASM (National Academy of Sports Medicine) and AFAA (Aerobics and Fitness Association of America) are both listed on the same screen, on AFAA’s website nonetheless. Don’t be confused, AFAA has not acquired NASM; it’s actually the other way around. On this particular page, AFAA is offering a NASM Group Personal Training Online Workshop for $129, granting 7 AFAA CEUs. Essentially, you read a bit, watch some videos, and take a quiz that you need to pass in three attempts.