The X-Ray Vision-aries Blog describes itself as “a healthy and green living blog designed for non-health nuts” and their post featuring gym-alternatives certainly follows that philosophy. Don’t have a gym-membership? Have one but are not motivated enough to use it? Then “100 Fun and Free Exercise Alternatives to Your Gym Membership” is right up your alley.

From links to online articles describing detailed exercise routines you can do right at home to helpful pointers to everyday calorie-melting activities you could get into, these links have something for everyone. Here is just a small sample from this extensive list:

• Workout with weights right at home
• Walk your/neighbor’s dog round the block
• Workout using Mens’ Health articles
• Cut the grass using a push mower
• Park farther away from a store than usual and get a walk into your routine

For the rest of the tips, hit the article and read through the entire list.  Some of the links to other sites were so good I bookmarked them on the spot so I could refer to them later when I don’t have a gym around.

What other techniques do you use to exercise when you don’t have a gym handy? Comment away your ideas and share your ideas.

If you have ever been stressed for time and wondered how to get the most effective use workout from the few precious minutes you have during lunch, then the Smart Fitness Blog on MSNBC Health has a few quick tips for you. In answering a question posed by a mom of three kids about maximizing her gym time during her lunch break, contributing writer Jacqueline Stenson explains that intensity is the thing to focus on.

Instead of steady cardio for the time you have in the gym, she recommends using intensity changes to vary your workout:

For the cardio portion, aim for high-intensity interval training on a treadmill or bike, for instance, at 65 percent to 75 percent of your maximum heart rate, says Anderson. Work at that pace for three to five minutes, then lower the intensity to allow yourself to recover briefly, and then go for another high-intensity burst. As your fitness level improves with time, you can try to push yourself harder. [MSNBC Health]

Of equal importance is weight/strength training (in fact i would say this is even more important than cardio). With only a few minutes for this, it’s better not to focus on the etire body at once:

When hitting the weights for only about 20 minutes, you may not have enough time to work all the major muscle groups in one day. So target a few muscle groups, such as chest, back, shoulders and abs one day, and then other groups, such as triceps, biceps and legs, on another. [MSNBC Health]

Some other topics covered in this useful Q&A includes nutrition pre- and post-workout as well as more cardio-information.

How do you maximize your gym time?

We often hear of several attempts to curb the easy access to junk foods and sugary sodas by kids. There is talk of legislation to ban the advertising of unhealthy snacks during childrens’ programming on television and even the removal of snack- and soda-vending machines from schools. But how successful are these programs and should they be continued or is the effort not worth the results?

The answer is: yes, the programs are successful but only if continued for extended periods of time. Yahoo News reports on the results of the so-called Dutch Obesity Intervention in Teenagers (DOiT) which had special health-lessons at school and also increased gym-time:

The results were at least partially positive, researchers report in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. Over 20 months, students at 10 schools that ran the program reduced their soda intake, compared with their peers at eight “control” schools. Girls at the intervention schools also showed a smaller increase in body fat. [Yahoo News]

There was only one issue with this program and that was that the results tended to slowly show diminishing returns over time:

However, those benefits tended to wane over time. And certain other positive effects seen at the eight-month mark — like less weight gain around the waistline in boys — had disappeared by the 20-month point.

The findings suggest that such school-based programs can be effective, but that they need to be kept up, lead researcher Dr. Amika S. Singh, of the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, told Reuters Health.[Yahoo News]

Looks like when it comes to weight loss, the “falling off the bandwagon” syndrome is not limited to adults alone.Any fitness, weight-loss of good-nutrition program needs to be a continuous life-long process and over time it becomes … what else, a way of life. No quick-fixes and no brief-periods of weight-loss “diets”.

Making fitness your way of life is the only way to ensure success.

Summer’s round the corner and if ever there was a time you wanted to be slim, trim and ready for the beach then I am assuming this is it! If so, then ere is some more ammunition you can add to your list of great exercise moves to get your body in shape. MSNBC Health gives you six exercise moves you are probably not doing to get that great shape you’re looking for:

Before you throw up your hands and cover up in your beach towel, though, realize there’s still time to shape up. Granted, you’re not going to shed 50 pounds by Memorial Day — or even the Fourth of July. But it’s not too late to lose a noticeable amount of weight, firm up some flab and feel more confident[...] [MSNBC Health]

The “moves” include such not-form-the-gym tips as Writing Your Goals and even Fitting In Some Fun in your routine. Read the rest of the tips and incorporate them as you see fit as you get ready for beach season!

While being overweight in adulthood and during middle-age is known to be a risk factor for heart-disease, a recent study highlights the danger of being overweight even as teenagers or adolescents leads to similar risk factors.

