The American Swimming Coaches Association sent all of their coaches an email recently in an effort to try to fill some vacancies for Swim Outlet’s Fitter and Fast Tour. This project is top-notch and travels across the country to provide the highest quality clinics of swim instruction to anyone interested. It’s a huge benefit for experienced swimmers and beginners, and while it focuses on youth, coaches and whole community benefit from its presence.
Back in August, I saw that the American Swimming Coaches Association (ASCA) was launching a new course to become a Certified Summer Swim Coach. For those of you who are unaware, summer swim teams can be so much different from your standard club or high school teams. The competitors can often be those who face one another in other more competitive seasons. They use this format to bridge the summer gap and stay in shape while working on and developing new skills.
For many, the level of commitment and attendance is insignificant in comparison to their other teams and as a result, the coach is faced with endless new challenges. Since swimming is such a competitive sport, you’re faced with going into meets with a fraction of your team. Often, that small group are your least experienced and skilled swimmers, but you have to make due because swim meet scoring can be tremendously one-sided, and that looks bad to say the least.
As the LA Fit Expo is in just a few days and the Evolution Fitness Conference comes with it, tens of thousands of fitness enthusiasts and hundreds of fitness professionals will be walking through the doors of the convention center. The energy as high as everyone aims to meet their favorite social media celebrities, grab a picture to post online, and pick up some free shirt and supplement samples. It’s like a feeding frenzy but the positivity in the room is outstanding.
Organizations including POUND and many others take the stage to demo their newest and most challenging group training formats while vendors show off their most advanced products to date. It isn’t quite the same as IDEA, IHRSA, SCW Mania, or Perform Better, but the EFC still gives professionals the opportunity to learn from their peers and even gain some continuing education units in the process. All of this comes at reasonable rates if you can find parking.
Food Network was and still is the most-viewed network in our household. Over the course of 20 years, that hasn’t changed but the personalities and themes certainly have. While it’s not fair to say whether it’s for better or for worse because that would be so subjective, we can definitely say what we enjoy more or less. Everyone has strong feelings for Bobby Flay, Guy Fieri, and all the baking contests, but there are just some shows that give you a little bit of everything. Cutthroat Kitchen is one of them.
For the longest time, we watched a lot of Chopped and we still do. It has its practical application. While the focus of most competition cooking shows isn’t being healthy, there are two major components that will make the life easier of the everyday chef, or the home chef. Those two factors are time and convenience. In most of these competitions, the chefs are only given 20-30 minutes to prepare a meal. That’s right, on Chopped they’re not making a single dish. They have to prepare four portions, which could be exactly how many you need to make for your family! Most of us don’t have hours every day to make fresh meals, so we often resort to opting for some not-so-fresh meals but that often sacrifices the health factor. Frozen food and fast food are time-friendly and have large portions, but typically are filled with unnatural ingredients, excess calories, tons of sodium, and a lack of nutrients. On these shows, top chefs show you how to save time.
Getting from Point A to Point B used to be a challenge of physical endurance and mental strength. If you’ve played the game The Oregon Trail, you can only imagine how fit you’d have to be in order to make it across the country. Nowadays, everyone tries to put in as little effort as possible, as we’re even moving closer to cars that drive themselves. While I’m not asking you to ford any rivers, it wouldn’t hurt to think about turning your daily commute into something a little bit more rigorous. Here are a few things to try differently:
We get asked every single day if this will work or that is the answer to all of their questions. People wanting to lose weight, build muscle and get stronger say that this person told me that and that person told me this but I’m not sure who to believe. Just the other night, I spent ten minutes answering some guy’s questions in a hot tub and most of that was damage control. I had to let him know that most of what he heard were nothing more than myths and misinformation.
Any teacher or instructor can tell you that it can be far more challenging and time-consuming to teach the right way to do something to someone who only knows how to do something the wrong way. To be clearer, it’s easier to make french fries from a potato instead of mashed potatoes. When I first started really taking my fitness (outside of sports and martial arts) seriously, I bought every magazine at the grocery store. If it had fitness, health, or muscle in the title, I was reading it front to back. My dream was to one day be on the cover of Men’s Health, but it isn’t anymore.
Today we stopped by No Kill Los Angeles, or NKLA, which is one of our favorite animal shelters. We adopted a 5-month old puppy from here in the past and have attended their super adoption event with the Best Friend’s Animal Society two years in a row. These two work together with other local animal rescues to try to save the lives of as many animals as possible, and we appreciate that effort. We’ve included pets countless times before in our posts for many reasons, including their positive effect on your mental and physical health.
Our precious baby
Please enjoy the post below brought to you by our friends from http://www.runhundred.com.
Taken individually, the year’s best workout tracks are each solid picks for topping off an existing mix. As a whole, though, they might work even better—as they balance two of the main elements in a great playlist: familiarity and freshness.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year and every night you have a holiday party booked. An ugly sweater here, a kiss under the mistletoe there, and one too many glasses of eggnog everywhere. As we look towards making resolutions for 2016, let’s try to survive 2015 first and as we’re shoving endless calories and drinks down our throats, let’s try to balance that with something to help us recover.
Sometimes it can be really challenging to get someone who isn’t interested in physical activity to start caring about their health, especially when you care about them or their progress. A huge population of individuals that are lacking in the exercise category are often those who spend hours and hours in a chair every day. They might be eating so little that they’re avoiding being overweight, but that doesn’t make them healthy.