Abdominal fat can be either visceral (deep) or superficial (just under the skin). The former is much more deadly than the latter since it surrounds the major organs in the abdominal area and restricts the flow of blood to and from these organs. Swedish researchers determined that among about 600 men they studied, those whose Body mass index (BMI) increased most during adolescence also had the most visceral fat which could lead to type 2 (adult-onset) diabetes or heart disease later on in life.

Being overweight in childhood, however, did not lead to visceral abdominal fat but mostly to the superficial variety which is not as dangerous:

The findings suggest that preventing excessive weight gain in adolescence, in particular, may help control visceral fat accumulation later on, according to Dr. Jenny M. Kindblom and her colleagues at Gothenburg University.

So even if childhood BMI is high, Kindblom told Reuters Health, there may be benefits to preventing further increases during adolescence. [MSNBC Health]

The last line above could be the biggest takeaway from this study: It is never too late to lose weight and, for that matter, never too early either.

If you have ever found yourself with too little time to complete a full workout but still a strong desire to maximise what little time you have left so you derive the maxmum benefit, then here’s something that might prove to be useful. The WebMD site carries a “10 Minutes To Burn Calories” artickle that describes exactly the soution the time-constraint-problem.

There are several theme-based programs of exercises that you can choose from. Each program typically consists of 4 or 5 different exercises each one varying in intensity and duration. For example, the very first one is Backyard Boot Camp and as the name suggests, this is a program you can perform virtually anywhere with exercises like jumping jacks, step-ups and mountain-climbers.

Check out all the other exercise-programs as well – they are bound to come in handy someday when you just don’t have the time for a full-fledged workout!

We Love Working Out!

When it comes to working out in the gym, how early is too early? If trends are anything to go by, then it seems teenagers and even preteens (the 10-12 crowd) are hitting the gym these days and reaping all the benefits their elderly companions get. It is an interesting development that will go a long way in reducing the high obesity and overweight levels in this country.

Preteens And Teenagers In The Gym

The Washington Post writes about the Green Valley YMCA in Frederick County (Monrovia, MD), where children as young as 11 are allowed as long as they are accompanied by adults. The various exercise machines are a source of wonder to the young minds  while  early exposure to structured exercise routines builds the kind of mental and physical discipline that can last they child his or her entire lifetime.

Advantages Of Allowing Children to Start Using The Gym Early

Getting a child motivated to exercise is only one part of the story. The gym is also a great place to develop a parent-child rapport. In a world where the Wii-playing, Twitter-Facebook using younger generation rarely crosses paths with the office-going, T.V. watching older one, the gym can turn into one of those common activities both groups can enjoy doing together.

“I wouldn’t say that all kids need to be in the gym, but I have a home gym and my kids love it,” says Seth Blee, a physical therapist who is clinic director at the Inova Physical Therapy Center in Alexandria. “If the parents are exercising to be healthy, they can be great role models.” Kathleen McHale, a pediatric orthopedist at Inova Fairfax Hospital for Children, notes that parent-child exercise “is a little bit like eating dinner together as a family.” [Washington Post]

Exercising also helps build core muscle strength and improves the balance and posture in children. It build s confidence and where kids use the gym with friends it builds a feeling of community and partnership.

Adjustments In The Gym And Safety Factors

It is of course a given that most gyms have equipment that specifically caters to adults, so in these cases, slight modifications need to be made to the machines or gym-layout to make them kid-friendly. Certain rules are also enforced to ensure the safety of children such as requiring the children to always be within sighting -distance of their parents or guardians or requiring a certification by a personal trainer.

To conclude, I think the arrival of the younger generation in the gym is an excellent trend and, in fact, one that needs more encouraging. With due care for proper safety and procedure, exercising at young ages will help the child not only in physical activities or improving general heath, but will also improve confidence and aid in better performance in the classroom.

After all, we all know that it’s a sound mind in a sound body.

If you were to see an article from the Archives of Internal Medicine titled “Physical Activity and the Association of Common FTO Gene Variants With Body Mass Index and Obesity“, I would not blame you if you didn’t read it all the way to its conclusion! But while most arcanely titled pieces of text are doomed to go largely unread, it would be a shame if you were to miss this all important conclusion:

DNA chain

“Our results strongly suggest that the increased risk of obesity owing to genetic susceptibility by FTO variants can be blunted through physical activity. These findings emphasize the important role of physical activity in public health efforts to combat obesity, particularly in genetically susceptible individuals.”

That’s right: exercise can beat the obesity gene! (at least that is what the above would say once translated into English!)

The “fat mass and obesity related gene” is commonly called FTO and a group of researchers from the University of Maryland set out to investigate the effects of exercise on those with single or even multiple variants of this gene. They picked about 700 Amish men and women to figure out how these plain and simple folk (who vigorously shun contact with the rest of the country and continue to avoid modern technology) manage to avoid becoming obese even though their diet consists mainly of refined carbohydrates, sugar and fat.

The answer is quite simply that these people burn an amazing number of calories in their quest to use human labor for most tasks and avoiding machinery wherever possible. Numbers in the order of 900 calories a day have been quoted and that is a lot by any standard of exercise (jogging an entire hour would burn “just” 400!). That vigorous (or even medium-paced, but long bouts of) exercise can even overcome the “natural tendency” of our bodies – as defined by our genes – is a profound discovery and certainly one that should spur the more fatalistic among us to action.

Evadnie Rampersaud, a co-author of this study, says: “Obesity isn’t really determined by genetics, but by environmental factors. We’re not doomed to become obese because we have this gene that we may or may not know about. By living a healthy lifestyle, getting physical activity, eating a proper diet, you can actually impact the final outcome.” [Time]

Genes, while certain types of them may certainly be present in our bodies, need the right stimulus and environmen to actually “turn on”. I say, in the case of villainous ones like the FTO, we exercise hard and leave it “off”!

While the world’s abuzz with the super-human and historic achievements of ace American swimmer, Michael Phelps, few know what it took to keep him going at the blistering pace he managed to maintain (8 Gold medals in the Beijing 2008 Olympics in 5 individual and 3 team events).

He not only beat mark Spitz’s 36-year-old record, but he also did it using all 4 swimming strokes (Spitz only swam freestyle and butterfly) and in an era when other countries from around the world can no longer be ruled out as serious contenders (what with Olympic-level training and access to world-class facilities becoming the norm in more and more countries).

So what does it really take? Yes, there’s perseverance, discipline and training, but there is also … nourishment!

Imagine swimming in 17 Olympic-sized races over a period of around 10 days and managing to continue performing at your peak in each of them. What kind of calorie-intake do you think that would require? Well, the answer is: 4000 calories at every meal – that’s what!

Here’s what it takes to keep Phelps going:

His breakfast: a large bowl of porridge; three doorstep-sized sandwiches of white bread, butter, fried egg, fried onion, lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise; a five-egg omelette tastefully garnished with parsley; three slices of French toast liberally sprinkled with sugar; three pancakes topped with chocolate chips; and two large cups of coffee.

Next to it is lunch, which consists of 1lb (that’s a very large bowl) of pasta with tomato sauce; two large ham-and-cheese sandwiches with more lettuce, tomato and don’t forget the mayo; plus four bottles of a proprietary high-energy sports drink.

For dinner, it’s another pound of pasta, a large cheese-and-tomato pizza, and another four bottles of the same proprietary high-energy sports drink.

[Via Xinhua]

You can visit the Xinhua news site to actually visually see what these monsters of meals look like. Oh, and don’t even try this at home unless you plan to train and compete like Phelps. His average workout burns about 1000 calories per hour (dedicated joggers, you burn about 400). And he does 5 hours of it every day during peak training not counting his actual swims and cooling-off periods!

So, how healthy is this diet in the long-term? Probably not all that much:

Even though the 23-year-old spends a solid five hours of each day burning off those calories, the diet still seems excessive. Is he following some sort of dietician guru’s programme? Barbara Lewin, a nutritionist who has advised international athletes on their dietary health for almost two decades, thinks not.

“Health-wise, if he were eating like this long-term, he’d probably be having to see a cardiologist regularly,” Mrs Lewin told the BBC.

She recommended cutting out the egg yolks, replacing the white bread with whole-wheat, throwing some fruit and vegetables into the mix, and spreading the food out over the day with regular snacking.

[Via BBC News]

Just goes to show that one’s diet must be a pure function of one’s need. Too much or too little and you’re just setting yourself up for nutritional disaster. Age, gender, physical activity and your own specific plan (fat loss? muscle gain?) – they all play a vital role in determining what and how much you should eat.

Just got back from a relaxing vacation and after a brief hiatus, it’s time to get back to business! As a person whose primary day-job involves sitting for long hours in front of a computer, I am always looking for ways to enforce proper posture while I sit. A good chair with adjustable lumbar (lower back) support is most often a given in modern offices and I am lucky enough to have the amazing Aeron chair which, I assume, is adjustable in 30 different ways including a setting that will allow me to work upside down! I am just kidding, of course, but the point is that a chair that offers you good support for your back is extremely important.

But the best chairs in the world will do you no good, if you continue to stoop or slouch while in a sitting position. Swiss Balls substituted as chairs can go a long way in helping you regain your posture. Based on your height, you choose the right sized ball and simply use that instead of a chair. But what do you do when you already have an office chair and rolling a Swiss Ball into office is not an option? Well, you can now use the next best thing: a FitBALL Seating Disc that sits right on your chair while still offering the benefits of a Swiss Ball.

Disclosure: I was sent one (1) FitBALL Seating Disc directly from the manufacturer (Ball Dynamics) to try out and then present a product review on FitnessMantra. You can be assured that my reviews will always be unbiased, irrespective of whether I purchase the product or receive it to review.

Product: FitBALL Seating Disc
Manufacturer: Ball Dynamics International, LLC
Presentation: One 15-inch inflatable Seating Disc with an extra air-hole-plug and a plug-removing tool.

First Impressions

The Seating Disc has a strong rubbery texture and has the feel of a good quality product that should last for a long time. You don’t require a pump to inflate this disc and the air-hole plug does an excellent job of keeping the disc at the right inflation level even after extended periods of usage. When first inflated, the Seating Disc warped a little bit near the edges, but after a day’s use and adjusting the inflation level, these disappeared.

One sure sign you probably don’t have a good posture while sitting? It hurts when you sit right! And this is exactly what I felt within 10 minutes of using the Seating Disc. It’s amazing how much my lower back started to resist my sitting on the Disc although it might be true that continuing to use this product will eventually resolve that issue. It takes a few attempts to get the inflation level just right for you. It’s probably not a good idea to over-inflate the Disc to avoid extreme instability while seated. At the same time, under-inflating the Disc will make it too stable and chair-like and so won’t really enforce a change in your posture.

How the Seating Disc Is Supposed To Help You

So how does this thing work and why is it supposed to be good for your (lower) back? The key is a word I have been using many time in the past few sentences: stability (or rather “instability”). Every small (mostly unnoticeable) movement that you make to stabilize yourself on this Disc while sitting utilizes the smaller muscles around your lower core (abdomen) and lumbar region. The eventual strengthening of these muscles is supposed to go a long way in alleviating the lower-back pains most commonly associated with extended periods of sitting. Also, by enforcing a good posture, you will most likely gradually learn to sit erect and keep your lower back curved inwards which is the right way to sit.

Working On The Ball

Along with the Seating Disc, I also received the book “Working On The Ball” by Jane Clapp and Sarah Robichaud – a guide to achieving fitness in the office by working on a Swiss Ball. The book describes various little exercises you can perform on a Ball while using it as a chair in the workplace. Granted, most of these exercises will make you look and feel a little silly, but they are supposed to help you get through the day without that nagging pain in your lower-back by evening. Since most of the exercises described in this book deal with a Stability Ball, only a few of them could be adapted to work on a Seating Disc.

Prolonged Use And Discomfort

While the initial effects of enforcing posture are all well and good, prolonged use is an altogether different story. I personally had to get off the Disc after about 15-20 minutes because of soreness I felt in my lower-back. While I am sure this may have something to do with my incorrect posture before using the Disc and it’s possible that extended use may very well reduce this soreness, I would like to hear from other users of Discs or Swiss Balls as chairs. If you use such devices for sitting the whole day, do comment on whether you had any discomfort during the early days of usage. For now, I plan to use for about half-an-hour at a time – once in the morning and once in the afternoon.

Science Behind The Seating Disc

Finally, I would just like to mention a couple of points from a scientific perspective. I tried to look up research concerning the usage of Swiss Balls as chair-replacements and while most do not disapprove of their usage, the results as far as benefits go have been quite inconclusive. For example, a study titled “Stability ball versus office chair: comparison of muscle activation and lumbar spine posture during prolonged sitting” finds that although there is a slight increase in muscular activity, there is increased discomfort as well, causing the study’s authors to come to the following conclusion: “The small changes in biological responses when sitting on a stability ball as compared with an office chair, combined with the increased reported discomfort while on the ball, suggests its use for prolonged sitting may not be advantageous”.
Another study, “Sitting on a chair or an exercise ball: various perspectives to guide decision making“, tried to discern the cause of possible discomfort: “Sitting on a ball appears to spread out the contact area possibly resulting in uncomfortable soft tissue compression perhaps explaining the reported discomfort.” and concluded that “The results of this study suggest that prolonged sitting on a dynamic, unstable seat surface does not significantly affect the magnitudes of muscle activation”

Conclusions

So it certainly looks like the jury is out on the real benefits of using Stability Balls or Seating Discs. But one thing to keep in mind is that if the discomfort is only caused because we have been sitting with a wrong posture until now and are trying to correct that, extended usage might indeed help fix the problem. I would welcome comments from users who have tried such devices for longer periods and have experiences (either positive or negative) to share. As for the answer to the question “Is the Seating Disc right for me?”, well, you’ll never know until you try one for yourself, will you?!